Web3 games Million on Mars and Sunflower Land will do cross-chain event (updated)

Getting blockchain games to cooperate and share gameplay across two different networks is one of the ambitions for the larger metaverse. So it’s interesting to see two companies do that today across two blockchain networks.

The Web3 games Million on Mars and Sunflower Land, two growing play-to-own crafting games, are creating a first-of- its-kind, cross-chain, cross-universe, crossover event. The collaboration between Million on Mars and Sunflower Land, built on the Wax and Polygon blockchains respectively, will mark one of the first Web3 experiences to enable coherent gameplay across two different networks.

This means the two Web3 games are building true interoperability between them, fulfilling one of the core promises of Web3 technology. Players of either game will be able to begin quests and crafting experiences in one game and finish in the other game, unlocking exciting in-game tools, prizes, recipes, and surprises across both games.

Million on Mars is a web-based and mobile-friendly Wax blockchain game. Players can buy unique land plots on the red planet to settle on Mars. In the game, players can take on a slew of actions, including purchasing & depositing buildings and resources for crafting and renting buildings to other players — all on real land plots taken from data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) data.

Players earn Dusk tokens as they buy and sell goods and services in a fully player-driven economy. Million on Mars has seen exponential growth on Wax since its debut in Q4 2021.

After launching in early 2022, Sunflower Land rose to become the 8th most popular blockchain game by user count, with its player base climbing 60,000% in the first four months of release. Players must plant, harvest, collect and craft resources to manage and grow their farmland and earn SFL tokens.

Interoperability is a key component of the Web3 revolution which aims to create an interconnected internet where different apps, games and websites are all compatible with each other. The transition from Web2 to Web3 will see users currently siloed on exclusive platforms able to traverse the entire length and breadth of the internet seamlessly.

“We’re really interested in creating experiences with other products and games in the web3 space, especially if they are on other blockchains as it helps lay the foundation for interoperability between experiences,” said Adam Hannigan, CEO of Sunflower Land, in a statement. “As a web3 project what we are doing with this crossover is truly the first-of-its-kind and a true differentiator.”

The gaming sector of the decentralized finance (DeFi) space has emerged as one of the main drivers of interoperability, as gamers seek to carry their gaming experiences and items with them across different platforms.

“There’s a very strong community of smart, ambitious and hardworking people in the web3 space,” said Erik Bethke, chief creative officer of Million on Mars, in a statement. “It’s exciting to be able to partner together across blockchains with a fantastic open-source team like Sunflower Land, who also built a very fun and gorgeous game.”

The Sunflower Land and Million On Mars Crossover event will run from May 24 for 30 days. At the end of the event, the interoperability will remain in place for both games. Both companies have said they’re excited to see how the player community receives this event, and plan to build more crossover events in the future.

[I’ve updated the original story with the material below on how it works 3:39 p.m. Pacific time on 5/31/22].

How it works

To explain the crossover, the companies said they needed to delve into the some context around the first multi-chain quest.

Starting in Sunflower Land, players are introduced to the main character — entrepreneur and martian resident, Melon Dusk, who crashed his rocket in Sunflower Land. He asks the player to help him repair his rocket and load it up with sunflowers and seeds so he can continue his mission of spreading sunflowers to other worlds. Players then begin the quest providing wood for the launch pad, some iron for the rocket repair, and a pile of sunflowers and sunflower seeds to complete the first phase of this multi-chain quest.

Once the rocket repair is completed, Melon Dusk takes off in his rocket to deliver sunflower seeds to Mars. Then players are directed to a special Million on Mars get started page exclusively for Sunflower Land players, this grants them free access to Million on Mars. From a technical perspective, the repair of the rocket is treated as an NFT contained in the farm contract to maintain state and be verified later.

On the Million on Mars side, the company developed a special landing page for SFL players, where it asked players to connect their wallets and verify that their Sunflower Land farm on Polygon contained the Repaired Rocket NFT. Once it validated that the player completed the quest in Sunflower Land, it asked them to connect a Wax wallet to play Million on Mars. If they did not have a Wax wallet already, with sponsorship from Wax, Million on Mars offered a streamlined and free experience to create a new wallet.

Finally, once players were inside playing Million on Mars, it asks players to do the second the multi-chain quest: to acquire land and grow sunflowers. This requires the player to scavenge and produce various resources such as sunflower seeds, soil, water, etc.

Once the players complete the quest in Million on Mars, they’re registered to later receive an airdrop for an NFT on Polygon that will be redeemable in Sunflower Land for the Observatory.

How did this crossover come about?

Both game companies have been fans of each other’s work and have very active player communities with notable overlap between the two games. Community members came up with the idea (community members at Undisputed Noobs Guild). They then took the idea and ran with it. They finalized the technical details and both development teams built out the integration and gameplay updates. It took the two companies around two weeks to build the integration and get the crossover event launched in both games.

Technical crossover details:

● Both projects use typescript for their back-end servers which made sharing and re-using blockchain accessing code easier.

● The Sunflower team prepared the Polygon NFT smart contract for Million on Mars to mint on which also helped everyone to deliver quickly.

● An important part of any successful blockchain game is to verify players are actual human beings, rather than bots. Sunflower Land & Million on Mars are dedicated to ensuring our games are exclusively played by humans. We created several layers of human verification to ensure no bots got into either games during this exciting crossover event.