The developers of Shockwaves, a free-to-play music-based FPS available on the Elixir Games Launcher, have officially introduced the ability to mint earnable weapons and armor into NFTs while gearing up for a new tournament featuring 3000 of ChainGPT’s $CGPT token up for grabs for the top players.

Minting and ChainGPT Tournament Details

Thanks to last week’s update, non-NFT weapons and armor gained from lootboxes can now be tokenized on the Polygon network by heading to your inventory in-game and choosing which of your arsenal you’d like to mint. This will open up your browser and allow you to complete the minting with your connected wallet by paying a fee of 2 $MATIC. The fee may change in the future. By completing this process, your 3D weapon becomes a unique asset that can be traded on OpenSea. Next to rarity, each weapon is comprised of loads of different visual and gameplay-related traits, possibly making one weapon more valuable from the other. The traits in particular include fire rate, range, accuracy, damage, armor penetration, item name, item type, first color, second color, metal color, manufacturer and music resonance.

The update also brought in the ability to destroy in-game items by paying a certain amount in xNeuros, the in-game earnable currency representing the $NEUROS token. By destroying an in-game item, you have a chance of getting a new weapon from a lootbox, so instead of paying 300 xNeuros for a common lootbox, you have the option to destroy an existing item you don’t need for a chance at getting a better weapon by paying less.

Every week, the studio looks to engage its community with competitive events that give players the opportunity to earn token rewards from one of the game’s partners. Now that the $ZYM tournament ended on June 26th, the team has announced that the next one involves Web3 AI infrastructure project ChatGPT, with 3000 $CGPT up for grabs for the best players starting from June 27th at 4 PM UTC and ending on June 30th at 10 PM UTC. It’s not clear how many players can rank for the prize pool, but considering the previous one that just ended allocated rewards for the top 50 highest-scoring players, it is likely that the leaderboard for this one will also be the same.

How to Play and Earn in Shockwaves

With the current version of Shockwaves, players can play and earn lootboxes and xNeuros by playing 8v8 matches where the team that captures and defends the designated zone on the map long enough wins the game. Each player is equipped with armor and 2 weapons that maybe have a secondary fire option, with matches taking place in medium-sized procedurally-generated maps resembling cyberpunk-like dystopian cities with neon flashy colors and fitting music that you can use to your advantage. Every map has specific strategic positions in which players who own Sentry Turret NFTs can place them for a potential tactical advantage.

Music can have a certain impact on the fast-paced gameplay that you may find useful. Specifically, music can help you navigate the environments quicker by allowing you to jump multiple times if you time it right, adding vertical movement and enabling you to climb up tall buildings, with white lines at the bottom of the screen showing you when it’s time to jump. This music-powered feature is referred to in the whitepaper as Deep Waves, and according to this documentation, there’s more it than just jumping, as timing your shots right with the music can actually allow you to do more damage, hence the music resonance trait of weapon NFTs. Various map effects are also said to be synchronized with the music to give this flashy feeling attempting to make the experience feel like you’re in a trailer.

As you play a match, which can consist of both players and AI Agents, you gain points for dealing damage, killing enemies and capturing the required zone. At the end of the match, it seems that this score influences your rewards, so even if you lose the match, you might still end up gaining more xNeuros than some who win depending on your performance. Or maybe the rewards are just random. Last week’s update attempted to further improve the scoring system by making it possible to gain some points for doing damage while giving higher points for capturing the zone and awarding fewer points for making long-range distance kills, especially the ones from above.

Players need to collect xNeuros in order to open various types of lootboxes, which can contain in-game weapons, armor and xNeuros. Just like xNeuros, lootboxes also have a chance of getting awarded at the end of a match. xNeuros however can also be purchased with the $NEUROS token. $NEUROS is a governance token that can be staked through different tiers of staking in order to give you bonus in-game rewards.

If you want to passively earn from the play-and-earn title, then you can do so by owning an AI Agent NFT on the Polygon network. These unique characters can be controlled by you but you can leave them playing matches as in-game bots that supposedly evolve over time and become better at the game. If you leave them to play on their own, you will receive a certain share of the earnings, while the remainder is kept by the NFT so that it can buy in-game items that only it can use. By choosing to play as your AI-powered NFT, you will get a percentage bonus for in-game rewards based on the rarity of the NFT, with Common AI Agents providing a 10% bonus while Legendary NFTs award a 30% bonus.