AMA with bull crypto on Floki's NFT gaming metaverse, Valhalla

FLOKI’s NFT gaming metaverse, Valhalla, is currently being developed by a team of 11 people with combined team experience of over 50 years and plans to aggressively expand to a team of 20 to fast-track development.

This team is led by MrBrownWhale, a renowned crypto veteran and NFT expert and Jackie Xu, a blockchain veteran who has been in the industry for a decade and has worked with some of the biggest names in crypto.

The innovative game which features play to earn mechanics will be playable entirely on the blockchain. For perspective, Axie Infinity is the only other game that does something similar; the project leads have also initiated talks with advisors at mainstream gaming organizations that include Terraria and Horizon: Zero Dawn to ensure Valhalla features the best gaming environment.

In this AMA with Crypto Bulls, FLOKI’s NFT gaming leads MrBrownWhale and Jackie Xu give an insight into exactly what’s planned for FLOKI’s NFT gaming metaverse, Valhalla:

Can you please tell me about Floki Inu and the story behind the meme?

Mr. Brown: We were born from an Elon Musk tweet, where he said he would buy a Shiba Inu and name it Floki.

Since then, our focus has been to lean into that powerful meme, which is on par with Shib and Doge, while also building out beneficial utility.

For example, we have partnered with Curate and Crypto Cart so that you can use your token to buy real world items.

We have also partnered with Kimbal Musk‘s project, Million Gardens Movement, to impact the world for the better — not to mention being at the Musk dinner table!

Now, we are defining the most important part of that utility with Valhalla.

You recently announced Valhalla. Can you tell me about the project?

Mr. Brown: Yeah, I would love to!

What we’re aiming to do with Valhalla is to bring mainstream and blockchain gaming together in a metaverse.

We’re taking successful elements from games like Pokémon, Animal Crossing, Farmville and Skyrim.. bringing them to the blockchain.

We have creatures in Valhalla that are called Vera. You’ll be able to walk around, encounter them, battle with them and also capture them.

Interesting note: Each Vera NFT has more than 9 quadrillion(!!) variations.

When you have your Vera, you’ll be able to train them the way you see fit and take them along with you on raids.

But if that’s not your thing then Valhalla also has a gardening system in collaboration with Kimbal Musk’s Million Gardens Movement, where you will be able to raise and tend to your crops. These are also NFTs, and can be sold either in-game or directly to your fellow players.

We’ll also be introducing novel play-to-earn mechanics so that next to addictive game play, Players will also have a return on investment on their time spent in game.

Valhalla is our love letter to blockchain gaming and I’m confident we’ll kickstart a new era within the cryptocurrency space.

What makes Valhalla different from the other NFT games in the space?

Jackie: Good question! So many things.. Where to start? The main differentiation: the entire game is played on the blockchain. The only other game that does something similar is Axie Infinity, and it took them around 3 years of development to get there.

That’s great, but we’ll be taking things a few steps further by running not just a game ecosystem on-chain, but also all the other game mechanics as well.

This means that whenever you farm, raid, or battle in Valhalla, you’ll be directly saving your progress on the blockchain. So you’ll not only be directly increasing the value of your NFTs while playing, but you’ll also be actively contributing to the network whilst playing!

Also, NFTs in Valhalla are what we call upgradable NFTs. This doesn’t just mean its value changes, but also its optics, its attributes, its abilities and many more things! These changes are directly reflected in your wallet. It’ll be a fun experience seeing the live updates on marketplaces such as OpenSea and Rarible.

There are more technical innovations that we will be making to differentiate Valhalla from its competitors, but we don’t want to tip off the competitors right away. We’ll be periodically releasing updates as we progress. I hope that’s alright for now!

What is the makeup of the team working on Valhalla (their experience, number of people on the team, etc.)?

Jackie: First off, we have MrBrownwhale, our main NFT strategist. I’m assuming he won’t be talking about him, haha. He’s been in blockchain since 2013, and NFTs since 2017. He has been involved in the strategic rollout of many NFT projects as well. One notable example I can think of right now is his current role as a council member of Ether Cards, a project that has raised more than 4 million in presales alone.

Then there’s me, the lead blockchain developer. Similar to MrBrownwhale I’ve been in blockchain since 2012, and have been actively working on smart contracts since 2017. Before that, I’ve worked as a software engineer and technical lead on projects ranging from large social networks to anti-fraud transaction processing systems for the traditional finance industry.

Besides us, we have 2 sound engineers with extensive experience not only in gaming, but also in creating musical scores for, among others, Netflix. We believe sound is one of the most important factors to giving players a well-rounded gaming experience!

Next to sound, there’s of course design. This is a rather broad department comprising an illustrator, a character modeler, an animator and an overseeing art director. This is a team that has a combined experience of more than half a century(!) that’s well in tune with one another. They’ve previously worked on projects ranging from commercials, to short files, to games and are very excited to bring out our vision of Valhalla to your screens!

In addition, there’s of course the game developers. We have two Unity game developers working on Valhalla that have been working with that engine since ~2008. They’ve seen the good and the bad, and will be working on a wonderful game client for Valhalla.

Then there’s our game designer. Mind you, this has nothing to do with visuals but everything to do with tweaking the in-game numbers to make sure that balance is kept in Valhalla. Kind of like Thanos, but nicer.

Furthermore we have what we call a “lore master”. She’s putting her more than a decade’s worth of D&D roleplaying into the Valhalla narrative and world history, as well as writing out the lives of the various in-game NPCs.

… and last but not least, we have a QA guy. Can’t forget the QA guy.

That’s 11 (if I can count)!

Oh and a small side note: we’ll be aggressively expanding this team to around 20 people.

And one final note! We’re currently in talks with a few high profile advisors for Valhalla as well. These are people that have worked on pretty interesting mainstream games. Horizon: Zero Dawn and Terraria for example.

How does Valhalla benefit the Floki token?

Mr. Brown: One of the primary things that drives demand for a token is utility. And utility is exactly what we’ll be giving to the Floki token.

The entire Valhalla economy runs on Floki. Anything you buy in-game, costs Floki, anything you earn in-game will be paid out in Floki.

This means that a huge amount of Floki will be constantly flowing in and out of Valhalla, effectively decreasing the “regular” circulating supply and increasing demand for Floki.

Talking about driving up demand… What do you think is needed to get started with playing Valhalla? Floki in your wallet. And what do you think will happen when non-crypto gamers discover Valhalla? They will start stocking up on Floki just to play the game.

Like Jackie mentioned earlier, Axie Infinity comes close to what we envisioned, but we want to go much much further.

If you know what happened to their token when they launched, well I think the benefits speak for themselves.

What are you most excited about in Valhalla?

Mr. Brown: I have a lot of things to be excited about, But I guess if I had to pick the one that’s closest to my heart as a gamer that has been thirsty for actual innovation within the NFT/Blockchain gaming space..

It would be actually bringing on-chain interactions to the next level while bridging the gap to non-crypto gamers.

I can’t wait for the play to earn mechanisms to kick in and (a part of) our community making a living from combining the two things they love: crypto and gaming.

Jackie: Haha — there’s so much to be excited about! If I could only choose one, then it would be the sheer amount of possibilities for min-maxing my NFTs.

I’ve been an avid RPG player for a long while, and a few things I remember quite fondly are 1) trying to get perfect initial stats in MapleStory and 2) calculating the most optimal way to train and raise certain stats for certain bosses in Final Fantasy.

I suppose productivity will massively drop after release, because I’m sure I’ll be able to find a few fellow nerds out there to tweak spreadsheets and discuss strategies with.

Does Valhalla have a litepaper?

MrBrown: We do have a litepaper for Valhalla, which will be shared shortly. Stay tuned and perhaps join Floki’s social channel to be among the first to know about it.

NO pre-sale, we do have genesis NFTs but the actual “pre-sale” is just buying and holding Floki tokens.

Where can the FLOKI token be bought?

The token is available on a few exchanges. Just to name a few, there’s PancakeSwap on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Uniswap on the Ethereum (ETH) chain.

Here are their respective links:

- PancakeSwap: https://pancakeswap.finance/swap?outputCurrency=0x2b3f34e9d4b127797ce6244ea341a83733ddd6e4

- Uniswap: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?outputCurrency=0x43f11c02439e2736800433b4594994Bd43Cd066D&use=V2

Is Valhalla suitable for beginners?

Jackie: At first, Valhalla players will be expected to know how to execute transactions to interact with the blockchain.

We do have a plan to onboard “regular” gamers, though! We expect some of them to not even have bought their first token yet, but are just looking to enjoy a game and earn funds while they’re doing it (haha — that used to be a dream of mine as well).

There’s a “managed ‘’ wallet future on the backlog that will allow players that don’t have a wallet to still play the game. This is similar to the way a centralized exchange such as Binance/Coinbase works, but then inside the game. It’s not planned for the first iteration of the game, but we definitely have it planned to be able to onboard a much larger audience!

How would Valhalla utilize the Gamefi trend?

Valhalla jumps straight into the GameFi trend and it’s play-to-earn model.

We will be utilizing different mechanics so people will be able to convert their time spent in the game to real life income.

Let me outline some of the play-to-earn mechanics for you:

1. We have a Gardening system in collaboration with Kimbal Musk’s Million Garden movement, where players can grow crops to sell in various marketplaces.

2. Vera system: where players can sell/auction their (rare/levelled) Vera.

3. Battle system: where players gain FLOKI upon winning battles

4. Ship system: where players can buy/sell/trade ships

5. Item system: where players can sell items to other players

I hope this gives you some insight in how we are utilizing the GameFi trend with Valhalla for the Floki Ecosystem.

Will community feedback be considered for the game development?

Yes, of course! As we build Valhalla, we’ll be releasing weekly updates. For the people that are aware of agile working, the duration of our sprint is one week, hence the update cycle!

Short feedback cycles allow us to iterate and pivot many times faster than traditional game development studios allow.

In Conclusion

FLOKI’s flagship utility project, VALHALLA, is an industry-disruptive NFT gaming metaverse that utilizes on-chain interactions and is led by NFT and blockchain veterans. There will be future updates on progress with the game as well as further AMAs to keep people engaged and in-the-know as development progresses.