Galaxy Fight Club brings new NFT interactivity through gameplay

In today’s case study (brought to you by Polygon Studios) we’d like to spotlight a mobile game bringing NFT communities closer together. Galaxy Fight Club (GFC) has brought not only a new NFT-based game to market but a game where in-game avatars take the form of NFTs from your favorite collections.

A major challenge many projects face in this rapidly growing space is finding ways to engage with each other. The team at GFC identified this issue and came up with a unique hook for their game. By allowing players to render popular NFTs in their collection to GFC avatars, communities now have a new way to interact and compete with each other.

We managed to score a bit of time to ask GFC about their game and the challenges they’ve come across.

What is Galaxy Fight Club?

Galaxy Fight Club can be called the first “cross-IP PVP game” made for the metaverse. Players are able to log into the game, connect a wallet, and jump right into the heat of battle.

Victory will net players rewards through the game’s internal play-to-earn ecosystem. Every Genesis Galaxy Fighter generates 5-15 $GCOIN daily, GFC’s native cryptocurrency. There is a total supply of 10,129 Genesis Galaxy Fighters.

“GFC is a mobile PVP MOBA game where players compete against each other to defeat the opposing team. There are several different game modes (with more on the way) but the current tournaments are run with teams of 3 players in an elimination-style bracket.” - GFC Team

To make the game even more interesting, when a player links their wallet they can access exclusive in-game characters of their favorite NFTs, as long as the collection is supported.

A number of projects have already partnered with GFC including CyberKongz, Illuvium, BOYPills, and many others. The team is constantly adding new partnered collections to their game allowing all sorts of communities to rep their favorite NFT.

Weekly tournaments are hosted with prizes ranging up to 3 ETH and qualifying tournaments where winners receive early entry into the “grand tournament” with prizes worth up to 300k USD.

What sparked this idea for GFC? Why make it a web3 game?

The team has an extensive history of being gamers and is well-aware of a common issue many gamers face today.

This is attributed to major gaming studios and AAA companies having complete control over all virtual assets. Web3 games have sought to empower players through digital ownership of any assets they earn within a certain game.

GFC has joined the scene of web3-focused games looking to make a difference.

They understand how much power the gaming market has and strive to allow the free market to determine just how much a digital asset is worth. To them, this is the future of gaming and they want to help facilitate this new movement.

Why build GFC on Polygon?

Polygon turned out to be the perfect chain for Galaxy Fight Club considering the low transaction fees that will help their game scale as more players come on. GCOIN is also based on the Polygon network so this allows for token burns to only cost a few cents to conduct. Token burns are essential to have as they help stabilize the game’s economy.

If GFC was Ethereum based then transactions would end up costing players a lot more, even if they were engaging in a simple activity. For example, if a player wanted to forge a weapon to increase their weapon’s strength, it could potentially cost $10+ on ETH, which would deter players from using it. Compare these gas fees to paying nearly nothing in transactional fees on Polygon and you can see why their team chose this blockchain to build on.

By building on Polygon, GFC can lower barriers caused by high transaction costs by the ETH blockchain so a wider range of people can jump in and play.

What were some of the challenges you came across?

Originally GFC was imagined to be a Super Smash Bros styled game but their team decided to pivot towards mobile development as they know mobile games tailor to a far greater demographic.

One challenge they encountered during mobile development was the proper implementation of wallet authentication to verify a user’s assets. While most other games require the NFT to be part of the game, GFC implemented a process where users would have their wallets associated with an account they create on their website. All the user needs to do is sign a 1 off transaction to verify they own the wallet.

Every time the user signs into the game the wallet is then scanned to see what assets they own which is then displayed on the character selection screen. This method allows for a safe and secure verification process while players can keep their assets safe in hardware wallets.

The team’s main focus right now is to get their play-to-earn model live and running but to do this they must check the box on a few other tasks. One important feature they aim to include before their play-to-earn model goes live is an admin dashboard.

This dashboard will allow for games to be reviewed and cheaters to be banned to ensure all games are played fairly. As you can imagine, with money on the line you can expect many to try to cheat the system. Having this dashboard in place will allow for rules to be enforced so the game is fair for everyone.

An improved version of the dashboard is in the works to provide admins greater control while reviewing matches.

How has community feedback been so far?

A closed beta has previously been held (in late 2021) which allowed 200 of the most active community members to take part. This was a crucial step for the game as it allowed the team to gain feedback from their community to see what they were working on for months.

Overall, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive which reaffirmed all the hard work done. The team has since moved on to an open beta where new versions introducing additional game modes and partner NFT projects are released weekly. Feedback is constantly listened to by the team and adjustments are made accordingly, such as OP weapon tweaks and a request for more team updates.

Since then the team has been proactive in producing bi-weekly dev blogs reporting what they’ve achieved in the last 2 weeks and what they’re aiming to achieve in the next 2 weeks. They also have been running bi-weekly AMAs with their CEO Ado which the community has found informative.

Any advice for aspiring web3 devs?

The GFC team had a few words for aspiring devs looking to break into web3…

Start looking into solidity, there are some great courses out there if you are new to development, otherwise, find an NFT project and offer to help out. Start with little things like building a sales bot that uses the OpenSea API, then as you become more comfortable, begin looking into different ways to read directly from the blockchain.

There are some great libraries out there that make it easy if you have an understanding of how blockchains work. You should start familiarizing yourself with Polyscan since you can learn a lot about how contracts work.

If you are into NFTs already take a look at minting directly from a contract, it's interesting and is another way to further your understanding of how everything interacts.

Find things that interest you and pursue them. There are a lot of developers in NFT communities who are more than happy to give you their time, use that and learn from them if you have the opportunity.