Hello friends!

日本語版 🇯🇵

I'm Xavi, the guy from the Symbol Docs Blogs! If you have read any of them, you already know I like writing a lot, so how could I resist the call of the Qiita Advent Calendar? 😁

And what could I possibly write about? Well, that is a silly question. If you follow the blogs, you already know exactly where this is going... 😏

XYM City 3D, the video game

Of course I am going to talk about my favorite pet project! But instead of the plots, numbers, and documentation updates I usually cover in the blogs, this time I want to talk about why we are making this game, why I believe we can actually pull it off, and how I am approaching the whole thing.

Just something light for you to read during the holidays... and maybe something that gets you a little excited too!

Game Goals

It all begins with Jaguar and Hatchet, the captains of the Symbol Syndicate, laying out some very ambitious plans.

Two of these plans are Education and Showcasing:

• Education: Most people think all crypto is a scam, and that is a shame. People fear blockchain because they do not understand it. If we want adoption, we first need education.
• Showcasing: Creating a blockchain, writing documentation, and hoping developers will magically show up and build apps is... not working. For anyone. But if you first build a cool, useful app that solves real problems, then developers will naturally ask how you built it, and suddenly they want to learn more.

So we thought: what about a video game that both uses blockchain and teaches blockchain, without being a game about blockchain? Definitely no play-to-earn, no big crypto endorsements, and none of the practices that have given blockchain a bad reputation. Just a regular, fun, honest game that can do things normal games cannot, with a story that happens to touch on self-custody and decentralization.

Casual players will not even know the game uses blockchain technology. They will just think the characters do.

Does that sound good to you? It sounded great to us, so I got permission to explore the idea further. And very quickly it became clear that we needed a third goal:

• Fan service: NEM and Symbol have been around for a long time, and both have developed a surprising amount of art, lore, and community creativity. They even created a city and named it XYM City! Honestly, it is the perfect setting for this video game, and a treasure trove of ideas for characters and missions. It would be foolish not to use it.

So the Syndicate had very good reasons to create a video game. Great! But... why should we be the ones making it?

Who Should Make the Game

At this point, we could have simply commissioned the game to an established studio. So why go through the trouble of making it ourselves? For two reasons:

• A good game has a soul, and you cannot outsource a soul.

  Just like you cannot make a movie without a director, a game needs a game director. Someone who already knows what the game is about and what emotions it should make players feel, even if they do not yet know what the game will look like. And that director must understand the game's goals deeply. Which means our ideal candidate had to be someone from within the company.