In the latest episode of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Oli Löffler, the CEO of German developer Voya Games about IP Angry Dynomites Lab and its first game, collaborative idle resource title Craft World, which has plans to become a launchpad for NFTs and integrate existing gaming tokens, among other features.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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BlockchainGamer.biz: How was 2023 for you?
Oli Loffler: It was a very interesting year, pretty different from the year before. In 2022 the market was already going down. There was the Luna crash and the FTX crash and so on. Still we managed to sell our NFTs and build up the community.
Then in 2023, everything was going down even more. People left the space. People were holding onto the things they already have and they weren’t willing to further explore new projects. But we had a good community and we are happy that we still have and they are very active. At the same time we were starting to do some experiments with game mechanics. We went into build mode, so we got less active in the community-building side of things because it was getting harder and harder.
We established a team. We are nine people now at Voya Games. We did the rebranding of the Angry Dynomites Lab to Voya Games as a company. The project is still called Angry Dynomites Lab, but in November 2023 we wanted to also establish a company brand because a lot of things changed.
After doing some experiments with blockchain tech and wallets we identified ways on how we can now really bring this into games. That’s basically how from November onwards we built a whole new game and soft-launched it in December. We call this new game Craft World. We have mobile iOS and Android clients, and a web client available. We are set up for a very good 2024.
Did you think about leaving the space in 2023?
I know a few people who did that. They started out with blockchain and they pivoted into something else, some AI, some more regular games. For me, it was always about what opportunities the technology can bring, and not so much about the market and the hype. This got stronger over time because the tech was continuing and getting better. Therefore we never pivoted. We really believed in our vision and ideas around web3.
Let’s focus on Angry Dynomites Lab. How would you describe it?
Angry Dynomites Lab is the IP itself. We launched the NFTs and built a community around it. Then in December 2023, we launched the first real game, which is Craft World on the Angry Dynomites Lab IP.
So just as a recap, when you own one of our NFTs, they’re producing resources, and you can use these resources in a game to craft other resources and build objects and buildings. That’s what we soft-launched in December. Now we’re exploring how to continue developing it, so that we can do a global launch in the summer.
The game itself is all about collecting raw resources, crafting new resources, and then specialize in resources. For example, one player can specialize in resource A, another player in resource B, and then build out objects which require many resources so that all players need to work together.
One of our bigger goals is to integrate more real-world economic principles into the game. Now it’s possible to create this digital economy for games and that’s what we find super interesting and want to make available as a platform for other games as well in the future.
The interesting bit for me is how players collaborate.
Yeah. We want to create this multiplayer experience where you have dependencies with other players. They have dependencies on you so that everyone works together for a greater good in order to produce these masterpieces, as we call them all together. And that’s what we see in the real world. You have a lot of companies creating goods and resources and specializing in them, but they have dependencies on all the other resources that they need. Then they’re selling it to someone else for profit. So we’re seeing all of these parallels from the real world that we want to integrate more and more into the game and make it fun.
And all these resources are onchain?
We are still on the testnet but we built an in-game interface where you can trade these resources in Uniswap pools. We even made it possible so that you don’t need a wallet. You can do it with your wallet as well, but we will also do something like delegated trading as we call it. We execute trades for you and also pay the fees.
We might want to monetize it later but you will always have the opportunities to just do it on your own, so it’s a convenient feature to make it easier for players who are not that familiar with web3.
How can you expand the economy?
One of the things we want to get more into and we are already planning is partnerships. We have the NFTs producing these fire and water, and earth resources, but we can utilize other resources from other NFT projects.
We are in close talks for a partnership with the CyberKongz, which is a very OG community, to integrate their BANANA token as another raw resource into our game. We see a lot of win-win possibilities for both sides. We can give the banana token utility by integrating it with factories to produce something else, combining it with our tokens and giving them a lot of utility. On the other hand, they have a very engaged, very good community that we can co-market with and then attract more players to our game.
We want to take this in the future in order to also attract other brands and creators to join our platform, our game platform, our economy platform, to create game objects as NFTs. For example, imagine SpaceX, Elon Musk comes back on the crypto train and wants to launch an NFT collection.
Instead of just setting up a website or putting it on OpenSea and getting an ETH for each rocket they sell, they could put a rocket into our game, brand it SpaceX, and then define what input resources you need in order to build the rocket. So it can consist of 1,000 steel, 10,000 hydrogen, and so on and so forth.
This is a way more gamified minting experience than it was before, so there will be way more engagement. There will be way more users looking into this because we already have a player base. At the same time, they might also have some users that join our game, and we have like again this win-win situations where both sides benefit in launching these things.
What’s your plan in terms of platforms?
Our goal is to go fully cross-platform. You can see it in landscape so you can see all your factories and your empire. It’s like Factorio which is one of our big role models. But you can also play it in portrait mode in order to look at a specific production line. We are on web because on web we have all the freedom and it’s still very accessible, but we also, in the long run, may want to create a PC version for the players who are deeper into it. Then I can launch it from the desktop and it’s a more immersive experience.
But also on mobile, there are the most restrictions. On PC and web you can do whatever you want from the distribution side. On mobile, the main distribution channels are the App Store and the Play Store, so we need to comply with these regulations. I think Apple and Google are slowly opening up but we need to be very careful in how we integrate the web3 mechanics to comply. I think the most important thing is Apple and Google get their 30% cuts on the sale, so we are exploring ways in how we can use in-app purchases to mint out the NFTs, which would then comply with the regulations.
What’s the plan for the rest of 2024?
We’re preparing the last bits and pieces for the launch in the summer. We want to integrate thirdparty tokens and that’s why we are talking to CyberKongz and other communities. Then we can utilize these integrations to get our user base into the game and bring some values to the other communities.
I think that’s a very unique way for integrating tokens. Most web3 games are reading NFTs and trying to display them in-game but we are integrating tokens and adding a burning mechanism, which decreases the supply, which a lot of these communities would appreciate. So that’s what we’re doing right now, closing these partnerships, integrating from a technical side, and then hopefully having a good launch in the summer.
This approach is much more interesting in terms of interoperability.
I don’t get why more games aren’t trying this with the fungible tokens because it’s way easier. With NFTs, people expect the character to look pretty much the same, that it has the same abilities and so on. It’s way more effort.
For a token, it’s just about the value perspective and metrics like where was it generated? How do you get it? How much is the supply? How much is the burn and increase of supply? It’s more like this abstract thing you can then use to give it a function in your game. That’s something I find super interesting and which also offers more opportunities in the game than with NFTs.
Check out more details at the Angry Dynomites Lab website.
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