The creators of the cat mech game Nyan Heroes want to save real cats

Cats are experiencing their play renaissance. While felines have been part of the medum for years, last year’s Stray proved they can carry games like heroes. Now a developer called Rude Robots wants to bring cat power to the web3 space with a free-to-play third-person shooter called Nyan heroes. Rude Robot Studios not only wants to provide an attractive game that will change the perception of blockchain gaming, but also wants to use Nyan Heroes to help save real cats.

GamesBeat spoke to Rude Robot CEO Max Fu about Nyan Heroes, the blockchain foundation and how cats will benefit from it. Fu co-founded Singapore-based studio Rude Robot in 2021 with YouTuber Wendy “Wengie” Huang. The developers plan to launch the alpha on PCs sometime early this year and expand to other devices later.

Nyan Heroes is a third-person shooter battle royale built on the Solana blockchain. The player characters are bipedal cats who pilot mecha suits at least ten times their size. While describing the heroes to GamesBeat, Fu compared them to Monster Hunter’s palicos. There are multiple different types of heroes to play as, including bulky Bulwark tanks, Deathmark assassins, and Megami supporters. Fu also drew comparisons to mecha-based anime, such as Evangelion.

In addition to gameplay, Nyan Heroes also features in-game token-based economy, with a built-in wallet. Rude Robot held its first sale of “Genesis Nyan” NFTs in 2021. It implements a series of balances in its economy to keep it stable in crypto winters. According to Rude Robot, it plans to make the cryptocurrency features more unobtrusive so that gamers who just want to play a cats-in-mecha game without bothering with the financial aspects can do so.

Everyone wants to be a cat

Fu stated that one of his priorities is to use the money from the games to help real (four-legged) cats. “As the game goes live, we hope to integrate various in-game activities or actions that will help save a cat in real life. For example, if a player performs a certain set of actions, completes a certain mission or finds a rare item in the game, we as a studio donate to an animal welfare organization on behalf of that player. At the same time, we reward that player in-game with a personal achievement to show they saved a real cat.”

Rude Robot has donated approximately $350,000 to 10 different animal charities, the largest of which is the Best Friends Animal Society. Fu has five cats of his own and says one of his backup career plans is to open a cat shelter.

He also hopes players will be motivated by in-game achievements to help real cats. “Ultimately, if players do these things consistently, we might even be able to create a leaderboard to recognize the achievements that saved the most cats in real life, for example. That is something we hope to include in the game as well.”

An image problem

Fu and Rude Robot want to change the perception of what web3 gaming can be. As Fu admits, there is a certain perception around blockchain gaming and the use of NFTs in such games. “There were a lot of other games that came out around that time and they kind of come and go. Some of them have given the whole blockchain gaming space a bit of a bad name. I think we haven’t seen any really high quality releases so far — triple-A releases.

Fu stressed that the goal of Nyan Heroes was to create a game, rather than a blockchain product. “I think the most important thing for us is that we wanted to do a certain job from day one of Nyan Heroes. And that job was to create an incredibly fun, game-first product and focus on the game – with only certain systems supported by the blockchain technology. We certainly weren’t there to build a blockchain product that just happened to be a game.”

Web3 games are still struggling to find an audience. A Coda Labs poll released last October found that only 12% of the 7,000 gamers surveyed had played a web3 game and 3% owned NFTs. The majority of gamers who had played such titles did so to earn or spend money. Coda Labs CEO Şekip Can Gökalp said at the time: “[Our] takeaway is we’ve done some terrible job marketing in this space. The crypto natives and crypto gaming companies and the get rich quick schemes left a really bad taste in the general public.

Nyan Heroes may not be the only game looking to change this, but Rude Robot’s adaptability as a studio could help, says Fu. “We know the quality will come sometime in the future. What we hope to be able to do as a small studio that’s maybe a bit more ahead and also more agile is to be one of the early pioneers in that space and prove that it’s really possible for a blockchain game to go from high quality, immersive and fun – not just this thing built around blockchain economies and financial incentives.

The path to feline NFTs

Rude Robot has since raised $10 million in funding for Nyan Heroes. The development team of over 50 employees includes several who have worked on Assassin’s Creed, Marvel’s Avengers, Destiny, Ghost Recon, and Rainbow Six.

Fu moved from medicine to the gaming industry and says the journey was a long one. But he notes that working in new technology has made the change worthwhile. “I feel like I now have the opportunity to innovate in this amazing space using breakthrough technology, like Unreal Engine 5, blockchain, now AI and merging it with gaming is really exciting. I really love it. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”