On August 8th, the AI Arena Champion NFT Collection officially dropped, allowing holders of Mint Pass NFTs to burn their assets to redeem and reveal their new NFT.
What Is the AI Arena Champion NFT Collection?
The Champion NFT collection consists of AI-powered fighters on the Arbitrum network, used to compete against other players in AI Arena, a PvP fighting platformer game similar to Super Smash Bros. These NFTs are trainable AI that uses your gameplay to learn its moves, so you can coach the AI fighter to play how you want it to in order to top the leaderboards.
Each Champion NFT is visually unique but also elementally different, as there are fire, water, and electric-based elemental fighters, so these elements could affect your strategies. They each consist of 6 different physical attibutes: hair, eyes, mouth, feet, body, and hands. Each of these has one of 4 rarities: Bronze, Silver, Gold, or Diamond. These are all cosmetic attributes that belong to the Skin layer. Each of these NFTs consists of 2 other layers as well: Frame and Core.
The Frame layer represents the character’s robot body and consists of Battle Attributes and an Elemental Power. These Frames are built out of random compositions of Titanium and Black Zirconium metals, so some Frames may have more Titanium or Black Zirconium, or both a balanced number of both. That means there are 3 weight classes: Striker, Scrapper, and Slugger. Each of them affects playstyle, as the Striker is a lightweight class with more Titanium, while Slugger is a heavy class with more Zirconium, and Scrapper is the balanced class. This also means that both metals influence 6 different Battle Attributes: Weight, Power, Speed, Defense, Range, and Stamina.
| COMPOSITION | > TITANIUM | > BLACK ZIRCONIUM |
| Weight | Light | Heavy |
| Power | Low | High |
| Speed / Agility | Fast | Slow |
| Defense | Low | High |
| Range | Long | Short |
| Stamina | High | Low |
As mentioned before, each fighter has one of the following Elemental Powers: Fire, Water, or Electricity. This is basically a rock paper scissors design fighters with the Fire element have an advantage over Electric fighters, while Water Champions are better against Fire-based NFTs and Electric Champions are good when faced with Water fighters.
Last but not least is the Core layer that includes the AI powering the NFT. This is done by using neural networks, a machine learning model consisting of 2 components: architecture and parameters. Both components are stored on IPFS, with architecture essentially serving as the framework for the model that affects how various states are converted to actions, while parameters get changed whenever the player trains the AI and saves that data, updating the parameters on IPFS alongside a new hash on Ethereum. This all means that while there can be more models with the same architecture, each model is bound to have unique parameters, with the documentation teasing plans on introducing the ability to add different types of AI models for even more variety.
If you own a Mint Pass NFT, you can burn it to get one random fighter. The floor price for Champion NFTs at the time of writing is 4 ETH on OpenSea via Arbitrum, but you can also buy a Mint Pass NFT on OpenSea on the same network if you don’t mind revealing a random fighter. The floor price for the Mint Pass is currently 1.44 ETH.
How do AI-Powered NFTs Work In-Game?
Players teach their AI-powered fighter in Training Mode by activating data collection to enable accurate AI learning. If you turn data collection off, then the AI will only record important moves. As you can see in the video below, players have a wide variety of ways to configure their training sessions, adjusting training intensity and areas to focus on, such as opponent positioning, health, action representation, and more. You can switch between simple and advanced configuration screens, the latter giving you various sliders that allow you to more specifically alter training intensity while including more specific focus areas to choose from, such as raycast projectile distance, angle to opponent, and much more. There are also data cleaning options available as well, likely to help make your AI fighter react more fluidly while avoiding the use of your mistakes in actual battle.
And if that didn’t seem decently complex already, then the AI Inspector adds even more depth to AI training. This AI Inspector lets you “see inside the brain” of the AI, showing you what it will do in certain situations, thus making it a great way to figure out what areas need more training.
Once you’re done with training, you can head to the Simulation Mode to test your AI against pre-trained AIs of varying difficulty to see if your fighter is ready for battles against fighters trained by other players.
Owners of Mint Pass or Champion NFTs can already access the game via web browsers by logging in with their MetaMask wallet, with the Training Mode planned to arrive at some point in the weeks ahead.
