✴️ The easiest way to your first $10K in crypto is through airdrops, and the easiest way to get airdrops is to help games test in alpha and beta. ✴️ AI Arena is the latest and greatest to offer what seems like a generous airdrop of its $NRN token to simply help test its new AI-based auto battler!

Let's go over setup and gameplay before moving into the airdrop. 

Setup

Setup for the game is fairly simple. You start here to create an account and join your team. The teams available are led by various influencoors.

You will need to switch to Arbitrum Sepolia testnet in order to move forward with AI Arena. You will need testnet ETH in order to proceed with the initial transactions, which you can mine here.

You have until Season 1 starts to train your AI, and you have to pick your team by February 12. You are fighting for rewards with your team, but there is also an individual component to the competition.

Gameplay

AI Arena is the strategy game version of Smash Bros. Imagine if you had to give all of the commands to Link before sending him into battle — that's AI Arena. The actual fight is an auto-battler. You train your fighter how to perform in different scenarios before sending it in to fight.

The moveset can get quite complex. Check out this sequence. You use WASD for movement around the screen. You also have an attack, grab and special button along with shield and jump. Button combinations lead to added attacks, such as jump+attack or jump+special. Combos are plentiful, as attacks can be chained quite easily (think SF6 chaining as opposed to SF2CE chaining).

Airdrop

❗️❗️❗️8% of the total $NRN supply will be airdropped to players of the AI Arena P2A (play to airdrop) campaign. The more you win individually and as a team, the higher your percentage of that 8%. 

Insider Info

Rumors are that a large percentage of the player base on AI Arena is botted. Reports from supposed insiders state that the company behind the game is overstating its player base.

I honestly don't care as long as there are enough players to sustain matches and the game is fun. These influencoors, man. The guy probably recognizes the techniques he used to build his own audience — that's the only reason he's able to call it out. 😂

The Future: Prompt Engineering (PE) and UGC?

The models AI Arena introduced to me are what got me truly excited about this project. Truthfully, I'm not playing this game completely on its own merits, although I believe AI Arena is a game that can stand alone as a game/has the ability to cross over into web2. Graphics, music, original gameplay is all there. The game needs narrative and a marketing budget in order to succeed financially.

I believe the true value of this game comes from its ability to serve as a model to teach AI prompt engineering. The future of game devving — also animation, music, fashion — will come from prompt engineers who understand how to prompt computers to create what they want. The successful creators of the mainstream future will be CEOs of their own personal ML armadas, not individual coders or designers. Prompt engineers will speed up the production process to a pace that no individual will be able to compete with.

👉🏼 In this world, students of code, design and art must learn prompt engineering as a basic form of expression. AI Arena presents a huge upgrade from the text-based PE lessons I've been taking cues from. Using an advanced UI like AI Arena, founders have the ability to quickly assess, train and test a codebase or ideabase on complex scenarios rather than having to imagine them from scratch. 

AI Arena has a certain level of UGC (within the realm of Smash Bros. fighter) built into its gameplay. Users can modify the stage to a degree as well as the movements or general personality of the opposing fighter.

🧐 An example: Imagine your AI Arena opponent, whom you can also train, as a virus with a particular pattern of behavior. Imagine a coder being able to input that pattern of behavior as a fight sequence and then organize a defense against it as a game, visually testing for different scenarios in real time before deploying only the sequence in which the hero fighter comes out on top.

Would love to hear ideas on this, especially from developers. Could a prompt engineering UX set up as a fighter be reorganized for more serious coding scenarios? Would adding UGC elements allow for an open source expansion of this gamified experience into an ever-expanding variety of applications? Just thinking out loud, but I see massive opportunities in this direction that stretch beyond the world of web3 gaming.

Regardless, web3 gameplay is definitely improving (not that I thought it was that bad; I liked the original Axie, it was addictive). I never thought I'd get into an auto-battler, but my AI Arena fighter is just as much fun to strategize as SF6 is to play in real time. 🎵 Doesn't hurt that the soundtrack is bangin. 🎶 😁

👁️‍🗨️ Follow on Twitter or Diamond for more exciting, boisterous alpha.

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