IC Turtles, a DFINITY grant recipient project, wants their NFTs to act as customizable art that you can play around with and shape to your desire. For this reason, they are allowing two types of customization — accessories and traits. They want to give more detail on the difference between the two, and you can interact with them soon.

Accessories and Equipping/Unequipping

Accessories are more like the typical concept of “wearables.” This includes things like hats, weapons, mouthpieces, and shell armor. These are items that can be removed and added back to turtle NFTs. They act as individual pieces that can be moved between turtles. The technical implementation of accessories will be functionally similar to ERC-1155 tokens but implemented on the Internet Computer. IC Turtles will essentially be building their own standard to support this. They are excited to include these accessories in the initial drop of ICTurtles! Soon after the drop, the team hopes to enable adding/removing accessories so that you can interact with them as quickly as possible!

How Accessory/Trait Customization Works

This article will focus on the actual implementation of accessories/traits and how turtle owners will be able to mutate their metadata.

IC Turtles want to make this a unique part of their project that gives users a tangible way to interact with their art early on. Accessories and equipable items can be viewed directly on your NFT as you change them!

Accessory and Metadata Mutation Flow

Traits are immutable metadata tied to a specific turtle, while accessories can be equipped/unequipped between any number of turtles. The initial drop will include many accessories. Below is a brief explanation of how equipping/removing happens:

1. Go to the dashboard on the IC Turtles website (WIP).
2. Select a turtle NFT and accessory to remove and submit a remove request.
3. The ICTurtles main canister will remove the turtle’s accessory from the metadata and mint you an accessory token that represents the accessory. This accessory token can be transferred to other users.

You can also do the reverse (equipping an accessory).

1. On the site, you will be able to select a turtle and an accessory you would like to equip. To complete this process, you must have an accessory token of the correct type.
2. The accessory token will be burned in exchange for mutating the metadata of the turtle to include the accessory.

Layering and Rendering Turtles

The main canister accepts HTTP requests for an NFT ID. It will then scan the corresponding accessories that the turtle has and layer all the accessories together to form a full turtle. This way, all assets and layer handling are on-chain. The overall image will change immediately after mutating the metadata through the above process. ICTurtles believe this layering method can make their mutable metadata more robust and unique, as the wearables/accessories are immediately reflected on the NFTs.
One potential difficulty of this is integration with wallets and marketplaces. The canister returns HTML code for an SVG of the NFT rather than a png, so there may be a bit of overhead to integrate the viewing of NFTs inside your favorite wallets and marketplaces. However, ICTurtles believe this method is the most scalable and exciting for their project and community!

Coming Soon!

IC Turtles currently have a basic frontend UI for equipping/removing. They plan to clean it up and then release a demo to demonstrate how the process works!

Traits and Breeding

Traits are more like parts of the turtle that logically can not be removed as easily. This includes things like a turtle’s eyes, mouth, nose, and shell. These are different from accessories, as they cannot be moved from turtle to turtle. These traits will be used in determining the offspring of a turtle during breeding. More information about breeding mechanics will come as progress is made in the project.

Game Integration

Both traits and accessories will have certain rarities and stats. These have been decided on and will be revealed soon! These rarities and stats will be used to calculate the strength of different turtles in the upcoming combat mechanics within the game and larger-scale faction competitions. A trait/accessory can have different types of stats, meaning various accessories and traits will have utility in other ways!

*Note- This article was previously published as a Medium post and has been published on our platform following a request from IC Turtles.