Nifty Island: Game That Lets You Create Personalized Islands
Nifty Island is a world where players can create personalized islands and customize them however they wish. They will be able to build structures using the build system and game assets, terraform the land, or replace the whole island with their own 3d model.
It is a community oriented platform puting the focus on user generated content. Players will be able to create their own game assets, mint them as NFTs, and display them in game. Users will also be able to display other NFTs they have too.
Everyone will get a free island and there are an unlimited number of them.
There were a couple NFT drops the community could participate in. The NFT Palms sell for 3.5ETH at cheapest, there are 6 tiers of the palms, the cheapest of the highest tier is listed for 420ETH.
The collection was launched 15 October, 2021 and the avs. price is slowly rising since:
The palms will give holders benefits as it is common with genesis collection NFTs. For now, holders got some free NFT drops (Legendary Pistols) but the game-related benefits Palms provide aren’t clear at this moment.
The other collection is 10K Legendary Pistols. These will be an accessory and a vital tool for players battling in the metaverse. The floor of pistols is at 0.2ETH.
Both collections made over 1,6K in volume by now.
The graphics of NFTs allow you to guess the visual theme of the game. The guns actually look pretty neat, they are detailed and obviously had a lot of work put in them.
Let’s have a look at what other game visuals we can find.
This is B33. It will be a pet that will follow around the players throughout the island:
The graphics are simple as you can expect in a metaverse project but they do have stilistic uniqueness and attractiveness. They compare to Decentraland graphics in regards to the amount of details and the theme in general but I would say that Nifty Island has more of a futuristic, alien vibe which I like better. When the world will fill up with elements it should look alright.
Tokenomics
$ISLAN token will be the currency of the game and will be used for in-game transactions, buying and selling islands and other NFTs.
The tokenomics aren’t available right now as well as the date of the token sale.
Team
The project was founded by Charles Smith and Zack Pantely but little information can be found about the team, there’s no team profile on a website. So pretty much all we know are the names of founders, the fact that there are 42 other team members and they are looking to employ more, as there is a link to the open positions page on their website.
The Linkedin profile of Charles has no description and you can only see his past work experiences. The one relevant to crypto is the Reserve project where Charles was a Head of Business development until 2020. The project didn’t reach wider audiences yet, the current market and diluted caps are at 28,8M. Reserve is a stable, asset-backed cryptocurrency with the goal to create a universal store of value – particularly in regions with unreliable banking infrastructure and regions where hyperinflation is an issue.
The information about CTO Zack Pantely is also very limited, according to Linkedin he didn’t have any crypto-related prior experience.
The search “nifty island github” didn’t pull any relevant results.
Partnerships & investors
Nifty Islands raised 20M.
Arrington XRP Capital, Hashed, Distributed Global, Alameda Research and the Solana Foundation are the biggest names that put their money in.
Social sentiment
Nifty Island has 31,9K followers on Twitter, 6,5K of which joined in the last 30 days. The account is followed by notable figures like Gary Vee, Kieran, founder of Illuvium, a few big NFT influencers @punk6529, @Zeneca_33, @BoredElonMusk.
The tweets don't attract a lot of attention in terms of engagement, not even the ones showing game graphics or game elements.
Discord has 22K members and 3K of them are online, there’s some activity in general chat but there’s little conversation. Instead, a lot of memes and irrelevant messages which shows there aren’t exciting topics the community can engage in.
There’s also a Reddit page with a bit less than a 100 people following.
Roadmap
On February 17th the first alpha version will be launched where 1000 pioneers will be able to explore the main game functions - build on an island, create their own NFT assets and mint them, interact with other players and explore the metaverse.
The release was postponed by a month, it was supposed to happen on January 17.
Summary
I like the idea. Island will serve as a social profile where people can express themselves by creating a mini world and also showcase their digital assets or flex NFTs they have. Owning a pet is also cool and I like the ideas the team is generating.
But the team is the weakest component, perhaps they aren’t weak but because there’s very little information about them, it’s hard to predict if they can successfully develop their ideas into reality. On the other hand, investors showed trust in the team, so it’s not a complete red flag.
The website is pretty poor in terms of information but perhaps this was the intention - to make it easily digestible and quick to go through.
The social sentiment doesn’t scream excitement, there’s no whitepaper too, no tokenomics, no date of the token sale. I have the impression that the strategy is to build something to show to the public first and then focus on those other aspects. If this is the case, and it could be because they have enough funding to work with, and if they will be able to launch Alpha version next month, it would mean that in less than a year (it was founded in 2021), the team accomplished quite a lot - the playable game version and few NFT sales.
The project is built on ETH and it will have to be migrated to L2 if the team wants to offer minting NFTs the user themselves creates.
Overall, there's a lot of uncertainty at this point but the project it’s worth keeping your eye on.