always happy to see you've made a game theory post. They always take me so long to read because I start having ideas and then find im reading the same sentence over and over repeatedly without taking anything in. I just did a 3 month unity course and joined the world game jam as well, but coding turns out to be pretty hard. Not sure Im quite ready to take on blockchain! but that said... how important is it to build Hive in from the start, or could you feasibly make a game with the blockchain in mind but then make all the necessary changes once the game was built?

This is my current checklist of concepts that Id like to bounce around:

• no in game currency
• gear bought and sold for HBD
• roguelite runs with plenty of RNG
• gear must be drafted from your collection
• even then your gear might not turn up in the run (you still have to use what RNJesus offers up)
• gear you find in game can be minted in to NFTs for your collection or sale
• minting costs HBD
• each run costs HBD
• higher leagues cost more to play in, but have better odds on legendary gear stats
• Most of the cost of playing goes in to the prize pools which then get bigger the more people are playing
• winners are not guaranteed, the game is designed to be fun to play, but difficult to beat
• prizepools roll over and continue to get larger if nobody slays the final boss
• just thought, imagine if in each new league the run of enemies is built from a random seed but then effectively stays the same until it is beaten. Gear still drops randomly and there's plenty of RNG thrown in still, but effectively the community can get better and better at plotting their course, strategising for certain 'known stumbling blocks', so that a particularly difficult run, which might not get beaten for days or weeks at a time, building up an enormous prize pool from all the slain heroes and gaining mythic reputation in the community, but will eventually be beaten by a brilliant strategist, or an outrageously fortunate run of luck. 2 ways to win the same lottery. Even better if its in teams and they squad splits the prizepool. Glorious.
• minted items collect stats, and possibly even history. "Woah, I could buy Edicteds great sword that he used to slay the TrollBoss in the original High Rollers tournament, and look its no.3 in the list of all time goblin kills". Putting as much love in to the player and item statistics/histories as possible seems to me a sure fire way to give extra value to NFT's beyond just their gameplay value

what do you think? Is using HBD problematic? Id really prefer not to have a new currency involved.
also, Im not sure whether being able to pay to mint NFTs ad infinitum is so smart, but presumably there might be a way to let the market work this out.... if common items are cheaper to buy than mint, you wouldnt mint new ones (unless it had a very amusing randomised name, a special mint number, or perhaps a surprising combination of tactical abilities).... equally with legendary items, which would be more expensive to mint and probably even more specific in their abilities, so you would always be weighing up, does this add something to my arsenal? could I buy something cheaper or more specific on the market? Is this saleable or collectible for some reason?

please point out any glaring holes in this concept. Im probably never going to build anything this in-depth anyway, but as they say, its the thought that counts, and I bloody love thinking about this sort of thing! Its certainly more fun to think about that to build, and in most cases, its probably more fun than playing the steaming piles of trash that come out on the other side.