A real gaming metaverse cannot exi-
For the longest time we’ve heard that taking assets from one game to another is impossible. And with scarcity-based pyramid schemes, the Play-to-Earn bubble, and fancy talks about the Metaverse, it’s only natural that you’re tired of hearing about those topics.
But what if I told you that one collective of indie game developers is bringing an interconnected gaming metaverse to life, today, using a fair and transparent monetization model that incentivizes good game creation?
Building the Indieverse
Totem is a platform where an infinite number of in-game Assets are bought, traded, and used by players across an expanding catalog of interconnected games. Totem Assets can support an infinite number of properties, to provide ultimate freedom for game creators when interpreting player Assets.
What is the potential of this system, and how does the Totem gamedev community use it to create the fastest growing metaverse in the world?
Infinite Assets
The basic building blocks of Totem Games are Totem Assets, in-game items that can be used by players across the different games on the platform. Those can represent anything in a game like a player’s character, equipment, and so on.
Every Totem Asset has unique properties that differentiate it from other Assets. Those properties can be interpreted by game creators in their games — they get to decide how a water-type melee weapon made of obsidian with a range of 60 looks in their game, how it functions, and more. Anyone can use the canonic properties, but also come up with their own new properties to adapt any Totem asset to their game.
Infinite Possibilities
If a creator wants to differentiate Avatars inside their game using a property that doesn’t exist yet, they can create a new filter. Let’s say this new property determines what an Avatar’s expression is. You can create a new filter that’s called “Facial Expression”, and immediately every Avatar that already exists, or that will ever exist on the Totem platform, will have its own expression!
For creators, this allows enriching existing assets and giving them a new take according to each game’s vision. For players, it means the assets that they own keep on evolving with time, the more games are introduced to the platform.
A new type of creator economy
Imagine you’re working on a fighting game, and you want player characters to use different combat styles. This property should affect player Avatars, so that when a player enters the game, they’ll see their familiar Avatar, but now with their distinct set of moves. You can create a new “Combat Style” filter, and decide how each combat style works and how rare each of them is.
After a successful release and marketing campaign, your game is popular, and everyone enjoys being able to combat with their Avatars using the different combat styles. The “Kung Fu” combat style becomes more effective than the others, so Avatars of this type become more sought after.
Following the popularity of your game, other developers decide to use your filter — implementing the different combat styles into their own games, but giving them fresh new takes. A new fighting card game comes out where Avatars are represented as decks, where combat styles affect card distributions.
Totem allows creators to piggyback on top of each other’s ideas to give players an experience that’s larger than the sum of its parts, and incentivize playing each other’s games.
Some examples from current games
With an infinite number of potential properties, Shared Assets are a flexible tool that helps deepen players’ sense of identity, and further their connection with the games they’re playing. For developers, integrating Totem Assets into their games allows them to tap into a market of players who are looking for a new type of experience to have with their existing virtual identities.
- The Horror bullet-heaven game Nightshift Survival uses a filter to determine a player’s items’ attack style to help them against hordes of animatronics.
- The Nephenthesys team created four new filters to determine the look of players’ jet fighters in their sci-fi shoot ’em up.
- Music Rush is a one-tap casual game that features a unique Musical Genre filter, to allow players to own Avatars that can play through unique musical tracks.
- Belzeburger is a deck-builder about serving burgers in hell. The team wanted to use some of the canonical Avatar properties but quickly realized natural human skin and hair colors don’t work too well, so they’ve created their own infernal palettes for demons.
- This series of five mobile games all use the same unique Hat filter that gets your Avatar a cool headpiece that remains persistent across all of them!
99% of game developers are indie, but they make only 0.5% of the gaming industry revenue. Totem is a global collective that changes that by empowering indies to earn revenue through collaboration.
Want to play some Totem Games? Check out our Explorer!
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