Announcing: Based Gooeys!
Ahoy, Nova frens! We have exciting news:
Gooeys are coming to Base! 🥳
Our lovable, soft n’ squishy Gooeys will be released as a game in a Farcaster frame on Base chain. Gooeys is an on-chain game of questing, combat and breeding with a player-owned economy. Everything from the characters to quest rewards are on-chain and tradable.
Whether you’re a player of the original Gooeys Classic title or a newcomer, you’ll want to strap in and have a read of this article! We’re going to lay out what Based Gooeys is all about, and how it changes from Gooeys Classic.
Let’s jump right into it!
What are Gooeys?
Gooeys are an adorable bunch of — well — gooey beings, who reside in the magical Gooey Kingdom. They go on quests, they eat, they procreate and of course — they fight the forces of evil!
Based Gooeys takes place before the era of Gooeys Classic.
The Dread is spreading across the lands, a dark corruption which makes the world uninhabitable. The corruption affects the Gooeys too, turning them into aggressive and violent creatures, attacking those who approach.
It is said that the source of The Dread lies within The Dreadful Copse, a land which is inaccessible except via a long and arduous journey traversing across the entire island.
Enter: you, the protagonist.
Your Gooeys must make this pilgrimage, find the source of The Dread and destroy it.
To do this, Gooeys are sent on quests where they are rewarded with items like rare foods which aid them on their adventures. Both Gooeys and rewards are fully on-chain and can be traded in a completely player-owned economy.
Apart from enjoying copious amounts of exotic foodstuffs, Gooeys also love to procreate! Breed them by “tumbling” two Gooeys together, and hey presto — out comes a new and unique Gooey. Tumbling has a chance of taking traits from the parents and passing them onto the child: Gooey genetics at work!
We can’t wait to share more with you about the Based Gooeys universe, lore, concept art and of course — game development progress!
This Ain’t Your Grandma’s Gooeys
With this move to Base will come quite a few changes to the original game.
If you played the original Gooeys Classic game, you might be wondering what differences there will be. Here at Nova, we have spent countless hours discussing, designing and going back and forth with the Studio Nova development team to ensure that Based Gooeys — while retaining core features of Classic — will be bringing lots of new goods to the table!
Gooeys Classic features questing, rewards, feeding and tumbling via fully on-chain smart contracts and transactions. Its release was a foray into a highly experimental concept of having the entire game run on-chain, with no centralised aspects. Gooeys Classic successfully showcases the potential of 100% on-chain games, where the whole game runs within smart contracts.
In Gooeys Classic every single move in-game requires an on-chain transaction. Gooeys Classic relies on using Chainlink’s VRF technology to provide verifiable randomness. To date, it remains one of the top users of Chainlink VRF on Polygon.
To enhance gameplay and features, Based Gooeys will be moving away from a 100% smart contract based deployment: while security and provable fairness will remain on-chain, we’ll leverage dedicated servers to carry out enhanced game logic/functions and store the results on-chain. While we strongly believe that GameFi is here to stay, we’ve also learned lots in our time and feel that a combined approach results in a more enjoyable playing experience.
A core component of GameFi is provable fairness, which will remain on-chain for Based Gooeys!
Fewer transactions, less gas fees, more fun — what’s not to like about that?
Questin’
A major area of enhancement coming to Based Gooeys will be a fully re-worked questing system!
In Gooeys Classic a quest was started and ran until completion. The new quest mechanics promise to be far more interactive, exciting and varied.
While questing, Gooeys will traverse a map with multiple areas and choices, where decisions need to be made with strategy in mind:
- Do you take the high road, full of danger and rewards?
- Or do you take the low road, stay safe and replenish your supplies?
Many decisions will need to be made throughout every quest, and a progress system in place so that you can easily pick up and play from where you left off.
These changes mean that quests throughout Gooey Kingdom will be far more visual, with a multi-route map to mark progress. Decisions on which route to take have repercussions down the line, so strategy and planning become an integral part of the gameplay experience.
Feeding and $GOO Mechanics
Other significant changes from Gooeys Classic will be in the food system and the tokenomics around $GOO.
We’ve made big strides from the lessons learned in Gooeys Classic to ensure that game balance and sustainability will be significantly improved in our upcoming release.
One thing we didn’t envision when developing Gooeys Classic, was that some players would buy and tumble their way to a literal army of Gooeys. After discussions with some of the hardcore Gooeys Classic players, we’ve come to realise that spending countless hours feeding a plethora of Gooeys just ain’t that much fun.
One of the biggest changes to the food mechanics will be doing away with the monotony of feeding times: it will be a thing of the past!
We’ll be detailing Based Gooeys food mechanics and $GOO tokenomics in future articles, so stay tuned for those!
FAQ
Why Base?
Nova has always been a first-mover in many aspects, and this decision is no different. We believe that Base have captured a large proportion of retail interest and usage since launch. Coupled with their fast transactions and low cost of gas, Base is an ideal launching ground for our upcoming releases.
We have experience building successful projects such as WaifuCast on Base, using the Farcaster frames specification. We’re excited about the potential of frames and it’s a big motivator which drives us to innovate.
What about Ethereum, Polygon and DogeChain?
Gooeys isn’t constrained by chain, or platform — our ultimate goal is to get Gooeys into the mindshare of as many people as possible, so restricting access to it definitely isn’t something that’d be aligned with that principle!
However, there are realities in making P2P ecosystems such as Gooeys workable; outside of requiring a medium (to which Farcaster’s frame spec is serving us on this outing), Gooeys also requires low gas fees, high speeds, VRF availability, and of course, a general interest in on-chain gaming itself.
Currently, Base is the only chain which realistically fits all 4 criteria — and along with having a unique medium in Farcaster’s frame spec, it presents a unique and ample opportunity for us to bring a brand new Gooeys vision to a fresh marketplace that’s been teeming with growth since its inception.
Apart from these reasons, the reality is that decisions are often dictated based on the need to go where the players are. Dedicating development and infrastructure resources to games on blockchains with few players is unsustainable as a business practise as well as for the DAO.
Will there be bonuses for existing players of Gooeys Classic?
It is important to balance the game for all players, providing a level playing field for both new and returning players of Gooeys.
While we can’t release full details yet, we can say there will be at least one perk for returning players:
- One free Gooey mint on Base, with a unique cosmetic which can’t be inherited or otherwise rolled. The free mint is for wallets holding Gooeys NFTs before the end of August 2024.
Do you have a release date?
None as yet. We will be providing a release ETA further down the production life-cycle.
What are the requirements to play Based Gooeys?
There are relatively few requirements to play. Essentially if you are setup for web3, you’re pretty much good to go!
- Browser with web3 wallet support, or Warpcast mobile client.
- Farcaster account.
- Small amount of ETH on Base chain for gas, and to mint a Gooey.
What’s Next?
Here at Nova we’re thrilled to have made the decision to release a Gooeys title on Base, and we’re fully into build mode!
Stay tuned to our Telegram and socials for updates, progress reports, concept art, development news and who knows, maybe a little bit of that alfalfa too! 👀
Until next time, Novafam! 🫡
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