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Metalcore is a multiplayer combined arms shooter that features mechs, tanks, infantry, and planes, built on Immutable zkEVM. Fight against other player players, explore, and complete missions to gather resources to craft mighty war machines to defeat your enemies!
Recently, we sat down with the Metalcore folks to learn a bit more the early challenges of building a blockchain game, and how Immutable's ecosystem has helped them accelerate their building speed, improve the user experience for players, and increase their community growth, retention and engagement!
Tell us a brief history about how MetalCore started - how did the team, vision, and inspiration come together?
MetalCore started years ago. It has always been a game we wanted to build, but the technology didn't exist for it. Web3 helps unlock a significant aspect of the MetalCore vision because ownership and stakes are crucial elements in a game focused on territorial control.Our team came together through years of collaboration on various games. MetalCore is the culmination of many years of discussions about what our dream game should look like.
What were some of the most painful challenges and decisions you had to make early on building on your own?
Early on, there weren't a lot of great tools in the web3 gaming space. There were a lot of discussions of what people are building, what is the talent level of those teams to build a reliable product, what is the cost of those, and what can we realistically do on our own to make sure we get the exact product we want and need.
The hardest part of building a web3 game is making all these things work seamlessly. Building a game is hard enough, now integrating completely new tech stacks adds a significant challenge. Being able to work hand in hand with an organization who is building tooling gives us a lot of comfort in the proper implementation of the tech into our game.
Anyone who has watched the web3 gaming space has seen what Immutable has been doing for the last few years, us included. As our game hit a point where we needed to find a web3 home, and seeing what Immutable was doing as far as developer tooling, onboarding, and publishing, it was an easy decision to make and has been a great fit so far.
What is building a game like before and after building with Immutable?
Before, it was a bit like being on an island. From a studio perspective, we saw the potential that web3 has to fundamentally change the way games are played, but there is a lot of new tech that needs to be integrated. For us, we are a game studio, and we focus on building great games. But that’s not enough to bring the value of web3 to players as a next-gen game, and Immutable really covers that for us. It’s a great partnership and allows each side to focus on what they do best.
How did joining the Immutable ecosystem impact your player community and traction?
How has Immutable impacted your player growth and retention?
This has been an area that Immutable has had a great impact on our project, and is not often discussed. We’ve seen great growth on X and Discord, not just in new members joining, but in retention rate. For in game stats, we have seen between 10-25% growth for each public event we have had.
How has building with Immutable impacted your ease and speed of building?
It’s saved a lot of developer and engineering time, because those aren’t things we need to think about anymore. We can focus our developers and engineers on the game rather than focusing on efforts outside of the game.
How reliable has building on Immutable tech stack been compared to the solutions you were using before?
We just launched the first parts of our tech integration with Immutable, Passport, into our game about a month ago. This has unlocked wallet connections, which was a big moment for us. In the web3 gaming space, we have always heard of how much of a pain onboarding can be. When we launched with Passport, players were able to download the game, sign up for an account and connect their wallet in about 30 seconds, which is less than a lot of web2 games that have no wallets! This integration went off very smooth and we couldn’t be happier with the results.
What gave you the confidence to build on Immutable zkEVM?
Immutable offers several positives - great tooling, and a great support system around them. From a tech perspective, Passport and zkEVM are solutions that web3 gaming has been needing for some time now, and take a lot of the friction away from onboarding. On the other side, the marketing and publishing teams at Immutable are top notch and have been a huge value add to us as a project.
What advice do you have for any game development studio that is trying to build a game in web3?
The best advice we can give to a studio who is looking at web3 is to understand the web3 landscape and understand why you want to build a web3 game. It’s a complex landscape and it is an area where every move you make is going to be scrutinized - both in good and bad ways. You have to have conviction on web3 technologies making the game experience better, and if you don’t you’ll question yourself non stop. Know why you are building here, know how you want to implement the technology, and know how you can use the technology to increase the PLAYER experience.
Shout out to the Metalcore folks for taking the time to chat about their experience building on Immutable - if you'd like to hear more from the amazing team, tune in to our recent podcast episode, Between 2 Layers, featuring an exciting gameplay demo and interview with the founders.
If you are interested to dive in to the world of Metalcore for yourself, head over to their website to get started!
Are you building a blockchain game? Get in touch with us and start building with Immutable on easy-mode today.
