Hey guys! Welcome to the second blog post. See the announcement post here.

For those of you who are new, this is a dev blog about the Enjin-backed game, A Turret's Life - a game about crafting and trading overpowered weapons to fight against endless attacking robotic waves!

MFT Updates

The MFT has been completely distributed. And congratulations on filling the MFT up within 3 hours... And remember, if you missed the MFT, there will be more tokens and game item giveaways in the future!

Now, I would like to quickly address some issues that were brought up:

Bots

I did what I could to eliminate duplicate eth addresses, email addresses, and telegram usernames. There were dozens of duplicate entries that were caught this way. However, there was not a clear-cut way to eliminate bots or people who had multiple unique accounts. One idea was to allow for only unique network ids to sign up. But this would also eliminate anyone who was in the same building as someone else who registered – neighbours, friends, spouses, siblings, roommates, etc. So, I decided not to go with that method.

Going forward, I think activity-based ways or contests would be a better way to give away tokens and game items, since this would require user engagement and weed out bots, giving people who were genuinely interested in the game a better shot. It's also a more interesting way of doing it anyhow.

Bound Token

Another controversial point was that the MFT was a bound token. I posted my reasoning in more depth in the Telegram channel so I don't want to sound too much like a broken record here, but essentially the reasoning was that the MFT represents you by your identity as an initial community member for the game, not by what your wallet holds - if you gave your founders token away, the person who received it is not really a founder, even though you technically still are.

Really, the challenge is to balance between the trading and game aspects for the items. If there is too much of a trade focus, then the gamer would suffer since all of the good items would be held in someone's personal collection and never see gameplay; if there is not enough trade, then the power of using Enjin for true ownership of game items is not fully realized.

Most game items will be freely tradeable and other special tokens similar to the MFT will be tradeable, though I still think a handful of items that represent your identity should be bound. But perhaps they would be more like a badge and offer less functionality, while tradeable items will have the functionality. This system as a whole would offer the benefit of rewarding the genuine gamers, while also creating greater value for the collectors.

From Steemit to Scorum

I posted the first blog on Steemit last week. However, I was kindly contacted by Swolesome, the Community Manger of Cats in Mechs, and he recommended Scorum to me. First, if you haven't heard of their game, check it out at https://www.cats-in-mechs.com/. If you love cats, or mechs then you can't go wrong with both of them combined! I'm personally quite the cat lover myself (though I can't get a cat in my little single room apartment... ) But I guess I'll just have to play their game instead and live vicariously through it lol.

Anyhow, why Scorum? After looking looking at the platform, I was quite happy on its focus towards gaming and competition, which really fits the niche of A Turret's Life well. Eventually, A Turret's Life will have social and online connectivity such as challenges and leaderboards where players will compete against each other in a short time to reach the highest score in a category, and the winner will get bonuses and prizes tournament style. So with this in mind, I really think Scorum could be a good match for the blog.

Progress

Game Engine

A Turret's Life is being developed using the Unity Game Engine. The 2019 preview version of the game engine sounded quite promising, so I started the project up in that. But as powerful as it could be, it is hilariously buggy and frustrating. At one point, the VR headset suddenly started rendering upside down, so I had to downgrade the version of the editor, which solved that issue but broke something else *sigh. So getting the latest and greatest is not always all it is cracked up to be. For the next while, I will be using the more regular features of the game engine until the new versions are more stable.

Inputs & Interactions

I've been working on an input system that can work between desktop, VR, and standalone VR, and with gamepad support on all three. The challenge is that the button types between them all can be vastly different. For instance, a frustration of mine is that for most platforms the trigger is a button – not so for Oculus Rift, where it is an axis that has hundreds of possible values based on how far you press it. So, this tiny, single difference required a whole unique solution.

Anyhow, the main point is that I am designing the system to work in a generic way between the different controllers. The hope here is to minimize having to create totally unique UI and interactions for each platform.

Unity's Input system maps a binding from a controller to an action. From there, a script receives the action pressed and then sends the command to interact with the game world.

I apologize that this is not the most exciting feature to talk about. Believe me, I can't wait to start on the shooting and crafting features! But being able to interact with the game world is somewhat useful, go figure...

Join the Community!

Website: https://www.aturretslife.com/

Telegram: https://t.me/aturretslife