The Project

Keen to understand better what native blockchain gameplay experience could be, we started by prototyping a simple game mechanic of Rock Paper Scissors and seeing how it could be translated into the blockchain. 

The beautiful wild mind of Mack Flavelle was currently inspired by the 90s TV show Highlander and the Chef’s Table Massimo Bottura episode talking about Parmigiano Reggiano 🤌🏻 

My duty was to mix these two universes and lead the creative visuals, storytelling and world building for the game.

The Game

In Cheeze Wizards players duel on 1:1 battles in a tournament to become the Big Cheeze.

To enter the challenge players can buy 4 types of wizards (Fire, Water, Wind or Neutral). Each wizard is a unique NFT and its power is related to the value paid.

Part of the purchase goes toward the grand prize, aka The Big Cheeze award.

The Lore

"There can be only one …

In the land of Cheeze Wizards, every year during the cosmic alignment, an evil force old as life itself awakes. The Blue Mold. In order to stop it, the four tribes unite to perform the ancient ritual, the… Gathering.

They peregrine across the land to the old Sacred Udder temple to summon the magical warriors into existence.  

Once completed, the tournament shall begin. Wizards must duel on 1:1 battles. Acquiring power from its opponents to become the Big Cheeze and have enough power to cease the Blue Mold."

(*if you haven't read the previous with a Scottish accent and a cheesy voiceover from a 90s tv show, please read it again)

Story Time

Early in the project, I had a planned weekend trip to Oregon.

I left early in the morning from Vancouver and caught the scenic 8h train ride down to Portland. From there, I rented a car and drove for a little field research. My stop was at the Tillamook dairy factory in Tillamook County.

Their visitor center was actually surprisingly sophisticated and after witnessing firsthand the process behind cheese manufacture, plus eating lots of cheese I felt like I had all the inspiration I needed.

Driving back to Portland I saw a metal dragon sculpture on the side of the road. (Actually wasn’t a dragon, I just need to acknowledge I need glasses). And at that moment, everything clicked and the dots, that were in front of me all this time, finally connected.

Cheeze Wizards was going to be about wizards made of dragon milk. Ok, now back to the project…

The Modular System

The big question was: How to create a feasible modular system that works on the web + allows for multiple animations for a huge volume of unique assets + generates visually appealing characters + fits within our timeline?

Felt like a daunting technical barrier, almost impossible to overcome. But we managed to develop an improved modular system for the characters. This unusual workflow worked around all our resource, time and technical constraints. Was a big win and a proud technical achievement for the whole team. Big shoutout to Jack Bonnington and Tom Scharstein.

So our pipeline was a mix of Illustrator (+Overlord) + After Effects + Lottie + LunchBox (Custom tool). Everything you see in the game was designed and animated as scalable vector images (svgs).

From the characters to the backgrounds. From the FX animations to the little baby cheeze (a.k.a fetus cheeze). This approach allowed the game to run in the browser and to be implemented successfully with sound and the other project’s assets.

Some Stats ↓

+700 ETH as the Big Cheeze

→ 8,341 Sign ups

→ +6K Wizards summoned

→ 8,395 Duels

→ 103 Parties created

→ 17 CheezyVerse projects built

Many developers explored the composability aspect of blockchain to build different software and tools on top of the game. 

The Impact

Cheeze Wizard was an amazing experiment. With a very tight timeframe, we managed to push the technology to its limit, in both dev and art department. And along the way we failed, we succeed, we had fun, we ate cheeze every Thursday and we learned a lot. We found the limit of the technology. We found the barriers preventing the same quality standards of user experience to be delivered as seen in other platforms.

The long waiting periods to process transactions plus the extra measures that had to be implemented in order to keep the game fair and engaging were a huge challenge, influencing the gameplay and jeopardizing the experience.   

But we learned that today many little things we take for granted while designing digital applications needed to the re-imagined when designing for decentralized games/applications (dApps). Learnings that are fuelling Flow and helping to shape it to become the blockchain designed to reach billions of users. ✨