Chances are, if you played online computer video games growing up, you played at least one where your main character was a stick figure.
Maybe it was Fancy Pants Adventure, Stick Fight, or Mighty Guy, among many others. 135, a Utah-based company, is trying to bring those golden days of gaming into the new age with Stickman Saga, a player-vs-player, play-to-earn game powered by the blockchain.
In the game, players’ stickman characters will battle it out in the virtual arena for ranking boosts and $STIX, the virtual currency powering the stickman universe. Minting is scheduled for April 13, after which the Stickman Saga team will ramp up the development of the in-game battle arena. The Stickman Saga marketplace will launch shortly after, and battle arena beta testing will begin.
Once that’s complete, players will soon be able to compete against one another. To enter the battle arena, stickmen will need to pay $STIX tokens, and the winning player (or team) collects the prize. There are also plans for Stickman Battle Arena Tournaments, in-game quests to earn $STIX, etc. As the game evolves, there will be airdrops of new weapons and characters to Stickman holders.
135 is launching a gaming platform called GEN3 to host the game, and there will be more games to come on the platform.
“That’s our first game that’s coming out on the GEN3 gaming platform, so we’re excited for that because we have really big goals for the future of Gen3 and what’s going to come from it,” 135 founder AJ Affleck says.
The mint price for each stickman isn’t finalized but is likely to be between 0.08 and 0.1 ETH.
That’s not the only thing that 135 is working on. The company, which has officers in Lehi, New York, and Florida, has two other main facets apart from play-to-earn gaming. It also operates a launchpad and provides seed investments for startups, and is involved in crypto education and event planning.
For the launch pad, 135 looks to help companies, artists, and rappers with their web3 needs, developing minting sites, deploying smart contracts, doing reveals, and working on the back end of what these companies need to launch these products. They’re also involved in the consulting and advisory side of things for various companies and projects from Utah and beyond.
What Affleck says they bring to the table is a knowledge base about the NFT space and all the work that goes into a successful project.
“Building an NFT community from scratch is crazy hard. I think it’s harder than making a million dollars in a month,” Affleck says. “It takes the craziest guerrilla marketing tactics to grow a big NFT community in a number of months because most of the few projects you see aren’t organic. Most of the people who are on their Discord or who are on their Twitter are just bots, and then a lot of the projects only sell out halfway and use the funds from the first half to mint the second half to show they’re sold out. It’s all sketchy, so building the right way is hard.”
As time goes on, Affleck sees the company focusing more on its in-house projects rather than consulting and backend work for other groups. To weed through the sketchy and find the projects worth buying into, 135 also offers services for individual investors and enthusiasts. For $9.99 per month, 135 offers a program called 135 Pro.
135 Pro is meant for individuals and includes a step-by-step crypto education course called Crypto University, a monthly newsletter, live streams, investment opportunities, private events, and what 135 describes as a “pro discord channel,” with alerts, weekly portfolio updates, live news, and daily voice chats.
“There are just certain things that are above what Google is going to offer you,” Affleck says. “People love to be part of a community, but I also think we offer more insight. We have a better understanding than what someone would get over Google, and we’re also able to walk them through step by step.”