Cronics — into the metaverse

We recently airdropped 5000 Cronics, and NFT built on the Internet Computer using our very own EXT Standard. Recipients were those that donated ICP to our TipCan page — we are over the moon with the response from the community, having distributed all 5000 NFTs within 48 hours.

Because of the positive feedback from the community, we have decided to revise our roadmap for the Cronic project and begin to share some of our early concepts and ideas, as well as previews and early demos to our Telegram community. In this article I want to go over some of the concepts we are looking to implement and provide a general roadmap.

Firstly, we have not settled on a breeding mechanism, or details regarding initial supply and how supply will change in future. You can join in on the discussion on our Telegram channel as well.

Visual Traits

We are looking to make some changes to some of the visual traits. The following however will not change:

• Background and background color
• Background pattern and color
• Shape (type, size may change — read below)
• Eyes (including glasses) and eye color

Getting mouthy!

Currently the mouth shape is dependent on a gene — in future, this will be influenced on your Cronics “mood” or something you have fed/given to them. E.g. soda-drinks may give them a “burping” mouth, or an unfed/uncared for Cronic may seem super cranky.

We also want to release some super secret mouth types which require the use of an exact combination of items in a specific order. Mouth shapes remain until some other event triggers a change.

Accessorize — it’s good for the soul!

Currently, all Airdrop Cronics have an accessory, which is generated based on their genes (e.g. shirt and tie, name tag etc). These will be switched to independent Accessory NFTs, which can be interchanged between Cronics, or stored within your wallet. So accessories will no longer be a base trait anymore, but something that can be equipped and added to your Cronics.

Accessories will be available via the Cronics game store, through the secondary market and special events. We plan to add a ton of accessories, including pets, toys and outfits. Cronics will not be minted with accessories.

To honour the Airdrop Cronics, the current accessory your Cronic has will be gifted to the Cronic and equipped at launch. This essentially gives all Cronic Airdrop owners with a free Accessory NFT. Further more, the accessories currently available with Airdrop Cronics will be exclusive and won’t be available in future.

Two going on 30…

The overall appearance of your Cronic will change to reflect it’s age — this allows for some cool combinations of older, more sophisticated looking Cronics as well as younger, wilder ones. Mix this in with some cool accessories, you can come up with some very stylish combinations. Want your Cronic to remain looking the same age? Feed it some Beauty Potion and it will look like the day it was minted!

More visual traits!

We are planning to add more animations, and at least two more visual traits. These will affect Airdrop Cronics by adding to them (not taking from them). These changes could include some Cronics being blessed with a new animated background, or another visual element added to the Cronics. More to come in future as we are still exploring ideas here.

Also — although traits have an equal chance during minting, we want some traits to be more dominant than others so we will see certain traits become rarer as breeding occurs, potentially even to the point where some traits may die out.

Beauty Pageants

We want to provide users with options to truly customize the look of the Cronics, and believe having a range of visual options and accessories allows for this. But what’s the point? Well, for Pageants of course!

Pageants will work sort of like a “staking” mechanism. You enter your Cronics into the Pageant tour to earn in-game currency and items. While on tour, Cronics can not be interacted with or traded, they essentially become locked until you withdraw them from the tour (or they run out of Pageant tickets). Users can also participate as judges in the Beauty Pageant game, where they can earn in-game currency and items for voting. The Beauty Pageant works as follows:

• 10 random Cronics are selected from the tour list to participate in a pageant
• 10 random Judges are selected from active players to participate as judges
• A random theme is selected for the pageant — this could be something like “the color green” or “superhero”
• Judges are then asked to vote on their first, second and third picks that best match the theme of the pageant
• Cronics are rewarded based on the number of votes they receive
• Judges are rewarded base on voting for the winning Cronics. This incentivizes honest voting

We will implement a few things to make it unfeasible for someone to try and game the system, as the costs to do so would outweigh any rewards. With enough players and Cronics on tour, we think there will be 1000s of active pageants at anyone time.

Timeframe

We are working toward having our first public release in October 2021, so you will be able to play with your Cronics and feed them, with more types of interactions added over time. This will also be the next time new Cronics will be minted and available to the public through auctions.

We plan to release more information on a bi-weekly basis counting down to our first Cronics Auction, so follow us on Medium to keep up to date!

You can follow ToniqLabs on Twitter, check out our code on GitHub, or join the Cronics Crunch community on Telegram.