DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Design Team and Team Dox Announcement) — May 2, 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 (mostly a transcript tbh). You can find the transcripts/summaries of the prior AMA’s in my index of DeFi Kingdom’s Articles.
Here is a link to the recording of the AMA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP4kJKV3B4w
This week, the AMA was from members of the Design team. 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.
DeFi Kingdoms Website
DeFi Kingdoms Official Medium
DeFi Kingdoms Discord
Team Members Present:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Intro
Bolon— We’ll have an intro from dreamer then learn more about what each of these talented people are working on in our art and lore departments, then we’ll take some questions after that.
Business Update
Dreamer— we’re excited to have our artists on today. We’ll be talking with the game art team. Quick state of the project. We had a helpful round table yesterday. Have had some good questions. There’ve been a lot of efforts working through the questions, concerns that have come from the community. I won’t recap all of that in detail here. There’s lots of great recap on the internet if you want to watch or read summaries. We have an awesome agenda for this week, followed by this AMA, then the raffles for Gen0 on YouTube, then another one tomorrow for the raffles from PJ. Wednesday those heroes are being released. Thursday is a one time surprise event after some questions. Then Friday we have the grant program relaunch. We are working on an action plan and the draft will be shared at the end of this week, keeping in mind that this is an ongoing plan of action and we’ll have a lot figured out by then, with a special chaos cast party on Saturday. At the end of the game design AMA portion, which will be about 25 minutes (so at 2:30 ET) the vote outstanding will end and we will have Frisky Fox hop on and talk about the results of that.
Top of the hour we have that important raffle to get thorugh. From now until half past hour if we could keep questions limited to art and the design team so please don’t be offended if we try to limit it to that. With that, let’s get started.
Bolon — One quick note, I did put a typo that the action plan would be released 11pm on Friday, but its actually 11am on Friday.
Updates from the Design Team Members
Purple Onyon— I work on the art team and I am one of the map designers. I’m currently working on the Serendale map. I’m continuing to build out around the edges. Soon we’ll get to see the lands we’ll get to discover and settle in the future. More lands are coming because that is what I’m working on!
Bolon — Map is obviously a big part of the game and a highly complimented feature. Any thoughts on being the one behind the scenes on the Serendale map?
Purple Onyon — I’m working on Serendale and its a lot of fun. A bunch of pixel artists worked on the attributes for the mapping. Cinnamon Bun did the majority but many of the buildings and features were done by others. I take the pixel art that others have created and position it and move it to make what you see as part of the full map. We recently had a meeting going on to plan out the further expansion of the map to make sure it fits in with the lore. With any type of fantasy realm the map needs to work with the storyline on where people come from, where they travel to, where CV fits into direction on the map, which side it is, which direction you’d have to travel to, etc. It’s been fun working hand in hand with the lore department on that and to be able to plan out a much larger map, the entire continent on where regions are, where different cities are that we’ll be able to reach on the map.
Secondbestdad — you probably know me from my Bloater comics, which is unfortunately not my job but I’ll continue to do them until someone fires me. My primary role lately is pet concept, design and animation. I’ve been doing some front end work with Fez to get the pet cards feeling cool and getting that tech up there. We’ve been working on a shockingly large amount of very cool pets, as well as a good at one point. Shortly they’ll be posting an example pet on the twitter that I worked on, if you are familiar with the blub pet, like slime, taht are jelly like creatures that combine together to form a larger entity. That pretty much covers it.
AtlasParker — hey I’ve been working alongside Secondbestdad and some of the other artists on pets. I have some spoilers here if you guys want to see some stuff.
It’s a toad, then we’ve got some snails and a frog and pet dragon.
I’m really proud of the people I get to work with. Kudos to Cinamon Bun who couldn’t make it today. It’s a pleasure working with these people.
This is another spoiler here, the stone carver NPC. He’ll be quite important, and I won’t reveal too much but you’ll be able to interact with him soon.
Jakxicles — Bone and I have been working on a questline. We have been working on the main story questline as well as a PJ story quest. The main story quest has been a lot of fun and I’ve been able to collaborate with Purple on the map for this, because there’s going to be a lot of lore embedded into the landmarks as part of this. I’m also working on short stories so that you can dive a bit more into the NPCs you’ll interact with in the main story, although it won’t be required.
Bone Pillar — like Jak said, main story quest is something we’ve been working on along with PJ story quest. Goal with main story is to start establishing some long-term story information as well as having a higher level of presentation as our current quest since it will be the main showpiece story. My position has shifted a bit since last time, I’ve been coordinating a lot with other team on getting NPCs done in certain places. We’ve been working on a lot like the Hatchery, Stone Carver, etc. and working on the bits of lore here and there that we need for that. One other thing I can say is that we had the pages of the enteral story and looking into how we can wrap that up. one thing we are exploring is figuring out how we can use those pages to get more lore as well, such as seeing those pages give you more lore than what is just on that page itself. Exploring what that means exactly but we are looking at that as an option.
AMA Live Questions (Lore)
(Mettez) Relating to Eternal Pages, specifically I’m not sure how much you can say about it, but suppose some people are collecting partial sets and can’t complete them all, should they feel bad, should they try to trade for them, is it a problem if people collect multiple sets, is there a reason to collect multiple sets? What should people be aiming for?
Bone—Basically there is the goal of having the 10 pages. With those pages, the point of them is not only to deliver the initial lore to you but give you the ability to put the pages together by the end of it. Kind of the goal and what I mentioned earlier is expanding the use of them to get you more lore, to provide some use to them in addition to just collecting them. It will be lore related things that you get from them, exactly what hasn’t been finalized, but that is kind of the goal of having those pages have an additional functionality outside of just combining them.
(Mettez) Suppose someone has multiple sets, would they be able to gain different level of lore by combining multiple sets?
Bone — for this set we don’t have plans to have additional benefits for having multiple sets.
Bolon —just one quick note there are plans to make the pages tradeable in game.
(Coolio) My first question is with Lore, as far as input and anything as far as community, do you have a place where we can maybe in suggestions add ideas for lore or provide input?
Bone— I brought that up to Bolon because I’d love to have ideas come from the community. I loved following early access communities on Steam and helping contribute, none of my ideas ever made it into a game but I love the idea. You can send me a DM for any ideas you have and I’ll take that into consideration.
(Coolio) As far as DFK strategy and arena style artwork, I haven’t seen any of that and don’t know what it would look like but have you started looking at it?
Bone —From a lore side, we have the setting ready. In terms of assets, I don’t think any of those are public yet. But we have a theme for that area and how we want it to function and I don’t want to say much because we are mostly support on that project.
Dreamer — There is more to come shortly — you’ll probably see it on socials as we see more come out on Duel. But w/r/t art as it relates to that, yes, we just haven’t released it yet but we are probably close to start doing some teasers.
Bolon — I do want to add one quick item on your first question, you can always send suggestions and we’ll make sure it passed along, but one thing we are building out now and something we saw used for the first time is our new site that we used for yesterday’s round table where you can submit things and people can vote on it. We’re going to be adding a suggestions section on that so you can add suggestions and those can be upvoted by the community in general and I’m personally excited about that.
(Sentius) Will there be a penguin pet?
Secondbestdad— I feel like there is strong evidence of that as a possibility ;)
Bolon — That’s about the safest answer you could have given. He’s probably sketching something right now.
Secondbestdad — No sketching needed, we’re in good shape on the penguin front.
Dreamer Closing Design Department Portion of AMA Statement
Dreamer — this week and prior weeks we’ve said a lot that regardless of what’s going on in the world that we can’t control, we can control that we keep building. Regardless of price and various other topics going on, these people are still working. We do value everything being worked on with the community and all the questions, but we also need to keep working and I want to thank these people. Thank you to the community for sharing the excitement and support. You can imagine the passion that it would require to look at markets, crypto, chat and twitter going on right now and just keep going. Kudos and applaud to them.
Governance Vote Regarding Team Leadership
Frisky Fox — Super happy to be here. It’s been an interesting weekend. Just to reiterate what Dreamer said, there’s always outside side forces going on. People have asked if we can weather the storm and yes we can. It’s about continuing to build build build. That’s what sets us apart.
Wanted to take a minute to say that the poll that we had is now closed. It was a landslide. I am overwhelmed by the outpouring that I’ve received over the past few days of love and encouragement and support. I’ve received thousands of notes. I wanted to give a big appreciation to you for those things. It’s this community that drives me to show up every day and work all day long trying to give 100%. This project is my dream and its basically growing and growing and stepping up to fulfill the potential that it has. This has so much potential that it blows my mind sometimes to think about the possibilities. I’m super appreciate and grateful for all of the support I’ve received from you.
Us as a leadership team spent a lot of time this weekend in long meetings talking about what can we do, what we need to do to make sure we are stepping out on the right foot to continue to grow and meet the plans that we have.
We spent a lot of time talking about what action points we can take. We promised an action point plan on what we will do to grow the project and the utility for our assets which are very important at all times, but especially in markets like they are right now. We spent a lot of time brainstorming those things and have a lot of great plans.
Not the least of things, but putting down the pedal on the incorporation of Kingdom Studios and what that entails for us as a project and what that provides in terms of security from a regulatory perspective and longevity of the project. We want to make sure we are around long term and that’s a big first step.
There’s a lot that goes into that in terms of incorporation and other items. Bolon had Thursday listed as a surprise event and I’m here to announce what that surprise event is. As we need to move forward with the entity that entails much of the leadership not staying anonymous. So a lot of people will be putting our names down, showing our faces, showing you who we are that we are sincere. The Suprise announcement is that we will be having a special call where a lot of us will turn on our cameras and say our names, who we are, what we do. We aren’t trying to hide, but are trying to be mindful of security for our families. We are at the state of our project now though, where we can really step up and bring this to the next level and make this official and I will be one of those people. I still stand by the point that it’s not as important in this space who someone is, but what they do and what they build and people can see what you build without knowing who you are, however, the crypto space as a whole and much of the world is starting to mature and this is what you see other projects starting to do and we want to make sure we are adhering to the best practices of the industry. So many of the leaders, myself included, will be standing up and saying who we are.
A couple of other things — having the official entity in place will allow us to have more staying power when it comes to regulations and weathering storms and legal matters. That opens up a lot of avenues for us as a project to explore other revenue streams for us and the community to benefit everyone here.
Another thing we are focusing on in the short term is making sure that all of the new and exciting things we are launching are examined closely on how they will impact the economics and the play to earn experience. Our players have invested real money in this game and expect to earn some type of return on that. We are trying to give more and more emphasis on whether this is incentivizing the right type of behavior.
We also have some big things coming up. Gen0s are going to be huge. We have some exciting raffles after this. Bolon will drive that and I’ll be commenting. As I said earlier, this whole expansion we’ve been trying to give back to the community and this is an example of that. All of the heroes being raffled off are being used to incentivize and reward players.
I did want to touch up on some items, some of you saw in Barcelona that I did a panel and it was streamed and they asked a question “if you could start over and do anything else what would you do”. Everyone said they’d like to be doing something in the gamefi space. When it came to me I said I wouldn’t change anything because I’m already in that space and I’ve had this dream for a long time and have been working hard to build it and I’m excited to be here in this space. In summary I’m excited about this next step for us as a project and what this means for me personally and for us as a team and us as a community. With that I’ll pause and see if anyone has questions or things they’d like to ask. Looks like we have about 6–7 minutes for question then we’ll head over to the raffle.
AMA Live Questions (Frisky Fox Update)
(Malience) I now have three questions because my original 2 were for the art team. (1) Do we think we’ll see specialty quests like Hubert had mentioned previously to those that do finish eternal pages? (2)
Bone — So it is something we are thinking about. The one thing that we might hold back on that specifically is because that would limit the number of people that can experience that content, so there might be ways to explore that in the future, but for now its mostly to give additional lore incentives.
(Malience) (2) for the art team, will see quest givers that send us across the map or will we travel to go and meet those NPCs that will give us those quests?
Bone —what I can say from a story quest perspective is that that is what we have in mind. You’d have these multi part quests where you’d travel around through the existing elements of the game. At this moment I would be surprised if we didn’t have quests where you’ll travel.
(Malience) (3) for the doxing will that be here or on YouTube? Will people be able to ask questions?)?
Bolon — 90% chance it will be on YouTube. I’m finalizing those details. Vast majority of leadership is doxing but other team members were invited as well. So we are working on the headcount and figuring out which platform will host us best. The doxing party itself will primarily be us doxing ourselves and introducing ourselves. The chaos cast will be more of autobiography/background questions kind of thing. That’s the tentative plan. If we have time on Thursday we might take some questions. If we do YouTube we’ll have the chat and might be able to field some questions there.
Frisky Fox — with that said, I will still only answer to Fox.
Bolon — You’ll know our names but we won’t respond to you ;P
Frisky Fox — this project is such a large part of our identity at this point. It will be fun on Thursday. We’ll turn our cameras on one by one and say who we are, but I’ll still be fox at the same time.
(LvRenoan) Discord exists and there’s a central hub but something missing in game is a central social forum. Maybe a chat or avatar-based proximity voice system that could be a candidate for a gathering place. That could open the door for it to become a much more immersive experience. Right now its still just mostly a defi experience, not much of a game experience. Seems like people could bond more if as they get equipment and items they could show that artwork on their avatars in this social in game tavern/function?
Frisky Fox— I agree. In game chat and integration with guilds, it's all about the social aspect. We are a crypto game. Crypto itself is about the community so having that in our game directly is something I want to push for. We’ve considered embedding discord into the website, which is tricky but possible. Or just doing our own chat, which we have the expertise to do. Then in the future having guilds and tournaments and leaderboards.
Bolon — Sounds like it could be a cool opportunity for the Kingdom Building program. We need to wrap it up and hop over to the raffle. Today is not for the PJ raffle or leaderboard raffles. This weekly is the last weekly leaderboard one where we will be giving Gen0’s. Every leaderboard Gen0 raffle given up to 4/30 will be on the board for tomorrow along with the PJ raffles.
Closing Remarks
Frisky Fox— Excited for the future and appreciative of the outpouring of love. I’m super bullish on this. Super Bullish! Thanks everyone for coming, excited for the raffle.
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!
