Rocket Monsters' Andrew Woodward Has a Revolutionary Vision

Rocket Monster Bear NFTs Selling on Kalamint — *Rocket Monster Bear NFTs **Selling on Kalamint** as of July 10*

Rocket Monsters, a play-to-earn crypto game on the Harmony Network, doesn’t have a tradable cryptocurrency yet — but it has sold more than 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to date since its launch 10 months ago, and it’s becoming increasingly popular among GameFi enthusiasts.

GoblinCrypto spoke with creator Andrew Woodward this week to talk about the success of his project, and to learn more about where he envisions it going in the future. The impetus behind the game, he explained, stemmed from his disappointment when he started looking into GameFi. “We’re not going to bring in a market if people are just going to stare at an NFT and play a card game,” Woodward said.

“We’re not trying to re-do Grand Theft Auto,” he added. “If we’re going to go into imagination and do something, let’s go all in.”

Read the full transcript of GoblinCrypto’s interview with Woodward below.

Goblin Crypto: What inspired you to create Rocket Monsters?

Andrew Woodward: A lifetime of gameplay. I’ve been around it for a while, every console since Atari. I came into crypto and the crypto gaming sector, and I was pretty let down by what I saw. Having a background in art and graphic design, and just a lifetime in games, I set out to build Rocket Monsters. I don’t really have any game that I really look to as inspiration. It’s just my imagination.

GC: What are your favorite games?

AW: Just the games I played when I was growing up. Killer Instinct, Metal Gear Solid, Mortal Combat, Zelda, Mario. In crypto, I don’t have a favorite game.

GC: Why bears? Are you going to introduce other races?

AW: Other alien races. Everybody does humans. We’re not trying to re-do Grand Theft Auto, by any means. And everybody builds on Earth. You know, if we’re going to go into imagination and do something, let’s go all in. We have plenty of games built in an Earth atmosphere. Doing space gives us a clean slate to do whatever we want, because there are basically no rules outside what we know scientifically. Space gives us a lot more runway to go with different types of alien beings.

And we have different ones. It’s not just all bears. We have bunnies, we have badgers, we have a whale kind of creature. There are a lot of different kinds of ways we can go with the characters in space.

GC: What’s the total character supply capped at?

AW: They’re not really capped, per se. Once we drop the third and fourth one on Harmony, there’ll be 15,000 so. It just depends, but there isn’t really a cap on bears. We also have our land that’s ready to go, but we have not dropped that yet.

And there is other stuff we’re going to drop — like vehicles, spaceships, weapons, skins. Right now, people are probably wondering why ships are popping up. We haven’t said anything as to why, but there will be ships. Those will be available.

There’s no date on an NFT drop for the ships yet, but we did finish building out the space outpost — space center. That will our space dock, the future home of space travel to other planets. So we’re trying to get some of the spaceships done early. We have the first hoverbike mint, which is still live. We’re looking to do some more vehicles like that.

GC: Land was originally scheduled for release in June?

AW: We were going to drop the land, but everything with the market, just everything going on with the Harmony hack, it just wasn’t a good time to do really anything, so we’re just building.

GC: Is there any sort of mechanism in place for players to understand or predict how many additional NFTs will be produced in the future?

AW: There is no mechanism. We’ll possibly get to a point where we’re saying when there’s a release, but we’re not going to be doing anything that can be mathematically figured out.

GC: How many pieces of land do you have planned for the initial world?

AW: We were going to release 50 percent [in June], so probably right off the bat, we’re going to release 7,500, 8,000 pieces.

GC: How many planets are you envisioning?

AW: I don’t have a number on it, honestly.

GC: What’s your plan for the tokenomics?

AW: We’ll have the Bear token, Particle, and Crystal. We’re also going to have a soft currency, which you need within a blockchain game, because you don’t want to have to deal with a transaction and a wallet signature every time you, say, win a battle. That really sucks the life out of a game. So it’s finding the right mixture of tokenomics that will work for players. There will be someone who comes in to polish the tokenomics.

GC: Where are you at on the in-game marketplace? I believe that was set for August on the roadmap.

AW: We’re building all the infrastructure. So right now, we’re working with XP Networks on the contracts for the bears on Tezos and Kalamint. So all of that ties into the marketplace, and we’re kind of working on that at the moment, the contracts, the game builds, the infrastructure. We’re going to push the marketplace out.

GC: Your roadmap is in need of an update. Where are you on that?

AW: In this industry, everybody is so intent on everyone having a roadmap. Roadmaps are just words. People can spice it up, shine it up all they want, but in reality, what have you built? What type of product do you have? So we have a quarterly roadmap, but we need to update it.

I think the way we’re going to start doing the roadmap is — I’d like to go with a retro map instead and put it inside of the roadmap [to show] what has been accomplished rather than give dates or outlooks on what’s supposed to happen, because development doesn’t work that way. Getting people hyped up for certain dates when there are unknowns and variables is not something that’s high on my list.

GC: What other things have you learned from other DeFi games to do or not do?

AW: We see the industry changing right now. We see issues with DeFi right now. There was a lot of hope put into DeFi, and we’ve seen some of that deflate this year with everything going on with the larger stuff. So focusing on gameplay, for one, is huge. And we don’t see that currently in our landscape. We do see a lot of projects that have dropped a token and then tried to wrap some gameplay around that, and that’s not going to work. We’ve stayed away from dropping a token for quite a while.

I know that it’s got to come, but I think it’s a huge mistake to drop a token hoping it works. Throw something at the wall hoping it sticks, and then let’s build the game around that if we can even build the game around the wall. So I think that’s something that’s hurting the GameFi industry at this point in time.

It’s cool if you can put out characters in good supply if people actually utilize those. If we’re talking about games, what blockchain gaming needs to get to right now, is we need to get to the point where we’re bringing in a market. We’re not going to bring in that market if people are just going to sit there and stare at an NFT and play a card game.

GC: On that note, what do you hope will make Rocket Monsters different from other games? If people have one takeaway after they play in a year or two years from now, what would you hope it is?

AW: That they actually found a blockchain game where they can play and earn. It’s going to be an ever-changing landscape. My vision is — five years and beyond — we’re building out other planets. We have different characters coming through. And the interoperability that’s coming. We have the ability to utilize different chains with NFTs on those different chains directly with Unreal Engine 5. So we’re not limited, by any means, in our capacity to have that interoperability.

GC: What will be the primary earning mechanism?

AW: Primarily what we’re looking at with Rocket Monsters, because we are a traditional game, is eSports. Branching out to Twitch and getting the gameplay out for tournaments, utilizing that type of system for earning. And then we also have player versus player (PVP) and player versus environment (PVE). There are different ways people will earn that way. But I would say PVP will be the initial way.

Examples of eSports are team deathmatch, capture the flag, hide-and-seek, and battle royale.

GC: You’re planning on expanding to other blockchains?

AW: Looking at the blockchain market right now, GameFi is not sustainable on one chain due to user base limits. You have games recycling the same users, and then if they’re relying on a single-chain and experience a huge influx, it just doesn’t work out. Axie Infinity has suffered from that. It’s like a large bank in a small town with a quota to open new checking accounts that far exceeds the town’s population.

GC: Can you talk about why you decided to stick with Harmony after the issues they experienced in June?

AW: Morals, man. Loyalty is something I’m big on. I don’t like backstabbing or being lied to. I like people I can trust and can hold to their word, and I have no reason not to believe Harmony at this time. They’ve done everything they’ve told me they would do, and they support Rocket Monsters.

GC: I know you started on Tezos. Some people were upset that you left.

AW: We’ve addressed it. It’s one thing to up and leave because there are issues going on. It’s a whole other thing if you’re trying to hop around and cash in on different chains. The technology for games — Tezos doesn’t have it. They don’t have anything for Unreal Engine or Unity outside of a browser-based capability. So we have our assets bridged. But I still have friends at Tezos. We didn’t take any grants from Tezos, and there are some really good people at Tezos.

GC: How many users do you have so far (by whatever metric you might use)?

We’ve sold more than 10,000 NFTs. Metrics will change as we begin to tackle the gaming metrics. Like right now, we have the multiplayer that you can download and play. We’ve just started having a meetup at 7 p.m. inside of “Level X” every night. So we’ll gauge the metrics differently as we begin gameplay.

GC: The roadmap shows August as the launch date for mobile. Is that still the case?

The APK for downloading is inside of Harmony Dock, so people can download it now. We do have the full NFT integration. But we’re probably pushing that ahead a couple of months due to the current market conditions. We’re really grinding hard on our multiplayer right now.

GC: Any plans for making it to the Apple or Android stores?

Yeah, it’s a lot easier to put on Android. On Mac, you have to jump through a few hoops, so that’s why it will go in the direction of Android first. There’s software now and different things you can use. We have access to that stuff for Apple, but it is a bigger market. We’re not putting a date on it as of right now.

GC: Are you prepared to survive if bitcoin drops to, say, $15,000? Or would that affect your schedule?

As a business, you have to look out and watch what’s going on. We’re not going anywhere. We’ve prepared for worst-case scenarios. We’re prepared to build. If Harmony crashes entirely, we’re prepared for that as well. You have to be. We’ve been building since September 2021. We dropped our first NFTs in August 2021. We’ve been on this journey for a minute, through the good times and what we’re currently going through. We’ve had to make adjustments here and there. We have a solid team, we know each other very well at this point. So we’re prepared for whatever we need to do.

GC: Who’s on your team right now? What are your plans, if any, for expansion in the near future?

AW: Right now, there are five of us grinding seven days a week. We have three core members that do other things. One’s a professor, two of them are engineers. We also have MLC Creative, which basically gives us a game studio. We’re not contracted, but we have a relationship.

And we’re also talking to possible partners right now. We’re part of Harmony Ventures, and we’re looking for partners for Rocket Monsters as a whole through Harmony Ventures.

GC: Are you all working for free, or do you have a budget?

AW: We have a budget. We pay the team. We have not received funding from anyone other than one $25,000 milestone payment from Harmony.

GC: That’s not much.

AW: No, we’ve bootstrapped our entire project ourselves since last year.

GC: What are your top goals for 2023?

AW: Rocket Monsters on mainnet, everyone playing, and eSports going well and healthy.

If you enjoyed this story, please follow GoblinCrypto on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Medium, or Google News.