DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Creative Department) — January 10, 2022
For those unfamiliar with the project, the DeFi Kingdoms leadership team holds weekly AMA’s with the community on the discord server.
Not everyone has time to listen to the recording or wants something they can just read instead so I’ve been writing these written summaries. You can find summaries of the prior AMA’s in my index of DeFi Kingdom’s Articles.
Here is the link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7rmcxCeHZk&t=1s.
This week, the AMA was from members of the creative department. AMA’s have different teams present to address different topics. Join the discord to follow future responses to questions they couldn’t address on the call! Go to the Community Updates / suggestions channel to submit questions! https://discord.gg/bDwN2WYqy7
If this is your first exposure to DFK and you are looking to learn how to start participating in the game/economy, you can check out my unofficial beginner’s guide here and index of many other DFK articles here.
Team Members Present:
Sinstar — head of creative department
Pogo — Composer
Cinnamon Bun — primary map designer
LiterallyKantEven — heads a section of creative department.
pieface — heads a section of creative department (particularly w/r/t pixel art)
Bolon Soron — Community manager, leading the AMA.
*Frisky, Raspberry and Hubert hopped in briefly for a couple questions during the live AMA.
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Bolon: This is our creative department AMA, won’t be answering questions on development and game mechanics so keep that in mind as you come up for questions.
Sinstar: Hoping to start a video creation production system. We’ve partnered up with a studio that we saw participate in one of our contests to do some animations in connection with our lore. Things are coming together and we are excited to share that — not coming out this week or anything but we are hoping to have it ready for pre-release and release of Crystalvale. This is one piece of many initiatives the creative team has been working very hard on. With the improved size of the team, it’s opened up a lot of leverage to work on many of these directives we previously didn’t have the manpower to do. Sometimes those creative contests feel like just a community event, but this example where we reached out to the studio has been one instance where we have onboarded a community member as a team member.
Written Questions
Can you discuss the use of the castle region of the map? Will it be for PVE/PVP, top hero display? Also what’s up with the green monster tail?
Pieface: We released the castle for everyone to see and we have a lot of functionality planned for it. If you zoom you can see roadmap in top right area, we plan to have a lot of functionality. on the bottom right you see bulletin boards and NPCs that will be an announcements area. We’ll have our town crier announcements as well as historical and current announcements. There’s also some functionality we are looking into connecting our announcements channel to the game via this. It’s just to sync discord announcements to the game. W/r/t NPCs there are some there, but in terms of functional NPCs we will be adding some but it will be a surprise. The green monster tail and the red glowing eyes — these are teasers for something that we have planned for the future.
Is there a chance of added storylines and gameplots as the game progresses?
LiterallyKant: Absolutely yes. I don’t know if you guys have met Jacksicles yet, he hasn’t been on an AMA yet, but he’s been working on a lot of lore and quests for us so its a priority. That said, there are mechanical things that need to be resolved first. We want to have it so that when you hero completes a quest/action they are flagged, so that we can create quests that can only be completed 1x, or only once every so often or so that the actions you take on that quest can impact later quests. That is complex, especially when working on the blockchain. People should be excited about this. Once its done it will open chains of quests that open once you take certain actions and varying paths depending on actions that you take. Hubert is involved in these as well. This is going to be everyone in the company involved in this effort (blockchain, soliditiy, front end, creative) — this isn’t on the backburner, every day things are being developed on this. once the base is developed you’ll start to see quests rolling out on this front.
Sinstar: You have areas where you have landmark features with heroes and questing and land and PVE/PVP. Those are big timeline things, but this effort mentioned by LiterallyKant provides content for us to be working on for a very long time. Once we open up this feature in particular that opens up a lot of work for creative and front end because we can create endless types of story quests where the user can interact in many ways. Excited to unlock this so we can start producing content in between the really big features.
LiterallyKant: Teaser — we want to do class specific quests, where you can have a class specific storyline that you go through. Hopefully I won’t get smacked for sharing that too early but that should be really fun and there are a ton of us who contribute to lore and everyone seems to have a favorite class and is excited to contribute to the lore in this.
The tree on the map in the top right has eyes. Does this tree have a story? Also does the hot air balloon have lore associated with it or can I make up my own?
CinnamonBun: The tree guy on the map, yes he has eyes, he’s probably just grumpy from seeing his companions get chopped down all the time. I like to think he just judges you and watches you. This kind of ties into what Kant was saying with added storylines and things we are working on there. In terms of making up your own lore I’m all for it and is one of the things that make this community great.
Will the color of the egg determine its rarity or other stats or will they all be randomized?
Sinstar: Need to be careful with giving details on pets. We are in the process of developing some of these things, so I can give some basics on what we have set in stone, but there are still details shifting from time to time. I will say that the egg colors themselves do matter, its not just a random spawn. If you have a blue egg you would get a certain type of pet. We are looking at quite a few categories/splits on these and differentiating some of these pet categories. Element would be one of those (i.e. water type pets could be blue eggs). We have the gold egg, that’s another category that may do different things. We’ve always had plans for metaverse type of partnerships. We plan to partner with other projects that share similar visions and goals with us. Not to get overly confusing with all these distinctions because frankly we are still hammering down details on how to categorize these. Basically we want to make sure they are all viable and worth something. We want it to be special regardless of what category it comes from. I see Hubert in chat, we are working with him a lot on this stuff. We want to make them all viable and balanced. Want to make sure we get the best win out of every direction we approach it. We don’t want people to lose out on a particular egg because of the type it was. We want every egg owner to win by having an egg.
Are we anticipating that pets will have generations similar to heroes or would it just be here’s your egg and it hatches without generations?
Sinstar: There will be a baseline starting position when we launch pets and they will be a certain thing, but we want to be able to add on utility (i.e. when PVE comes out and we may augment pets at that time). It’s hard to say end goal what pets are going to be and what they are going to do because there is iteration that needs to happen. We have what the baseline will be but in terms of plotting out their entire life its hard to give you the elevator pitch on that now.
You already have music but what about sound effects when mousing over or selecting items?
LiterallyKantEven: We are working with a sound effects studio. They are expert and have worked with some big names. They are producing high quality stuff. You haven’t seen any of it yet because some of it is for stuff not in the game yet, but we are working on front end on what is needed to bring those sounds up. We have two sound effects we will be using to test that system. Soon, once you click on town crier you will get a sound effect. Also in the bank there is the easter egg piggy bank and we will have an animation for that as well. We just want to make sure the system on the front end will do what we want, and then we will be expanding out from there. We want to add some character to some of those easter egg aspects in the game. For example, when you summon and want to open the crystal, there is sometimes a slight delay between clicking and the metamask confirm so we’d like to have a sound notification that the click registered. Coming thoon.
Open mic up to CinnamonBun on Land and what he has to share on land:
Cinnamon: Do we have the images of the expanded land shared? Ok in the voiceless chat there are some images of the expanded land that will be coming out real soon. We are trying to make the world as big and epic as possible. One thing we are trying not to do is have land just be some big block or something. The land’s will exist in regions and we are trying to make it a real fantasy world. We think it would be cool to have land ownership that is relative to certain monuments so you could be like oh my land is near the ruins, or something like that.
I believe that is basically it on what I want to say on Serendale map expansion. Hope you guys like it!
Will Crystalvale have its own music or will you be reusing tracks?
Pogo: with anything we do with DFK quality is top priority. So reusing tracks hasn’t really been an option for us. During the process with Sinstar, Kant and myself where we were considering music options we considered remixes of the tracks on Serendale, but in the end decided to go all out and have completely original tracks for Crystalvale. Totally fresh music and they’ll all have a slightly different flavor to Serendale. Serendale has a high fantasy medieval sound track pallet. Crystalvale has a more wintery/arctic soundtrack. As of now we have 4 complete tracks. Really excited for you guys to hear it all and many more plans down the line. All new fresh music for Crystalvale.
Bolon: Music is easily one of the most complimented features of the game. Excited to see more originals. We’ll see what we can do about a teaser at some point.
Art Teasers for Crystalvale
Pieface: we’ve all been very hard at work with Crystalvale. We’ve been keeping things pretty secret and under wraps, but fresh off the press in instagram we have some residents of Crystalvale posted and a new area, we don’t want to drop too much, and we’ll let you speculate on what its going to be.
Live Stage Questions:
For the airdrop snapshots going on for Crystalvale —we’ve had a lot of newcomers to the community since then and I see lots of people asking about how can I get Crystal or is it too late because I can’t afford a hero and all the whales are going to take everything?
Sinstar: This is more of a tokenomics question for Fox. Mostly what we are trying to field are creative questions.
Fox: It’s similar to Jewel in its utility so everyone is probably going to want to get some to use on Avalanche. How we did Jewel, we had very high emissions with very high lockup to spread the opportunity around to our early investors to be sort of like Jewel providers to the community because you need Jewel to playt he game. You’ll also need Crystal to play on AVAX, its sort of like creating a decentralized viewpoint where you can be the Crystal providers. Anyone here now that is holding heroes, staking in bank and providing LP will get some Crystal. On Crystalvale we will have a dex and pools for trading Crystal (i.e ETH, AVAX, BTC, Jewel). Market will set the price of that. Emissions will start out high there (although at a scaled rate of Serendale’s start). The largest rewards are for those that invest early and invest often. We have some pretty rewarding things for those interested in jumping in. There won’t be a lot of Crystal at the start, it will be for the airdropped people and to early stakers first.
Are you keeping in mind that some people are playing through mobile? Over the months it seems that the game on mobile version has slowed down significantly, probably due to the graphical updates. Is this something that can be optimized or is already being worked on?
Raspberry: The answer is yes we are working on making it better on mobile. I test on mobile all the time and it definitely heats up my phone and goes slow. There’s a lot about mobile that can be irritating. We are aware and are working on it.
Fox: It’s worth mentioning that we are planning to make an app that will run natively on your phone. Its been my experience that its gotten better on phone. We’ve implemented lazy loading on images. As we add more features we’ll need to stay on top of it.
In terms of art — are we considering whether equipment will cause a visible change on our heroes or will there be any visual effects for enchantments (if there will be enchantments)?
Sinstar: We are pathfinding some of these features. We have an idea for how we want to deliver them but that is one of the things we are planning on having at least in our interface as an attachment and can be shown as being equipped with your hero. We are setting out to do this. It is a VERY fluid situation though, because we have to work with what front end can do, what back end can do and what creative has time to do. It takes a lot of grinding through what is working, what is optimized, what needs touched up. That is what we are leading to though, and things are looking good, so we are hoping to see some visual changes to the heroes eventually and are designing as such.
Will shiny cards always be purely aesthetic? Will there ever be a use case in the future.
LiterallyKant: It’s important to know that changes can come that aren’t anticipated, but as of now we don’t anticipate that Shinies will have any use. Once we put something in the docs we are pretty sensitive about making changes there. People collecting may see value, but we don’t plan to add any mechanics around shininess.
Sinstar: Hubert are you here to hop on and talk about this?
Hubert: The thing I will say, going back to what Kant brought up with the flagging system for questlines, is that we plan to have a tracking system and achievements. That opens up the door for a variety of quests. I’ve said in the past that any aspect of your hero is potential open game to include as a requirement or adds a benefit to your chances or anything on story quests. I would say Shiny is included in that category as something that we can pull upon and use.
Sinstar: We haven’t super delved into this with the flag system and haven’t fleshed it out enough, but that is developing. There’s no information we can give other than that its an option and we could use it in the flagging system. I wouldn’t plan around this, but its a possibility.
Will we be able to interact with maps? Any plans to make the map more interactable?
CinnamonBun: This is definitely a Hubert thing as well, but the map team has been working with the mechanics team to make something cool in this direction. We want the map to be more interactable and be a core part of the game.
LiterallyKantEven: Always torn on how much to share. Short answer is yes. We shared the map images earlier and you can see that there will be points of interest. Long term what we want is for those areas to have something interesting associated with them. Some of those are longer term and needing PVE and story quests with the flagging system. But we want it so that each region of the map has points of interest and things you can do there, whether its a direct click or a click that takes you to an interior zone with some NPCs. We want the area of the map that you are working with to impact what is available to you.
The pixel art has changed a bit throughout the first 4–5 months (the style). Do you think you’ll ever touch the heroes themselves or do you think that style of pixel art will always remain the same on the heroes?
Sinstar: There is potential. This is a subject we’ve discussed to consider changing. It’s still kind of up in the air. There are a few things right in front of us where we are putting most of our effort and this thing is something that isn’t necessarily on the backburner because if we did do it we’d need to do it before combat (which means we’d need to do it quickly), but this isn’t in the pressing matters category. We aren’t sure yet if its a viable option because there would be a lot of change that would need to be done with the devs. We animate via code and by hand, so seeing how far we can push both of those options determines if we are going to refresh the hero art or not.
Closing Remarks
Pieface: I just am so grateful for the community and everybody appreciating the art. I know some people that like to complain that its low res, but this is art, its gorgeous and ever pixel is thoughtfully created. We have many artists on our team, you can check out our org chart, and we have dedicated people working many many hours on the pixel art. We have a lot of things down the pipeline coming up and are so excited about that.
Kant: Love the bloater memes and the community. Our artists are super talented. Anyone on the chart sharing their socials, please support them. Check out our team page. Thanks again everyone.
Cinnamon: Thank you to the community. Nothing is more rewarding as an artist than to make stuff and see people interact with it on such a deep level such as memes because that is the deepest level of connection. Everything, the memes, a podcast from the hot air balloon, just everything you find and explore is so incredible and its amazing and I just want to say thank you so much.
Pogo: I can give you a private performance from Pogo (sings the DFK main overworld theme).
Sinstar: Its a weird reality we live in. It’s like a dream state making this game and then going into the Discord and seeing this interaction. I mean memes are not fresh anymore unless it comes from DFK. All memes are dead to me unless they are DFK memes. I really like the community. I think you are a very fun group of people and surprisingly enough this space can get pretty brutal and our niche in it is something special. I hope we can keep it going in 2022 with this same energy.
Bolon: We can’t tell you all how much we appreciate you. You are a great group of people. I’ve never had the privilege to be involved in such a great community, the help-fulness, friendliness, the jokes. We really appreciate you guys. To the creative department you guys are amazing we love you.
Next week’s AMA will potentially be the mechanics department.
Check out my Index of Samichpunch DeFi Kingdoms Articles for a list of all of my other articles. You should definitely bookmark this index. Follow my medium account to get updates when they go live!
