Rocket Monsters: Where Space-Based Bears Battle to the Death

Kalamint Rocket Monster Bears — *Rocket Monster Bears Selling on Kalamint as of July 8*

Have you ever dreamt of becoming a savage, heavily-armed, space-faring bear? If so, Rocket Monsters creator Andrew Woodward has the metaverse for you.

The upcoming play-to-earn Harmony blockchain game has generated an outsized amount of interest among blockchain gaming enthusiasts since its September 2021 launch, selling more than 10,000 of the non-fungible token (NFT) bears to date, while a clothing line for the game has cropped up on Amazon. In an interview with GoblinCrypto this week, Woodward laid out the roadmap for his project and revealed that more heavily-armed woodland creatures are on the way.

“We have bunnies, we have badgers, we have a whale kind of creature,” the 44-year-old developer said. “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 do something, let’s go all in.”

Rocket Monsters Hoodie on Amazon — *A Rocket Monsters hoodie selling on Amazon*

The game, slated to become fully playable before 2023, will allow users to use the furry but ferocious NFTs to engage in deadly space combat. “Space gives us not only a clean slate to do whatever we want because there are no rules outside what we know scientifically,” Woodward said. “So space gives us a lot more runway to go with different types of alien beings.”

Built on Unreal Engine 5, early previews suggest the game could be revolutionary in the world of GameFi. Instead of a card-based platform with the retro graphics common among its peers, Woodward is aiming to allow bears to use spacefaring vessels to travel to different planets — where they’ll be able to blow their nemeses of the woodland away on open-world maps.

Here’s the lowdown on questions you may have about the project.

Table of Contents

Tokenomics

To date, the game has not released a cryptocurrency. The game is slated to use three cryptocurrencies: $PARTICLE, $CRYSTALS, and $BEAR. (Crystal will be used for apparel and accessories within the game. Particle will be used for actions such as fueling ships and upgrading weapons. Bear will be the primary token for trading.)

“We 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,” Woodward said. “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.

Woodward said his team would have an expert “polish” the tokenomics before the cryptos are released, meaning that as of July, an outline of numbers contained in the white paper was outdated.

NFT Cap

Woodward said he expected the supply of “bear” characters to reach 15,000 in the near future, but said, “There isn’t really a cap on bears.” Future races will introduce a similar number of characters. (DeFi Kingdoms, by contrast, had more than 260,000 characters as of July 8.)

“We also have the land that’s ready to go,” he said. To date, a little more than 15,000 land plots have been developed. That number is expected to increase as new worlds are introduced.

They told us we were early…So we built the tools

They told us traditional games take forever…So we are building it

They said we would never make it to the moon..So we built a way

We are #RocketMonsters and this is the Arius MK1 🔊@harmonyprotocol #HarmonyONE #RMU $BEAR pic.twitter.com/qsXB13rd8e

— Rocket Monsters Universe (@MonstersRocket) July 6, 2022

Play-to-Earn Mechanism

In terms of how players will earn money, Woodward said, “Primarily what we’re looking at is eSports. Ratcheting out to Twitch and getting the gameplay out for tournaments, utilizing that type of system for earning.”

Examples of eSports, Woodward said, will include “team death-match, capture the flag, hide-and-seek, and battle royale.”

Rocket Monsters’ Roadmap

The game has a roadmap on its website, but Woodward said it was outdated due to recent events. (North Korea hacked the Harmony blockchain’s Horizon bridge in June, absconding with $100 million in funds.)

The roadmap advised that a mobile version of the game would become available, along with an in-game marketplace. Woodward said his team was “probably pushing that timeline out by a couple of months.” A land release scheduled for June has been postponed indefinitely, along with a $BEAR token airdrop scheduled for July.

*Most Recent Rocket Monsters Roadmap (Schedule delayed as of June 2022)*

Expanding to Other Blockchains

Woodward said the game would stick with Harmony despite last month’s turbulence, but said he also expected to expand to other blockchains. “Looking at the blockchain market right now, GameFi is not sustainable on one chain due to user base limits,” Woodward said.

“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,” he added. “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.”

How to Get Involved

As of July, Rocket Monster’s bears can be purchased on NFTKey using Harmony’s ONE, or on Kalamint or Rarible using Tezos. (Prices on NFTKey began at 4000 ONE as of Friday, or $79.) They will also be tradable in the game’s native marketplace once it launches. When land is released later this year, it will be available at MyBears.land. You can download an early version of the game on Harmony’s website. And you can follow the project on Discord, or on Twitter at @MonstersRocket.