Shrapnel, an upcoming first-person shooter multiplayer Web3 game, stands out with its level of community involvement and its distinct gaming finance (GameFi) mechanics, powered by NFTs. It has been working to include future players in the development of its gameplay, lore, and NFT ecosystem.
Don Norbury, chief technology officer at Neon Media, acknowledged that the process to build blockchain-based video games is different. He said for staff hailing from Web2 backgrounds, engaging with the community, getting ideas back, and sharing more than one traditionally would be comfortable sharing has been tricky. Norbury shared that Shrapnel is currently in pre-alpha development. The team will share early access versions with focus group participants in an effort to get feedback beginning next spring.
So far, potential players have been able to purchase an Operator avatar NFT which represents a mercenary character in the Shrapnel universe. The NFT holders also received digital and physical comic books created for each of the five available characters’ backstories at San Diego Comic-Con in July. And Shrapnel, more recently, dropped a two-minute game trailer – similar to how a trailer is released in the lead-up to a movie premiere. The trailer shows a spacey character exploring a futuristic and dirty city, and there is some gunplay as well. It also released the project’s white paper, highlighting its tokenomics and in-game assets scheme, on Friday.
Shrapnel is set to double as a platform for community-built maps with various sets of rules and gameplay styles, all based on a single-token economy based on SHRAP, an Avalanche-based governance token. Users can earn SHRAP rewards by completing missions, creating non-fungible tokens, or staking their tokens to receive two types of NFTs – vanity items and maps.
