After spending the last couple of years shipping code for one of the preeminent onchain games, Onchain Heroes founder Skarly is now working on his own venture with the upcoming idle role-playing game (RPG). Having secured a round of angel investment and a key infrastructure partnership in September, the game is due to launch by the end of 2024 with an emphasis on fun and a sustainable onchain game economy.

“Onchain Heroes is my attempt to bring a sense of magic and fun to onchain gaming,” said Skarly in an interview with OpenSea. “I’ve learned a lot from the past few years of involvement in web3 and have lined up excellent partners and supporters I know will carry Onchain Heroes to success.”

The creator of Onchain Heroes

With a decade of software engineering experience across industries including payments, logistics, and accounting, Skarly's journey into web3 began during the initial coin offering boom as he experimented with investing in Bitcoin and various altcoins. However, it wasn't until late 2021, at the height of the NFT craze, that he found his niche in onchain gaming with the onchain risk protocol Wolf Game.

Initially joining as a community member, Skarly identified a few pain points in his fellow Wolf Game players' NFT buying and selling experience and independently built tools to improve them. His marketplace aggregator, which simplified tracking floor prices across different NFT traits, caught the attention of Wolf Game's founders, who reached out directly for a chat.

Soon after, he joined as the project's sole developer outside the founding team. From there, Skarly took the reins and built much of what Wolf Game is known for.

"It started out with me building the kinds of trading tools we needed to make playing Wolf Game and trading its items possible," Skarly explains. "Once I officially joined, I worked closely with the Shepherd (Wolf Game’s co-founder) to build much of Wolf Game's features that are still available today."

This experience proved invaluable to Skarly, instructing him on how to build onchain architectures and develop workable tokenomic systems.

The inspiration behind Onchain Heroes

Skarly built up Wolf Game for about 2 years as lead engineer, including through the game’s acquisition by Pixel Vault, a company focused on using blockchain to develop onchain assets and media products.

One challenge Skarly faced in his time with Wolf Game was marrying the onchain and offchain systems.

“Over my time with Wolf Game, we developed this complex hybrid architecture to handle the game, the NFTs, the rewards, all of it a blend of onchain and offchain pieces holding everything together,” said Skarly. “It was a challenge keeping it all working synchronously and I found myself wondering what the game would be like if it was able to stick to its original vision. What would a fully onchain Wolf Game look like if it was able to stay that way?”

As Skarly pondered this question, he felt the pull to take on that challenge with a new idea that was brewing, one for a game that leaned into the kinds of onchain features he built at Wolf Game.

“I felt like I’d learned everything I could in building Wolf Game and needed to find out for myself if I could fully realize this idea of mine,” said Skarly. “I really wanted to bring back a portion of that magic feeling of the 2021 NFT craze and ground it in a game built with longevity and sustainability in mind. That’s my dream for Onchain Heroes.”

With a mission in front of him, Skarly raised funding from a handful of angel investors known in the web3 ecosystem, including Beanie, Bry DiSanto, Apix, Bharat, and others, and set about building.

What’s to come with Onchain Heroes

Onchain Heroes is being designed for the web3 crowd interested in notions like expected value, or the ability to parse an average of the randomly possible outcomes.  Players should have the skills needed for chart analysis and reading blockchain transactions to thrive in Onchain Heroes. Rather than aim for the mass market from the outset, Skarly intends to drill down on the player persona that’s already comfortable with blockchain mechanics and methodically expand the player base from there.

At its core, Onchain Heroes will be an idle role-playing game that prioritizes strategy and decision-making over mechanical skill.

“Fundamentally, this game is never going to be about your ability to handle a controller,” said Skarly. “Instead, this will be a game about your ability to handle risk.”

Within the game, players will be able to engage in classic RPG mechanics: completing in-game quests, earning rewards, crafting upgrades, and repeating the process with ideally better results. There’s an important twist with Onchain Heroes, in that the RPG relies on idle mechanics rather than players grinding away their time playing.

“I drew a lot of inspiration from Runescape and Melvor Idle,” said Skarly, referring to the established MMO RPGs. “Runescape requires players to click several times to collect resources like wood; it’s a lot of time spent chopping trees. I was more engaged by Melvor, where I click one button to chop trees and come back after several minutes to see how much wood I collected.”

The game’s goals for “idleness” are to strip away the time sink of performing repetitive tasks and empower players to focus on their strategies for balancing risk and reward.

“Players will always have a choice between playing it safe for slower progression or embracing high-risk, high-reward opportunities that could expedite their in-game advancement,” said Skarly.

Further, Skarly sees the idle gameplay mechanics as a built-in repellent for bots, a recurring problem for online games web3 and otherwise. A 2022 analysis posited that 40% of web3 game players are bots. Eliminating any grinding aspects from the game puts human players and bots on a more level playing field.

“A bot’s advantage over a human is its ability to repeat tasks for any amount of time,” said Skarly. “By taking away that advantage, by limiting activities by time, I’ve just saved myself a ton of time banning bots because they have such a low incentive to come to Onchain Heroes.”

Future players of Onchain Heroes can anticipate all of this gameplay to come wrapped up in a fun world built on a bedrock of pixel art.

“The art was deliberately chosen to be cute and pixelated,” said Skarly. “It creates an interesting juxtaposition with other onchain games, which often has high stakes and is commonly represented with serious themes, like sci-fi, space, or dark fantasy. I really enjoy pixel art, so building the game with it was a no-brainer for me.”

Onchain Heroes joins the Abstract blockchain

Back in September, Onchain Heroes announced it would launch on the Abstract blockchain, which bills itself as the forthcoming chain for consumer crypto applications. Abstract was unveiled in July as the next product being developed by Igloo, the parent company behind Pudgy Penguins and Overpass and led by entrepreneur Luca Netz.

“We spoke to most of the L2s in the Ethereum space,” said Skarly, referring to layer 2 blockchains. “Blockchain partners can usually offer three things: grants, technology support, and distribution. We have enough funding and consumers don’t care about your tech stack, but figuring out how you reach people and fit into the culture. Luca Netz and his team are the kings of distribution.”

Skarly believes that Abstract’s connection to the Pudgy Penguins community will provide built-in cultural momentum for adoption and legitimacy in the web3 gaming space. This thesis seems to align with Abstract’s mission, especially following its July 2023 announcement of its goal to become the "single greatest distribution channel—bringing users, liquidity, and community to crypto-native builders and global brands.” Further still, Skarly’s interactions with the Abstract team during Korea Blockchain Week 2024 convinced him it was the right blockchain ecosystem to partner with.

"If anyone is going to make consumer crypto work, I truly believe it's them," said Skarly. “Even though Abstract isn’t yet a proven chain, I’m confident in the team building it and believe it’ll deliver for Onchain Heroes.”

The Onchain Heroes mint

The upcoming Genesis Heroes NFT collection will be central to the Onchain Heroes experience. These NFTs will be able to serve as profile pictures, yet their primary use will lie in their essential role within the game.

Collectors interested in participating in the mint can vie for a position in the “Herolist,” competing on a points-based leaderboard to qualify.

Breaking from the common pattern of minting significantly before a game’s launch, Skarly plans to launch the game as soon as possible after the paid mint, which is currently targeted for Q4 2024.

“I hate it when you get hyped for a mint and everything is exciting, but you end up waiting more than three years to actually play the game,” said Skarly.

He emphasized the importance of engaging players and giving them a place at the table for building the game.

“The game will be built along with the community because you need that involvement and investment from the players,” said Skarly. “We’re bringing the players on a journey with us. Something I want to assure everyone of is that we’re fun-maxing, not midcurving.”