A few centuries ago, millions people had to flee their home because of the explosion of their star. They traveled throughout the cosmos to the first habitable planet, Eykar. After this long journey, the first thousands of spaceships landed in just a few month, filled with settlers eager to take over a new world.
You play the commander of one of these settler spaceships and your goal is to build the most prestigious empire. Prestige can be earned by performing actions depending on the faction you have chosen. There are 3 factions, each one has advantages and disadvantages but the more people who are part of one, the less interesting it becomes compared to the other two. Chose carefully to avoid having too many competitors. The most prestigious empire, whether it is controlled by a single player or a guild made up of thousands, will keep a significative part of the profits generated by the game.
Merchants gain prestige by trading. They establish trade routes and go in search of the most sought-after resources from other kingdoms. To succeed in this faction you will have to negotiate with the farmers, fishermen and other miners of this world.
Diplomats gain prestige by establishing unions between kingdoms. They have their place at the head of powerful guilds and implement complex strategies to bend the world to their will. To become a good diplomat you will have to know how to adapt to your interlocutor, sometimes discussing with rich merchants, and the next day with mercenary warlords.
Warlords gain prestige by destroying other empires. They can put violence in the service of the wealthy or stand on the side of good and defend the just causes. No matter how moral they are, they will spend their lives in bloody conflicts.
Eykar world is not infinite, but comes very close. The map divides the world into small polygonal territories called plots. There are more of these than there are atoms in our universe and they all have different properties. Their altitude and climate determine the interactions players can have with them. In a forest for instance, it is possible to build a lumber camp while an ocean allows to fish. The resources owned by players are represented by convoys under their control, each with different speeds and travel constraints.
When your colony gets big enough to be meaningful to other players, you may decide to ally rather than attacking them. Guilds allow to manage territories and resources shared by several players, preventing them from attacking each other. They also allow two interesting behaviors:
Eykar was created to explore the possibilities of StarkNet, a layer 2 making computation scalable. The more you compute, the cheaper it is per instruction, which means that putting storage aside, you just need to get enough players to make the costs negligible. After several months, this initial goal turned into three.
This phase will provide the technical requirements of the game and show that it can be done.
A quest system which allows participants to evolve an NFT that will give them access to the alpha of Eykar. This system should increase community engagement and promote the game thanks to social networks quests. It could also help to get feedback on the Starknet user experience on browser.
A first iteration of the game deployed on Testnet. It will be based on Genesis with factions and prestige introduced. This will allow to fix eventual bugs and adjust the gameplay to be as pleasant and fair as possible for the players.
This version, also called season 0, will be the first one to be deployed on the mainnet, with a limited number of participants. It will allow to test the game in real conditions with a limited stake.
Season 1 will be open to the public and will last one month. The contract will be immutable and user feedback will be used to improve the next seasons. Alongside these improvements to the game, cosmetic additions and small variations to prevent players from getting bored will be developed as the seasons go on.
This is Eykar's final goal. Having a decentralized game that never ends. In order to achieve this, two questions will have to be answered.
At this point, a governance token may be considered.