Algorand, NFTs, and Games

The Idea

I've had a bad itch to develop games recently though. I released Flappy Stock a couple of weeks ago and it's just made the itch worse! I've been trying to think of some more projects to work on, whether it's a web or a mobile game.

I've also been looking into and trying to wrap my head around blockchains, smart contracts, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies. Games like Axie Infinity and Alchemon, which use NFTs to represent the in-game entities that players play with, level up, and trade. It's all incredibly exciting and I really want to try and build some sort of basic game using NFTs and tokens on the Algorand blockchain.

I tried to purchase an Axie (Axie Infinity is on the Ethereum blockchain) and the gas fees to transfer to the Ronin wallet were just too damn high and so I gave up for now. The Algorand blockchain has far less fees so going with that.

Minting my first NFT

Just so you're aware, I have no idea what I'm doing here. 🤷‍♂️ I need to get way more familiar with blockchains and NFTs so I wanted to create my first NFT. I chose to use a an image of the SKYCATCHFIRE logo on purple. At first I tried to follow the tutorial on the official Algorand Developer documentation for creating an nft. For some reason trying this example errors out for me. I need to come back to this at some point and figure out why.

I did some more Googling and found out that you can create NFTs on the Algorand blockchain TestNet, BetaNet, and MainNet with a site called algodesk.io. I connected my "MyAlgo Wallet" to the site and filled out the form to create a new my new NFT.

You need some sort of URL for your NFT that points to the image that you want to use for your NFT. A popular site to host NFT media is Pinata so I uploaded the image there and they gave me a url which I added to the URL field as seen in the image above. Clicking "Create Asset" will mint the NFT to the Algorand blockchain!

Here is the transaction for my NFT minting. We can search for the NFT ID on the site NFT Explorer to find the NFT and check out the image! Here it is on the Algorand blockchain! https://www.nftexplorer.app/asset/382914519

Viewing the NFT in the official Algorand wallet

I've attached my "MyAlgo Wallet" to the official Algorand wallet app for iOS so I'm also able to see that my official wallet now shows the new NFT too. Wooot, very cool! 👍

The Game

I definitely need to give this some more thought but I have a few ideas that could use NFTs for in-game items. The possibilities are endless and I'm very excited to see if I can come up with something. Until next time!