Today we’re kicking off a two-week long playtest of Sky Strife, a fully-onchain RTS game build on MUD by the game developers at Lattice. We began ideating on the game over a year ago, back when MUD v1 was still in its infancy, and Sky Strife wasn’t even called Sky Strife — it was called MUDWar. We held our first playtest for MUDWar in August 2022, back when the object of the game was to capture the Ember Crown, which was on its own Island in the center of the map.
Future work on MUDWAR brought it closer to the Sky Strife we know and love today. We got rid of the Ember Crown and its capture mechanics (including the Donkey unit, which you needed to successfully capture the crown). We eliminated the multiple islands that players could spawn on, and instead decided all players should spawn together, on a small map. We also pared down match sizes from 64 players to four, all fighting in a brutal death match against each other. And we ported the game to MUD v2, giving it enhanced performance capabilities and a native indexer.
At the beginning of this year, we began running semi-regular playtests for Sky Strife, which turned into a weekly Friday cadence. We’ve gotten incredible feedback from our early players (thank you for joining our games and submitting your thoughts!) and have continued to iterate and improve on the game. The scope of Sky Strife increased too, from a game that would demonstrate the power of MUD v2, to a powerful and fun ecosystem in its own right.
We’ve also added the ability to make plugins for Sky Strife (you can see an example here, built by kooshaba, which allows you to augment the combat system, by allowing players to automatically attack the nearest enemy units around them by pressing the letter "P”). Adding plugins on Sky Strife is simple: open the "Settings" option, enter your plugin code into the editor, and press "Run Plugin." You're good to go!
Today, Sky Strife is ready for you to test it in ways it has never been tested before. We are looking to interrogate and refine our own hypothesis about player dynamics, match spawn mechanics, and even the infrastructure Sky Strife runs on. Winners of matches will earn 🔮, which can be used to summon more matches. One thing we are particularly interested in seeing is how players will choose to assemble their own matches and tournaments. Our recent Amalgema UI, which you will see on the Sky Strife homepage, allows you to join matches, or create new ones. We’ll also be seeding matches for new players to join 3x per day at 3:00am GMT+1, 11:00am GMT+1, and 7:00pm GMT+1. Rules for Sky Strife can be found here.
We’ve come a long way building Sky Strife, and we have a lot further to go. There are many ways to play Sky Strife: with a group of friends, in a randomly spawned match, or even to settle onchain beef with a nemesis. We’re excited for you to play Sky Strife with us over the next few weeks, and are looking forward to your feedback. We also have some fun easter eggs and surprises planned. Now, lets go forth and win some 🔮.
