The WASD Weekly: September 29, 2023

September 29th, 2023

Gm and welcome to the first edition of what I’m calling “The WASD Weekly!”

The WASD Weekly is a new piece that I’ll be releasing every Friday, to go along with our usual Monday and Thursday editions.

Yes, this means WASD is moving to three-newsletters per week!

WE. ARE. LEVELING. UP.

When you find out WASD is releasing 3 articles a week.

I have two goals for The WASD Weekly:

Get you caught up on past week in onchain gaming.
Provide you with some alpha on cool games to try out over the weekend.

I know it’s a Friday, so I will try to keep these light.

Or at least, lighter than usual.

With that in mind, each WASD Weekly will include:

A small opening note
A primer on the week’s biggest onchain gaming news
My picks for three onchain games to try out over the weekend
A recap of WASD content and mints from this week
A curated selection of the best content from other creators around the ecosystem
A spotlight and my thoughts on a cool onchain game I’ve played
An s-tier meme of the week

Essentially, I’m taking what used to make up the second half of our Monday pieces, and moving it to Fridays.

A look at the decision making process behind the The WASD Weekly inside WASD HQ.

I hope you all enjoy this first edition of The WASD Weekly, and be sure to keep your eyes peeled on Mondays, Thursdays, and now Friday’s for WASD content in your inbox.

🗞️The TLDR:

The hottest news from the last week in onchain gaming and autonomous worlds.

🎮 Plays of the Week:

Three onchain games to try out for yourself this weekend.

📺 This Week in WASD:

Catch up on WASD content and mints from the past week.

🤝 Words From Frens:

The best non-WASD Content from around the ecosystem.

🕹️ Game Spotlight: Roll Your Own

Overview:

Roll Your Own is a turn-based drug-dealing game on Starknet.

Inspired by the 1980s game Drug Wars, in Roll Your Own (RYO), players trade six different drugs (weed, speed, acid, ludes, heroin, and cocaine) in a fictional reincarnation of New York City in order to generate profit and rise to the top of the in-game leaderboard.

RYO is kind of like “arbitrage for drugs” as each one trades at a different price across the game’s six boroughs.

This means that to make money, you’ll have to buy low in one borough and sell high in another.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, as prices for each drug will change during the game’s 10 turns (called days).

To compound this, your wheeling and dealing will influence their prices, as players incur slippage for each trade they make.

Furthermore, you’ll have periodic run-ins with cops and gangs, who risk dealing damage to you unless you pay them off with 20% of your drugs and cash on hand respectively.

RYO is being developed by the Cartridge team in conjunction with DopeDAO (the DAO behind the Dope Wars IP, and recently launched Season 2 of the game on September 20.

The WASD Take:

Overall, I’m really enjoying Roll Your Own.

As a finance nerd who loves crime IP (Breaking Bad is my favorite piece of entertainment) I’ve had a lot of fun with the game.

While it’s easy to pick up (especially with a new tutorial in Season 2), RYO is hard to master, as there is a deceptive amount of strategy that goes into gameplay.

To maximize your profits, you’ll have to think a few steps ahead to plan trades and travel routes between boroughs.

There are also risk management considerations to take into account when playing, like deciding whether or not to hold cash or drugs on hand based on the composition of your inventory and what stage of the game you are in.

I think, for the most part, RYO does a good job of making it difficult to execute the same trade over and over with both slippage and stops from gangs/cops.

However, I feel there is a case to be made to make slippage even more aggressive in order to ratchet up the difficulty of the game.

When it comes to performance and UX, RYO is among the smoothest onchain games I’ve played. Transactions confirm near instantaneously, and the game utilizes burner wallets so you don’t have to connect a wallet of your own or sign anything while playing.

I also LOVE the game’s soundtrack composed by Casey Wescott, especially the song NightDrive. It’s my favorite song in any onchain game I’ve come across to date.

All in all, I’m really enjoying Roll Your Own.

I’d say it’s broken into my top-five favorite onchain games along with Primodium, Sky Strife, Network States, and Words3.

I can’t wait to continue playing and to see where the team takes it next!