Vulcan Forged - NFT game studio with DEX. Earn $LAVA and NFTs

Introduction

Vulcan Forged started as an NFT marketplace in the first place but now has grown to become a NFT game studio powering multiple games and is becoming a gaming ecosystem with over 20000 players. It also operates its own NFT marketplace which serves as the trading venue for its in-game assets and has seen surging volumes since its games have launched.

Vulcan takes its name from the Roman god of fire and forge.

When we look at Vulcan Forged, it is an ecosystem rather than a single metaverse game. The studio has a full lineup of at least 6 games that are currently available and these range from metaverse MMORPGs to trading card games like Hearthstone and even a 3D Battle Chess!

Its flagship product VulcanVerse, is based around Greco-Roman mythology and the ecosystem has a lot of lore or references echoing these origins. The project team are based in Greece as well, so players are expected to get immersed in Greek mythology inspired MMORPG world!

Gameplay

Vulcan Forged has a few games to offer so we shall have a brief look at some of them to get a feel of the different genres.

VulcanVerse

VulcanVerse (VV) is the flagship game and is set to be an MMORPG. The world view is set in a Greco-Roman mythology inspired fantasy world divided into four quadrants with the capital Vulcan City in the center of the map.

Players can once again own land plots (which are purchased with PYR, the primary game token) and recruit creatures known as Vulcanites to play the game or interact with their buildings and land plots. What’s interesting here with VulcanVerse is that players can not only place buildings in their land plots, but they are actually able to terraform their own land plots to different terrains etc., thus giving endless possibility to land plots to represent various terrain features.

a player customizing his land plot in terrain mode.

As discussed earlier, players need to acquire their own companion beasts known as Vulcanites to participate in activities in-game. Vulcanites are the primary creatures of the VulcanVerse and each has its different skills and lore associated to where they come from. These are your upgradeable NFTs you can level up, or trade in the marketplace.

Some of the free Vulcanites companions that players can adventure with in the game.

Vulcanites have different levels which indicate their rarity and powers. There is also an edition number that shows how many of the same Vulcanite are available in the world. As of now, there are 28 known Vulcanites in existence but there is more to come as the game development progresses.

For starting the game, players can get the level 0 Vulcanites which are unlimited in supply and free. Stronger Vulcanites can be purchased in the marketplace, or summoned via gathering specific in-game items and scrolls that are foraged by your Vulcanites in VulcanVerse.

These companions also carry over some its utility to other games in the platform such as being your hero card in the Berserk card game for instance.

Example of how a Vulcanite in VV has abilities that can be carried over to the Berserk trading card game in Vulcan Forged platform.

For now, the main activities players can engage in the game are terraforming their own land plots if they are owners, foraging with Vulcanites to earn in-game resources, battling other Vulcanites in-game, etc. For details of some of these activities, readers can refer to the game docs here.

A player made land plot terraform that’s been awarded by the official Twitter in a competition.

While the game features in the beta phase are relatively simple right now, there is a lot in store to come in 2022! Some of the updates to look forward to:

With fishing just announced in the roadmap, we can assume a profession/ skill system are in the works and are excited to see where it brings us as the MMORPG starts to mature!

Berserk

Berserk is a collectible NFT card game and is a standalone game in its own. In short, it is quite similar to Hearthstone. Players build a deck using 30 cards and can battle other players in different game ladders for XP and other rewards.

We will quickly go over the gameplay for a few of those who are not familiar with CCG genre of games in general. The simple objective of the game is to reduce your opponent hero’s HP to 0. Let’s look at the game board below:

The Berserk game board.

On the right bottom corner of your avatar or right top corner of your opponent is the HP. Once this goes to zero a winner will emerge. The red gem is depicting the Lava points each player has in a round — this acts as the energy filler for each round and starts at a low number at the beginning of the match, and as the match goes on player gets access to more Lava each round which allows for more powerful plays.

The player will draw 5 cards from the deck which is your starting hand. However, to ensure it is playable you will be given a chance to review these and return any number of the cards into the deck for a reshuffle, this is the starting phase of the game.

Starting hand where you choose your 5 cards to begin with.

Once that is done it’s onto the race to beat your opponent! As a turn-based card game Berserk can get fast paced with the combination of abilities and effects available from the card decks — there is a ladder system in place though if you own just a starting deck, but as you move up the ladders you can get access to higher leagues where your opponent will be having better and rarer cards that are inherently more powerful and harder to beat!

For a gameplay in action you can refer to here! The action can get quite hectic indeed, and of the full product line of the ecosystem this one is the most complete and playable game and has seen quite some positive reviews from card gamers in general! In particular, you can refer to the gameplay video shown earlier where the host discussed this and compared it with a few other competitors such as Magic: The Gatherng or Hearthstone, and guess what? They quite liked Berserk’s gameplay!

Vulcan Chess

In Vulcan Forged line up of products there are some of these classic games that are simple to get on and rules are clear for everybody, and here it is, the essential 3D chess!

Same Chess, same rules.

I guess Chess needs not much further description from here — good old simple game for one to kill some time and test your wits. Chess is obviously not the main game in Vulcan Forged, but players can treat this as a recurring activity to earn some XP which aids in claiming your LAVA rewards from the other games. The game can be PVP but if the matchmaking system does not match a human opponent you will get to play some bots instead.

Team

The Vulcan Forged team is currently run by around 40 or so members. They are mostly based in Greece but as the resulting success the team have considerably expanded to the UK, America and India.

Vulcan Forged CEO Jamie Thomson.

Jamie Thomson is the CEO of Vulcan Forged. He had long standing experience with frontend development for a number of years. He started in crypto by developing a NFT marketplace in the last cycle around 2017 and has been a dedicated builder since. As a result of the booming success coming out of Vulcan Forged, Jamie has now relocated to Greece to focus on it.

Partnerships

Being a metaverse project Vulcan Forged has seen backing and support from a large number of prominent players in the space. Let’s not forget Vulcan Forged’s tokens are available on-chain powered by Polygon and the network have played out a very important role for making the project readily accessible from enthusiasts with a low cost solution moving away from Ethereum mainnet.

Some of Vulcan Forged’s partners as shown on the website.

Next is Venly which is the wallet solution that Vulcan Forged is integrated with for the marketplace and the website, without which the platform would have not gone to life.

As for metaverse or web3 gaming guild partnerships, Vulcan Forged has also secured a handful of these in the past few months or so. These include big names such as AAG Ventures, Merit Circle and MetaRing for example. In particular, the mutual investments with AAG Ventures focus on their VulcanVerse product and also the Cedalion scholarship program and is considered as a major step to mutually work towards long term success of the ecosystem and blockchain gaming space in general.

Assets & Ecosystem

The Vulcan Forged ecosystem operates on a dual token system. PYR is the primary token of the ecosystem and $LAVA is the secondary token for earning in-game rewards or upgrading your NFTs and in-game assets.

Onto tokenomics of PYR: the token has a total supply of 50 million tokens and currently around 19mil is in circulation. A quick infographic of the distribution is as follows:

The token emissions are also fairly straightforward and transparent from the team. Main emissions would be from staking pool which is from the land staking which is taken from the project docs:

The main use case of PYR tokens in the ecosystem would be for leveling and staking in the NFTs or NFT God companions in VulcanVerse. Basically each level up has a required number of PYR stake and level ups are also paid in PYR. In the case of land, upgraded land plots also share a monthly PYR token rewards from the reward pool.

As for LAVA, this is the secondary token of the ecosystem and can be simply treated as the reward token or farm token from various activities or games in the ecosystem.

In short, any activities yielding XP from gameplay and interaction in the ecosystem will earn LAVA. Some example interactions that are eligible for earning LAVA in the game guide are:

As a secondary token, LAVA supply is not capped. The main utility use case o the token would be to purchase materials, upgrade Vulcanites and various NFT assets such as gods, land etc. It is also airdropped for longer-term PYR holders as a form of passive income rewards for players who have staked their PYR for the long haul.

How to get started

To get access to the ecosystem and the different games Vulcan Forged offers, one needs to set up an account on myForge on the official website to get started.

For first time users you will be prompted to register your email and set up a password after which you will receive a verification email. Once that is done you will be asked to set up a PIN for your Venly wallet which is the integrated crypto wallet solution for the Vulcan Forged ecosystem.

Once all that is done you will enter myForged where you will see your addresses and tokens.

MyForged wallet view.

To purchase game assets with PYR you can navigate to the marketplace and check out what’s available in auctions. These are denominated in PYR and you will have to move your PYR from your wallet to the market wallet in order to be bidding.

As for getting the games obviously, you can navigate to the games section and start downloading the loaders for each of the titles the ecosystem has to offer. Recall the Vulcan Forged ecosystem has a current line up of 6 games:

And that’s it! We hope you enjoy this introduction of the Vulcan Forged ecosystem. We quite liked the Berserk card game upon reviewing it and we suggest interested readers to study the docs and try this out. Its gameplay while similar to Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering, offers some interesting spins and can get quite addictive over time!

As for VulcanVerse and the Vulcan Forged platform in general, providing utility in the Vulcanite NFTs as the players’ upgradeable companions and the fact that some of the Vulcanite’s powers and abilities can be carried over to other games in the same platform is an ingeniuous design.

We like that Vulcan Forged offers different genre of games that appeal to different player demographics; rewards can be earned but shared across different games so it gives an opportunity for players to try out everything or exchange their game assets in one game for resources in another (e.g. a player can cash out their CCG assets in Berserk to get more exposure in VulcanVerse for instance). The marketplace is a cohesive piece holding the ecosystem together and as player metrics are approaching all time highs we can see this building out a flywheel effect attracting bigger player base as each of the titles in the platform matures.