Bringing ideas to life with Decentraland

When I think about Decentraland, a huge world of infinite possibilities pop into my head. But where should I begin with?
Since Cryptokitties, cryptogames are emerging and a swarm will come soon. For the moment it’s mainly collectionable and breeding assets, but it will be more and more complexe.
What frustrates me at the moment is the simplicity of these games. Ok I got a cat/dog/chibi/something I can breed/trade and sometimes fight with it (mainly stats based). But then? Can’t we have a more caring-like system? Can I interact with them with a lot of different actions?
Without a complexe system behind it, it would be difficult.

But here comes Decentraland!

Imagine a world where you can buy and hatch eggs, wondering what is inside, then taking care of the new born creature, teaching it behaviors, giving it a name, letting them play with your other pets, mounting it… and it will be your own and unique creature in a 3D gitantic multiplayer world where a lot of different gameplay systems live together!! Wouldn’t it be wonderful? So that’s where I am starting…

I AM NOT A GRAPHIST, SO WHAT?
I am the idea guy. The one with a lot of ideas but no drawing skills… But I learned a bit how to code. So I went to cgtrader and looked for lowpoly creatures assets. And I fell in love with the works of Manuel Alberto Avila Solarana (I recommend what this guy does! Nickname : Malbers). So I bought the little dragons from it : low poly, different textures, lots of cool animations… And an egg is included!!!

At least I can use these really cool placeholders to create the behaviors and the gameplay systems I have in mind (I don’t like using untextured boxes to create my gameplays, I need at least something more to motivate me).

PETS FEATURES

This is a non-exhaustive list, but it gives a good overview of what I am planning to do :

1. Random
   There are 3 main reasons why I will need randomness: I want to implement a rarity system, I dont want 2 same dragon (they must be unique) and I want the dragons to have different behaviors based on their personalities!
   What will be his body features? Its stats? Will he be a fierce one? A fearful one?
   That’s where I plan to go.

2. Caring
   We will have a pet coming from an egg to a wonderfull adult. But it’s not funny if we don’t do anything and just watch : so there will be a caring system where the player will have to feed him, play with him… and this will probably affect it’s personality. That leads us to the personalities…

3. Personalities and behaviors
   I want to bring a deep relationship between the pets and their owners. If for example someone let its pet without feeding him nor playing with him, the pet will get its own food and find its way of playing, but it will server the bond with its owner (not listening, going away etc…) and i twill probably affect its personality (being afraid of people for example).
   I also want the dragons to be autonomous : they will play with others, guard some lands, being angry, depressed, happy… To let them express their personalities.
   I haven’t mapped all the personalities I want with that but there is a ton of interesting possibilities.

4. Breeding
   Like cryptogames and a lot of breeding games, I want 2 dragons being able to reproduce, copying some stats/body features/behaviors learned/personalities… So for that I will come with a DNA system + an attraction system.

5. Mounting and showing
   One of the goal will be to mount our dragon and being able to show the other players what we teached him: fire breath, catch the ball etc…

I have a lot more ideas in mind (like deep learning for example) but first I will need to find what is feasible or not, but I also need to begin small, building this experience step by step.

FIRST STEP : IMPLEMENTING THE ASSETS
It tooks me some times to learn about GLTF and hwo to generate them, but thanks to the Khronos team there are a bunch of different tools for that.
To transform the assets I got from cgtrader into GLTF is another story! There are different approach: Blender, 3DSmax, Unity… As I am more into Unity I chose the last one.
Thanks to Sketchfab, there is a Sketchfab exporter which transforms Unity asset+anim into GLTF! There are still some issues but I were able to make it work and import the assets into Decentraland.

SECOND STEP : LEARNING THE SDK STEP BY STEP
I have mainly used Unity with C# and Javascript, but never Typescript which is used in Decentraland. So the first challenge is to learn the language and the api possibilites. But it’s not that hard and thanks to the Decentraland team and the community there are more and more help and examples we can learn from.
From now I am working on the behavior system which contains nearly 50% of the work I need: movements, managing animations, state system…
And one day my little dragons will run by themselves in Decentraland! Well… That’s a beautifull dream, but that’s why Decentraland is there after all 😊

If you want to follow the development, you can check the news on my twitter account:
https://twitter.com/NycolasBD

Thanks for reading!