A Brief History of Bears Deluxe
Hi there, PixelKnight here. I am a software developer, artist, and “right hand” to the founder and creator of the Bears Deluxe NFT project, PixelMage. As tech lead with a background in web and game development, head artist and lead creative behind Bears Deluxe, PixelMage has been a trailblazer of innovation, ingenuity, and for setting a precedence of what leadership should look like in the NFT space. In this short read, I will start from conception and deep dive into the Bears Deluxe project, ecosystem and success so far.
The aim of this article is to provide an introductory baseline for folks who are not only interested in joining the Bears Deluxe community, but to shed light on the inner workings of the Bears Deluxe, Bees Deluxe, Honey Hives Deluxe, the Honey Farm ecosystem and how it came to exist in the first place. I hope to provide you with some context as to why Bears Deluxe is extremely unique, why we are so incredibly proud of the work we have achieved thus far, and how we aim to smash through the plethora of short and long term goals we wish to accomplish in 2022. The questions I hope to answer by the end of the article are: “Why Should I Pay Attention to Bears Deluxe?” “What makes Bears Deluxe unique?” “Is it complicated to get involved in Bears Deluxe?” Let’s jump in!
We’ll start with a little history lesson to understand where we have come from, and where we intend to go…
8.29.2021– 9.03.2021: Pixelmage lists Bears Deluxe to OpenSea at .01 ETH minting price. The collection is made up of 6,900 (nice) 24px bears all hand drawn and algorithmically generated by Pixelmage himself. There are no future intentions beyond deploying a cool ERC-1155 PFP collection on the Ethereum blockchain.
9.20.2021: ALL BEARS SOLD OUT — Nearly 300 ETH in secondary sales within 24 hours. Profits are used to hire myself (PixelKnight) full time, and the rest are recouped into the project for future endeavors (internal team, giveaways, community support, solidity developer, etc). Plans start to form and conversations are had regarding the incorporation of utility by owning a Bears Deluxe. The idea of additional uses cases besides owning a cool piece of art begin to inspire the team as we start thinking outside of the box for ways we can put our Bears Deluxe to good use. Diligent research is done to understand the space, what other projects have been able to accomplish, not able to accomplish, and what we hope to build something entirely unique and engaging with a focus around gaming. Helping to bring gaming to the blockchain is our passion, and always will be.
9.30.2021: $HONEYD ERC-20 Token and Honey Farm ecosystem announced and added to the roadmap including Bees Deluxe and Honey Hives Deluxe collections. $HONEYD is a utility token that will fuel the Bears Deluxe Honey Farm ecosystem and provide numerous use cases that will be developed over time to ensure the deflationary aspect of the token. Community informed that a smart contract migration also known as a burn swap must take place in order for Bears Deluxe to passively earn 1 $HONEYD/day and to take advantage of the benefits of the ecosystem we intend to build. Although there are no time constraints or limitations, bear holders MUST transfer Bears Deluxe NFT’s from the original ERC-1155 smart contract and mint them to a new custom built ERC-721 smart contract. This two step process is done through OpenSea and our website. Thorough instructions including Youtube videos were created to guide bears through the migration process. These resources will be posted below in this article.
10.1.2021–10.18.2021: Hungry Bear Beta Levels 1–3 deployed and made available to play on desktop and mobile. Hungry bear is a retro arcade game and an upcoming NFT collection where every level will be an ownable NFT. The game plays like Sonic and Mario where players must rely on a momentum driven physics engine, collect the eth coins and complete the levels as fast as possible to achieve the highest score. The dev team proves that video game levels can be created, deployed, and owned in the form of NFTs, paving the way for a future filled with many retro game NFT collections that will make up the Bears Deluxe Retro Arcade. P2E mechanics will be introduced in these games in the form of $HONEYD token. These levels can be accessed and played on the portal section of our website, which will eventually be home to all of our retro arcade games. With backgrounds in professional game development, the team plans on expanding into building full scale games and dapps potentially using a layer 2 solution. https://bearsdeluxe.io/portal
10.24.2021: https://bearsdeluxe.io website goes live — built in house by myself and PixelMage using a typescript/react front end tech stack. This website will be used as a point of access to migrate bears, provide an interactive and fun UI for holders to manage their Bears, Bees, and Hives collections, do research on the collections, access the retro arcade, and much more. Information about our NFT collections and how the ecosystem works, and legal terms can be found on the site.
11.03.2021: Merch line goes live featuring designs created by members of the community. The merch store continues to expand in terms of designs and types of purchasable and wearable goods. https://merch.bearsdeluxe.io. Sometime in 2022 Bears Deluxe holders will be able to purchase custom merch for $HONEYD through https://maddies.co
11.17.2021: All Bears Deluxe begin to accrue 1 $HONEYD/day and are awarded a 3 $HONEYD bonus for each migrated bear per the smart contract. The smart contract would not be deployed for little over a week later, so upon deployment, migrating a Bears Deluxe came with a lump sum of $HONEYD right out of the gate which was presented to holders as a means of compensating gas fees for migrating bears. To this day, unmigrated bears have been accruing daily, and at the time of writing the lump sum of $HONEYD claimable by a newly migrated bear is up to around 50 $HONEYD!!
11.28.2021: The Migration, Bees Deluxe, Honey Hives Deluxe, and The Honey Farm Ecosystem goes live,— 7 Smart contracts working in tandem to provide a unique gamified experience like no other centered around passively earning and then burning the $HONEYD utility token. The Honey Farm is an ecosystem made up of 3 ERC-721 NFT collections, a “Queen” contract to control the 721’s, a bridge contract used to migrate the bears, a proxy contract to provide future upgradability and interoperability, and a contract for the $HONEYD token. Info and contract addresses can be found on the homepage of our website.
1/2/2021: Today at the time of writing 5,671/6900 Bears have been migrated to the ERC-721 smart contract as we welcome in the new year. Big plans on the horizon include:
— Bee Leveling, Future Hive utility will allow holders of hives and bees to level up their bees in the form of ERC1155 tokens as items effectively increasing bee daily $HONEYD accrual.
— VX Bears, a collection of 15,000 3D voxel Bear NFTs that can be used as controllable avatars in playable metaverses such as the Sandbox.
— NFT Paint, a DAPP(decentralized application) with a similar UI and layout to Microsoft Paint and Mario Paint, which is an old SNES game. Users create paintings on a blank canvas similar to these mentioned applications, however in NFT Paint, once a user is finished creating their masterpiece, they have the option to spend $HONEYD to mint their creation onto the Ethereum blockchain into a real NFT.
— Hungry Bear NFT collection will released in the form of 50 levels. Each level is an ownable NFT with rarity traits. The first 50 levels of Hungry Bear will be airdropped to the first 50 original Bears Deluxe holders who still hold a bear at the time.
— MANY MORE ARCADE GAMES TO COME! We plan to create many titles of retro arcade games that introduce unique web3 experiences and offer ways to utilize $HONEYD token. These games will be deployed in the form of NFT collections similar to Hungry Bear.
Thanks for the history lesson professor…But where are we at now?
The Present: ELI5 — Explain the current state of Bears Deluxe Like I’m 5 Years Old
When you think of ‘Bears Deluxe’, you should also think of the two companion collections that help make up the Honey Farm ecosystem alongside bears collection. These collections I’m referring to are ‘Bees Deluxe’ and ‘Honey Hives Deluxe’. Here is a glimpse of the Honey Farm User Interface on our website…
Owners of Bears, Bees and Hives NFTs will operate their honey farms inside of this ‘Farm’ section on our website. As you can see in the Bears section of my farm, I own Bears Deluxe #4861, and apparently its hive has been minted according to the metadata under the image. I will soon explain what exactly this means.
Notice above in the ‘My Bees Deluxe’ section of my honey farm. You’ll notice a string of buttons at the top of the module that represent functions that can be performed on the bees. you’ll also notice cards that display each one of my Bees Deluxe that I own. You’ll notice these bees indicate that they are ‘Worker Bees’, and that they are ‘alive’. Even if this doesn’t make sense yet along with the function buttons along the top of the module, this snippet of the honey farm UI should elude to the fact that what we have here is a *gamified system of multiple NFT collections that DO SOMETHING more than simply owning them. This ‘something’ is presented in the form of what we in the space call utility, aka functionality. Your Bears, Bees, and Hives function beyond the simple fact of owning them, and what you can do with them is driven entirely by the $HONEYD token. These are expandable systems that we plan to build on and continue to introduce new and exciting ways to use $HONEYD!
- Gamification is adding game mechanics into nongame environments
BENEFITS OF BEAR OWNERSHIP
- Every Bears Deluxe owner must migrate their bears in order to claim $HONEYD and take full advantage of what our ecosystem has to offer
- Earn 1 $HONEYD per day — Claim it daily or accumulate and claim at your convenience
- Unlock exclusive Discord channels in the Bears Deluxe server including our legendary Alpha Channel which is run by our amazing team of alpha authors
- Bears Deluxe owner will be able to claim an identical version of their 2D bear in the form of a VX Bear sometime in early 2022! The same traits will apply! These VX bears will act as controllable avatars in many metaverses to come including the highly anticipated Sandbox metaverse, in which Bears own a 3x3 estate in additional to several smaller plots of land.
BENEFITS OF BEE OWNERSHIP
- An owner of a Honey Hives Deluxe NFT can mint up to 3 Bees Deluxe NFT for 23 $HONEYD each (See below for hive details)
- Earn .13 $HONEYD per day — Claim it daily or accumulate and claim at your convenience
- Bees must be “fed” .23 $HONEYD every 10 days to remain alive. Otherwise they will die and not be able to claim $HONEYD
- Dead Bees can be revived for 7 $HONEYD — Reviving bees reactivates them and they will resume producing $HONEYD
- Burn Bees Deluxe for an instant 12 $HONEYD per Bee — this will destroy the bee forever removing it from the collection
- Transform your bee into a Worker Bee for 7 $HONEYD — A Worker Bee does not have to be fed $HONEYD every 10 days to remain alive, however, its daily $HONEYD earn is reduced to .09 $HONEYD per day
BENEFITS OF HIVE OWNERSHIP
- Each Bears Deluxe owner can claim one Hive for each bear they own
- Honey Hives exist in the form of 6,900 gifs with their own rarity
- Bears Deluxe owners will need to claim their hives in order to mint Bees Deluxe
- Every Hive can mint up to 3 Bees Deluxe NFTs before it ‘depletes’
- There are 5 different hives whose rarity is as followed:
Sun Hive | Common | 3000 exist
Cave Hive | Uncommon | 2000 exist
Island Hive | Rare | 1000 exist
Desert Hive | Epic | 600 exist
Wizard’s Hive | Legendary | 300 exist
- Depleted hives can be reactivated for 69 $HONEYD
- Reactivating Hives allows Bears Deluxe owners to repeat the Bees Deluxe minting process until all Bees have been minted
- FUTURE HIVE UTILITY: Level Up Your Bees (COMING SOON)— At this very moment the community is patiently waiting in anticipation for the release of a new system of utility we have come up with for owning hives. In addition to and completely separate from minting bees, with the roll out of a new smart contract, each hive will have 2 honeycombs that can be retrieved from the them. These honeycombs are ERC1155 tokens, they ARE NOT NFTs, and they can be consumed by bees deluxe effectively increasing the bees daily $HONEYD yield! In short, use Honeycombs to level up your bees to earn more honey every day! We have told the community that we will be waiting for the right time to deploy this system, which has been communicated as 15,000 bees minted. Currently, there have been about 5,100 bees minted since the honey farm went live on 11.28.2021.
- Here is an infographic I have put together to help you understand how this new system will work. Understand that each hive yields 2 Honeycombs, and the more rare the hive, the more levels that honeycomb will level up your bee at once. For instance, a legendary honeycomb will level up a bee to the maximum, level 5. There are only 300 legendary hives * 2 Honeycombs for each of them results in a total of 600 legendary Honeycombs that will ever be in existance, so the amount is finite and not all bees will level up, let alone to the max level of 5. More information on this system is being released regularly by the team and community members are always available in the Discord server to answer questions.
I have described the history of Bears Deluxe and the creation of the Honey Farm ecosystem in my own words from the perspective of a co-creator, and on both an artistic and somewhat technological level. What I mean by “somewhat technological” is that I am not a Solidity developer and did not write the 7 smart contracts that make up our ecosystem.
Solidity is the programming language behind the Ethereum network, and PixelMage made the conscientious decision early on to hire an expert Solidity developer to help him write the smart contracts. As a result of working with this developer, PixelMage would effectively learn advanced Solidity principles, how to write tests for Solidity code and much, much more.
I am, however, a full stack web developer with some web3 knowledge and the ability to comprehend solidity code. I can leverage my web2 skills to interact with smart contracts similarly to the way I have written and interacted with APIs in the past. I essentially send requests to the smart contracts in the form of functions and present the fetched information on the client side, our website. This is how we display the information on our site — with data we’re retrieving from the smart contracts. It’s how we show you your active $HONEYD balance, how we show you if your bears have been migrated, and so on.
Now you sort of get a rough picture of how each of us developers work in conjunction with each other to deliver content and create a user experience, and how our NFT collections provide utility to the holders through the form of passively earning our ERC20 token we call $HONEYD.
What is an ERC20 token?
An ERC20 token is a standard used for creating and issuing smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Smart contracts can then be used to create smart property or tokenized assets that people can invest in. ERC stands for “Ethereum request for comment,” and the ERC20 standard was implemented in 2015.
In Conclusion…
To sum this article up, Bears Deluxe, which was once founded on the idea of a cool profile picture NFT project expanded and was molded into a living, breathing, self sustaining multiple smart contract ecosystem, and there are no plans to slow down. The team, passionate as ever, plans to continue to build out additional Bear, Bee and Hive utility, create new collections, games, social experiences, DAPPS and more ways to use your $HONEYD!
Whether you’re brand new or have been snooping around the bears for some time, if you're intrigued, we welcome you with open arms into our Discord and Twitter discussions. We get excited when people come around and ask questions and have a ton of amazingly intelligent community members who can help guide anyone to the sweet and sticky promise land that is honey!!! Come on in and see what we are all about.
There are so many more awesome ideas and intricacies about Bears Deluxe that I want to be careful not to go too deep into now so I don’t oversaturate the hell out of the article any more than I already have. I’m more of a talker than a writer if you couldn’t tell lol. If there’s info you were looking for that you felt like I left out, don’t worry and we’ll continue to document our systems from a social and technical level. More info and articles to come! Here are some resources if you want to learn more. Thanks for reading!
-PixelKnight
BAGMI
Resources:
WEBSITE https://bearsdeluxe.io/about
TWITTER https://twitter.com/bears_deluxe
DISCORD https://discord.com/invite/S4PKGUa822
UNMIGRATED BEARS DELUXE — These bears still need to be migrated and come with a lump sum of unclaimed honey (1 per day since November 17th + 3 bonus for migration) and they come with a Hive that is ‘mintable’ once the bear has been migrated. https://opensea.io/collection/bears-deluxe
MIGRATED BEARS DELUXE — These bears have already been migrated and can take advantage of the benefits of the ecosystem. They do not come with a hive or honey as the hive and honey has been most likely claimed when the bear was migrated https://opensea.io/collection/bears-deluxe-new
BEES DELUXE https://opensea.io/collection/bees-deluxe
HONEY HIVES DELUXE https://opensea.io/collection/honey-hives-deluxe
