[nerf0]

Hi HN:

This is a fun project I've been working on recently. The idea of the cards started when I saw how an AI could generate realistic portraits of people. I tried to apply similar techniques to generating fantasy characters, and got amazing results.

The next 2 weeks were spent on designing the card assets, hero traits and descriptions. I borrowed some ideas from D&D (attribute points and alignment). Also threw in a random name generator, of which the names were scraped all over the internet.

Once I had the card assets, the rest all fell in place. It was obvious that the Ethereum blockchain was the best market place for such a collectible game. I spent the next 2 weeks writing the smart contract (based on ERC 721) and various pieces to support trading on the site. Fun fact: ETH price took off right before I was ready to deploy the contract on the mainnet. Due to high gas price, I had to spent a fortune... not fun!

I had a lot of fun working on it. Let me know if you have any questions.

[webmaven]

> This is a fun project I've been working on recently. The idea of the cards started when I saw how an AI could generate realistic portraits of people. I tried to apply similar techniques to generating fantasy characters, and got amazing results.

Can you share a bit more about the art generation? Are you using StyleGAN or some other architecture? Are you hand-selecting the art from among generated images? What training dataset did you use or create?

[nerf0]

Sure! I'm using a network very similar to StyleGAN. After generating a batch, I review the images and weed out maybe 10% of the really bad ones. I was actually surprised at how well it worked.

For training, I spent a lot of time scraping images. I couldn't find any good dataset for this purpose. Controlling for quality is pretty tough, and I didn't spend nearly as much time as I should. And it's evident in the result. Some of the generated arts have pretty low pixel quality if you look at the original image. Luckily, it looks ok on the cards.

[webmaven]

I understand the mechanisms for claiming or buying/selling unique cards to build a collection, but what are the rules for actually playing a game with the cards you've got?

[nerf0]

Not much right now, but see https://etheroes.io/roadmap

[webmaven]

I saw that page, but it doesn't mention anything about actually playing a game with these cards.

"Leveling" and "skills" are game mechanics, true, but what are the rules? You must have something in mind. Right now I have no idea even if the intent is solo play, 2-player, or more. Much less whether it's cooperative or competitive, deck building or engine-building or just tactical, and so on. How about whether there are going to be other (possibly a non-collectible core set) card types?