AMA Recap: Avalanche Vietnam x Heroes Chained

On Friday, January 7th, 2022 at 09:00 pm (UTC+7), we hosted a live AMA with Ersin Taskin, CTO of Heroes Chained.
A revised transcript is available below:

Before we dive into the questions, can you introduce the Heroes Chained project to Avalanche Vietnam community. Tell us about the team, your guys’ background, and what you all bring to the project?

Heroes Chained is a fantasy Action RPG game. And we introduced real-time card play. It is not turn based card play like Axie Infinity. The world of Ventuna is home to many races like humans, elves, orcs, dwarfs etc. and we have a unique race created by our Art Director Onur Cayli who created the White Walkers Race for Game of Thrones. So, he is doing a similarly amazing job for Heroes Chained. It is a medieval-steam era with a fantastic setup. Like middle earth. We are the first to introduce the play and earn concept as an alternative to play to earn. The difference in a nutshell is we say game first for GameFi.
I am the CTO of the project. I lead the technical team
We have an outstanding team at Heroes Chained. I recommend people to check the team section on our website. Mev Dinc, our Executive producer, has developed award winning games for his studio, Activision, Ubisoft, Nintendo, etc. Onur Cayli has created the White Walkers race for Game Of Thrones, and did the same for The Amazing Spider Man, Terminator Genisys, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Antman, Man in Black 3, Marvel vs Capcom, Sonic, etc. We aim to be the Blizzard of GameFi. Our blockchain team won the Avalanche Hackathon. So we are equally strong there.

1. Please share some prominent features of Heroes Chained that differs it from other projects?

We are the project which introduced the play-and-earn concept to GameFi as an alternative to play-to-earn. We say game first for GameFi. We know that great games are created by great game developer teams. So, game first translates to team first. When you check the team, you would see why the team cannot go with the play-to-earn games we see on the market but push for game-first. We use the same mechanism as the other p2e games but unlike p2e we have an organic answer to the question: where do you find the money to pay gamers when the hype is gone? We want to pull in real gamers out there especially in the developed countries that are willing to pay for great games. Supplying sustainable fuel to the economy when the hype is gone. We are also working on a long-term vision called Proof of Turing consensus mechanism called POT. POT is an alternative to POW and POS. In POT the game play by human gamers secure consensus. Thus, transaction fees go to the gamers not the miners or stakers. Transaction fess is a billion-dollar business in crypto and trillion-dollar business in the real world.

We also want to pull in non-coiners most of whom want to pay for a great game. Crypto-friendly gamers can use their self-custody wallets like in all play-to-earn games, however, we develop a custodial wallet option for our non-crypto gamers, as well. Our custodial wallet is automatically installed, configured and integrated to the Game UI. It is even fiat friendly. We plan to integrate credit card support for non-coiners. Also, we don’t want our non-crypto gamers to lose their tokens and assets by losing their keys. So, we have key recovery as well. On the other hand, we plan a gamification based blockchain training, and a portal with links to tutorials outside. We want to help our gamers transcend to the blockchain world at their own pace. We are action RPG game and we introduced real-time card play to it.

2. How is Heroes Chained development process going? Can you describe current development status, your market expansion plans and some hot events that await us in the future?

We started the project in Q2 2021. The core development took off last summer. 4 teams are working in parallel: The 3D arts team led by Onur Cayli is creating the metaverse, including the heroes, items, etc. They start from concept to 3d modelling. The front-end game developers work on the game play front-end using Unity. The backend developers work on the server side. And finally, we have the blockchain team working on the token and NFT side. All the teams work in parallel. We have almost finished the backend side, have gone more than midway on the frontend. Visuals take a lot of effort since they are created exclusively for this game and the quality is AAA, it is Hollywood quality. That is the greatest bottleneck but we have a very strong team there. Blockchain part is ready i might say.

And we won the Avalanche Hackathon 3 weeks ago. We will release the beta version in June this year. Until then we will be releasing NFT sales of a very specific race and land. We will also make fair-drops and bounty programs for beta test gamers. Then, we plan the full release in October. We will have expansion packs, and additional features along the way. It is a long-term RPG project.

3. One of the latest card games on the Avalanche platform:Tale Craft, has caused a lot of frustration in the community. I won’t say specifics. But how do players and investors take risks once again. with one more card game like Heroes Chained?

TaleCraft seems to be a board card game. First, we are an action RPG game. It is real time. The battles for example are all real time combats. We introduced real time card play to it. Instead of clicking on buttons in an MMORPG game you click on cards from your card deck. So, you have to be careful on your mana pool, mana refilling real-time, etc. It is an extremely immersive experience maybe like Illivium. You also need to be a good strategist. We will be revealing game play and game assets, visuals in the course of time until the beta release. I suggest you to watch our channels closely. So we are not a card game or a board game like TaleCraft.
We are not turn based like Axie Infinity but real-time action. And most of all we are game-first, not play-to-earn but play-and-earn. We also have explore mode where you roam outside the city. Build mode where you grow your guild, your heroes, your items. You craft gear. You clan with people. You do dungeons, do PvE outside the city walls. Classical rpg stuff.
Also our artworks is Hollywood quality. Remember our team. We have 3d models of heroes, items etc. So heroes chained belongs to a completely different genre.

4. You have a great development team with strong background & experience working on massive projects together with video game giants. I am curious why your team decide to commit to develop game for the blockchain space? Why not go for the traditional way with less obstacles and maybe higher chance for success?

That is a very good and legit question. We believe in decentralization. We think the gamers should own the game assets legally. They should be able to trade them freely and securely on open markets. We also believe the token holders should benefit from the growth of the game economy. That is why we have single token HeC with fixed cap, meaning deflationary currency. We believe that the people should govern the metaverse economy they drive. we are against a central authority inflating currency as economy grows.
In some other big play-to-earn projects they have two coins. one fixed cap the other inflationary. We have one fixed cap currency.
And we dont have an entry barrier like Axie Infinity.
you can freely enter and start playing
you may want to buy NFTs to save time or for cosmetics but entry is free like in most real games.

5. There aren’t many influential games in Avalanche yet. Why did you choose Avalanche instead of another chain? What kind of development can be achieved by choosing Avalanche? What are the benefits that the Avalanche network brings to Heroes Chained?

We believe in L1 for true decentralization. Our preliminary studies revealed that Avalanche and Solana are the best two for our purposes. We studied them in more detail. We aimed for the Solana — Star Atlas model, in which the mainnet and the game project work closely. We contacted two mainnets. Both Solana Labs and Ava Labs. They both agreed to our porposal.

We chose Avalanche. We believe we would mean more to Avalanche as the flagship game-fi project on the mainnet. We believe with the game-fi subnets, Avalanche transaction fees will be lower and high capacity will be dedicated to the game(s) on the subnet with good parameters.

Our technical team and Avalabs have a good communication which will increase with GameFi Subnet we are working on. With the Avalanche hackathon championship we have closer contacts with the leadership. We are impressed by the transaction speed of Avalanche. The time it takes from request to commitment on the ledger is the fastest we have seen. The capacity is also amazing. 4500 TPS. Also, the API is very developer friendly, which is super important. In the long term, I would bet on mainnets where the developers go. So, I am bullish on Avalanche in the long run. However, you are right Avalanche is not as strong as Solana, BSC, Ethereum, Polygon, etc. on GameFi, and we all need to work hard to get Avalanche to where it technically deserves.

So far we have get the best community support on Avalanche. According to metric even though we just started community building. The community gave us the lead role and the responsibility it is duly noted

6. What is your global expansion plan for $HEC ? At present, which market do you focus on, or on building and developing to win customers, users and partners?

We aim the whole globe. Even though we just started we are present in tens of countries in europe America, and all over asia. Vietnam is a very important country. That is we started with Turkey and added Vietnam as the second country.

7. Is it necessary to have $HEC to get started in the game or do you have a game mode in which we can collect $HEC with the minimum investment to start playing?

You can have free entry to the game. You may start slowly and gather NFT’s and tokens. You would need to do purchasing to save time and cosmetics, passive play and income, some efficiency though. So time is money. but you can start freely

8. Will you include community votes in the course of the game? Will the community be able to direct the game?

Yes we have the same HEC token as game currency and governance. Holders can stake HeC tokens to vote for game decisions.

9. Can you tell me what are your plans to make the game more attractive to players. Also, how to limit token inflation, thereby increasing token price over time?

This is important so let me stress again. We have one token and it is fixed cap. This makes it deflationary. Some other projects prefer inflationary token. Some prefer two tokens one fized cap one inflationary. In inflationary model the central authority has the priveledge to mint tokens as the economy grows. This will steal value from token holders. In deflationary token model as the economy grows the new currency value comes from and to token holders via increase in token value. this is natural evolution, organic and simple mechanism. You dont have to trust the game developer team that they wont inflate at will

10. Staking is the new trend. What staking options are available for $HEC token? Are there any incentives for staking? What are the various ways to earn $HEC token and are there any limits to amount of $HEC I can earn?

You can stake HEC token also do all sorts of DEFi earning yield, compounding, lending, borrowing, etc. you know Avalanche is rich in Defi ecosystem and we will be integrated to that fully.

11. People always check about safety and security from any project because much hack issue right now, I would like to know how is the safety of your project? How did you make sure that you are secure?

This is good question. Please Google superrational attack to see that i am very active on the Cryptography Mail List on the security of blockchain. We won the Avalanche Hackathon. Also we get our smart contracts certified by prestigous 3rd party companies, like Certik.