DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Design Team) — April 4, 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 of the AMA:
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:
Xeno moderated the AMA:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Team Updates and Opening Statements
Frisky & Dreamer — State of the Project — Recap Crystalvale Launch
Frisky — It’s been a really exciting week. We’ve released more code this week than we have in the entire history of the project at once. It’s a testament to Mr. Faun, Beetle Dude and all of our devs. Everything went smoothly. We launched more art and content than we ever have at a single time. The creatives on this call will probably talk about that a bit later. It was exciting to see how well executed it was. Having an expansion like this that’s been on our roadmap for so long and seeing how its a cross chain game now and flowing so well from one chain to another its awesome.
Not a single person didn’t do 2x their normal work. Everyone really killed it, so just want to step back and give a big round of applause to everyone on the team. Then just wanted to talk about the actual launch and how we handled the Crystal token and had all those airdrops where we are taking a whole new approach here where we are trying to reward the community with these new expansions and utility tokens and NFTs. We aren’t doing a Gen0 sale, instead we are trying to reward people that are participating in the game and in our network. Our team isn’t receiving and Gen0’s just because they built it, we have to go and stake and see if we get lucky in the raffles. We are putting ourselves in the same boat and the same page as everyone else. We didn’t get any of the premint of Crystal. So the only way for us to get xCrystal was to send our heroes on PJ or do any of the things that the rest of the community had to do. I’m really proud of how we are doing this compared to other projects. The community has been so supportive and we are so proud and grateful for that.
Dreamer — just echo the excitement and sentiment of CV and DFK chain. The efforts on marketing and event side, the summit, the giveaways, community participation and working with partners on solutions. It’s been a beautiful series of events and all of us who have a stake in this project should be really proud of this. We should look to continue to improve and think of how we can do better but its also worth celebrating and we have the opportunity today to talk to the creative team about this.
A few things: Ramp — they are integrated into the docks in Serendale and Crystalvale (to buy ONE and to buy AVAX). They are also available on the outpost, they still have a promotion of zero fees on Avax on the first 1M of volume. Go take advantage of that. Starting today there is a 3 week snapshot period for 100 Gen0s. Really exciting, we aren’t doing an initial sale at a fixed price, we are trying to give back to the community in as many ways as we can. This kind of caps off the beginning of the new land. Where did the majority of the Crystal come from? Participation by the community and airdrops they received for that. The structure for airdropping Crystal 1/2 and then vesting 1/2 over a week its been interesting to see the stability of the price. I’m happy with the maturity of the community. I want to applaud the community for looking out for the stability as we have this price discovery. I have my own views on what could happen with later phases of CV.
Another thing is that you can get Gen0s through leaderboards. One of the rewards for some of those leaderboards are Gen0s. This rewards people that play the game. I could go on and on about other things and those are the things I wanted to highlight.
Frisky — we did want to allow some time for questions about the launch and the project at the start and then turn the time over to the creative and design side to give them for them. We’ll take 2–3 questions here but then we’ll turn it over to creative to present, and then limit questions after that to just creative questions.
AMA Live Questions (Development and Launch)
(Mettez) How does classes and sub class launch for upcoming Gen0s? Two new basic classes will be added and be part of the larger class tree. Currently in CV we’ll get two new basic classes and one new advanced class. That is clear. What is confusing to me and other community members is how the new classes and class tree will be spread out in terms of Genes. The original Gen0’s had a mix of all the class genes in their gene pool (i.e. D Warrior, Subclass knight with main class and subclass having recessives of all 8 classes). How will that be handled for CV, are the other classes already designed so that they will already be in the recessive gene pool? Will it only be pure berserkers or berserkers with recessive genes not yet discovered?
Frisky— great question. We are essentially launching a new quarter of the other half of the genes (because half were released on SD). I’ve talked to Hubert quite a bit about this, we have a lot of good ideas and we haven’t settled 100% on where we are going to go but I can say we are spending a lot of time thinking about this and we have a meeting schedule tomorrow to discuss this exact thing and then hopefully communicate that at that time as well. We want the gene pool set up in an evenly distributed way.
(Malience) Phenomenal job for all the knights helping everyone on launch date. Secondly, I have a lot of people that have been questioning the development of Serendale since CV launch and think that we are going to stop developing Serendale. Wanted to put it into an open AMA.
Frisky — we had a meeting on Friday the day after launch where we basically said okay CV is launched, DFK Chain is launched, but the primary point of the meeting was lets recap those and then pivot back to full steam on Serendale and all of these new things hopefully coming out soon, and basically redoubling our efforts. This is high on our priority list. You’ll probably see some things (can’t say with 100%) this week and then next week some more. We have a lot of really cool things planned for April that will pretty much all be on Serendale and then a couple of big things on CV. You’ll see efforts on expanding things on CV (dex and Game) but also new things on Serendale. All the new gameplay features will hit Serendale first and then eventually make their way over into CV.
Cinnamon Bun: We are still working very hard on Serendale. In terms of the map itself, we plan on expanding it further than what you see currently, even on top of the expansion that we already did in January. I can’t say when, but we have so many plans for what you can do in Serendale. We are looking for ways for you to go out and explore the different regions with your heroes as well as lands and the content that you’ll actually be able to do out on the map. A lot of that is being worked on right now and then figured out how it can be carried over to CV as well.
Design Team Updates
Frisky — let’s shift gears now to Creative and Design. So much content dropped this last week with the new map and NPCs and lore. So many things, this is an unprecedented amount of work from them so this is their time to talk about that, so any questions you have on Design and content go ahead.
Xeno — a lot of the design with this new update is visual, then flavor text and all the awesome music from Sam. Figured we’d start with doing a brief tour and highlighting each of the five zones, I’ll then open it to the design team to make any comments they’d like, then they can share anything they’d like in the AMA chat, then finally I’ll bring people up to ask any Design related questions.
Let’s start at the bottom with the Docks. Here’s the dead Octopus killed on the way over.
Docks
CinnamonBun — I’m curious on people’s thoughts on Chef Wally — the walrus chef. I want to have walrus chef enemies but that’s a whole other topic. The dock was mainly designed by our main interior artis, Woostar, who’s been around on our project for a while and did all of our Serendale interiors as well. He had a lot of freedom and fun in designing the docks and he really likes to pack things with detail. It’s fun going through and seeing all the little details. Something that’s really cool that we did for these CV interiors is that we added a lot of clickable elements that are animated and do things.
Marketplace
Jakxicles — Love this area and the flame. Have some lore that will come out in future updates about the flame and its meaning. There’s several NPCs that will relate to a set of quests that Sinstar and I have been creating. Those will be implemented soon, I don’t know the exact date, and those NPCs will offer those quests.
Xeno — one thing I noticed is that in the world map the flame actually changes to match what's going on in the interior of the Marketplace.
Ice Gardens
Sam — The music in CV was designed a bit more intentionally than in Serendale. In CV there are two main groups of peoples, the Seers and the Berserkers and they are more populated in certain areas. The docks are berserker heavy. Gardens is seer heavy. Marketplace is a meeting between the two. The approach with music was to take inspiration from both. So the gardens are more ethereal and dream like than the docks, which are more dark and far more grungy than what we’ve seen in Serendale. Then the marketplace is a mix of the two where you get flickers of magical sounds but also grungy darkness at certain parts of the soundtrack. That’s a theme that should display itself more in the CV soundtrack.
Xeno — Incredible that you put that much thought into this.
The Cradle
CinnamonBun — this is a cool zone because its our first zone that isn’t necessarily related to the Dex or functional. It’s purely a lore based zone right now. I don’t want to get too into details unless Jakxicles has more to add, but I just want to say that this was probably one of our most ambitious zones in terms of art. The original of it was really cool because it wasn’t supposed to be a zone, it was just something that was on the map as a centerpiece and just intended to draw your eyes to it like the castle and mountain in Serendale. It’s not technically the landing page but it kind of is because its the backdrop of the world once you enter in. It’s just really cool how with this team someone will come up with an idea and a completely different team will just run with it and the creative back and forth was came to a lot of maturity with CV and for that reason I am excited to see what continues to get developed for this zone in particular.
Jakxicles — this is my favorite zone. When I joined CV it was like a blank canvas for me to develop a story. Originally this zone was not supposed to exist and when the artwork was shared with me I was like hey are we doing anything for this place, is there anything special going on? And I said, well now there is and I went into overdrive developing a whole back story and future story around this Serpent, whose name is Zinra [spelling unsure]. It’s like Chekhov’s gun, but Chekhov’s Dragon.
SpicyMapleCat — I just wanted to say what a great job on keeping the serpent under wraps, I didn’t even know this was going to happen.
Jeweler
No specific discussion
Team Updates:
CinnamonBun — here are some teasers for an upcoming zone in CV:
We have five zones and it will b e built up so that is has the same functionality as Serendale. Particularly with Gen0s and needing a meditation circle, summoning portal and tavern. These teasers are the portal that we are working on. I won’t go too much into it because it’s one of those things where you just kind of need to see it when it comes out. It’s a lot different than any zone that we’ve done yet.
Atlas Parker— Can’t get on an AMA without talking about Combat. So many different departments are working together to make one cohesive and fun experience. Mechanics dep coming up with balancing and cool ideas on how this will work. Lore working on how the enemies will have a home in the world and then creative and art and how heroes are being conveyed in combat. I also have a teaser here that I shared on my phone in Barcelona a bunch.
Sam — yes I have a little teaser to share. We are in Phase 1 of CV. Plans to expand the map to different areas and we were shared some images for the portal area, so here is a short teaser of the portal track. I’ve never shared an audio snippet over the AMA so maybe we can all endure 25 seconds of awkwardness while we listen to it. I’ll whack it in now and hopefully you enjoy.
Click here for the audio teaser which was posted in Discord (you’ll be directed to the discord).
CinnamonBun — I have one more thing to share on pets. This is an Illyrian Leafra. This is a higher rarity pet that is conceptually connected to the region in the upper left region of the map where you might eventually find things like Faye and Ent's. One of the cool things we are trying to do with pets is to enhance world building by connecting pets to future things like enemies and things you can see in the world. I want to put in a disclaimer that while the pet is pretty much final, don’t read too much into things displayed on the card as that’s still a work in progress. The card is designed by our UI lead, Lux, who has just done a beautiful job with our newer game UI, but especially she’s blowing it out of the water with these card designs. This is just such a fun area of the game to work on and I’m really excited for these eggs to be put into the hatchery and to get hatched.
AMA Live Questions
(Mettez) In terms of Lore and design, comparison between CV and SD, I see that some things overlap like Jeweler. But you guys working on art and design, will there be significant differences between not only how they look but also how you interact with them?
Cinnamonbun— Do you mean to ask whether functionally will they work differently?
Xeno — I think Mettez might have lost his mic.
Cinnamonbun — based on what I think I got from it — there are some shared functionalities like the marketplace, Jeweler and the docks. But one thing that’s really cool about this is that yeah you have that and how it interacts with the blockchain, but once that’s working seamlessly there’s a lot of places where we can diverge on things and see a lot more character between the two worlds in terms of things that are more content oriented. For example the Cradle is an example, there won’t be a Cradle in SD. Likewise in SD we are working on a PVP colosseum, which is something I was live streaming from the summit. CV might not have a PVP colosseum it might have something else. As time goes on there’s going to be a lot of divergence in terms of zones across both of the realms.
(Hodlthefuture) I’ve been running a dungeons and dragons game that is based in SD and we use heroes to navigate the space, we are called degens and dragons. I would love more lore to be written so that I can selfishly incorporate it into my story. I think we still have the lore section of the docs (which I think needs to be updated), but will there be a chance to maybe publish more lore? I.e. name of the mountain in Serendale? Can we expect more of that?
Jakxicles — this is the first time I’ve heard someone taking DFK and putting it into a DND setting. There is a lot of lore in works and keeping track of it for world building. For mountains that are ranged, yes there is one and it’s mentioned in Sir Derick’s plaque in the marketplace. There is one called [Drangolin] (spelling unclear) pass. There’s a lot of features I can’t go into too much details because it will implement the lore in various ways and I’m super excited for you guys to experience that.
(Jin the Mage) Kind of plays on what Jak just said, but will we see lore become more important to gameplay such as being able to find certain items, pets or enemies in certain areas? Or like a bestiary in Witcher 3 where certain things are more effective against other monsters?
Cinnamonbun— for quests and items Jakx could probably speak more to that, but for the map one thing we are really excited about is the idea that you’ll be able to fight different enemy types in certain regions based on the context of those regions. If you click on the land plots the lands will say what region they are in. The region that has the town south of Adelyn, Amber town, and any place that has a town or large settlement will have bandits in the enemy pool because the idea is that bandits flock to towns, etc. Or if we have goblin camps you’ll have goblins. Then there are things that have haunted aspects, like the Abbey to the East of Adelyn.
If you fight enemies in that region they’ll be more undead themed.
(Faulty Poker) I was wondering if there’s going to be different forms of pets and if they’ll be able to evolve because the pet teased looks like a baby.
Cinnamonbun — can’t speak too much on mechanics so I wont’ use the word evolve, but if you for example a little “entling” which would be the pet we showed above and is part of the entling family and let’s say you have an uncommon entling, it will look different than a rare entling vs a legendary entling. There are some progressions across rarity levels, and that’s for the sprites themselves and also color variations.
(Malience) My question is more towards the CV map. It looks stunning. I can see that there are caves made into the mountain. Will that possible be another add on in the future or would those just be paths to the other side or just land locations?
Cinnamonbun: Thos are supposed to be Dwarven settlements.
Right now they don’t have a planned function but that’s certainly something that could come into play.
(Dog) Will there be a marketplace for eggs or pets? Not sure if this has been said yet?
Cinnamonbun — Not sure how much to say about that other than that it’s a vague yes. That’s something that is later down the line.
Xeno — Just rough plans, nothing set in stone. Those conversations are still ongoing so hard to give a direct answer on that.
(Dunsparrow) Number of heroes is way higher than number of eggs. Will pets be bound to heroes in some way? Or you pair to them with a hero at a specific point before a specific action?
Cinnamonbun: I can’t go into the mechanics, but I will say that pets being associated with a hero is one of the things being worked on. There are a few moving parts with pets that make it complicated but that is one of the ideas that we are working on, so that it might be like an equipable.
Frisky — This is all still being worked on, to our knowledge we haven’t talked about any soul binding, it would be more of an equipable. This could change, but that is where we are at right now.
(Ogre Abroad) I just want to start off by saying amazing work. Launch was amazing, problematic yes, but they always are and a measure of a team isn’t whether you stumble but how quickly you get up and recover and I was very pleased to see how quickly the team recovered and got things right. This was the first big challenge that came up and it was important and the team succeeded with flying colors. Kudos and thanks for everything you’ve done. We have dwarves now, so WEN OGRES?
Cinnamonbun — Ogres are actually being talked about as high level enemies. After talking to you now though, maybe we need at least one friendly Ogre NPC, it’s clear that Ogre’s can be friendly as well.
Ogre — you have my permission to use my likeness, compare it with Shrek and throw it in the marketplace or something.
Closing Remarks
Jakxicles — thanks for attending and listening and witnessing everything that we are working on. Super excited for the future of CV and SD.
Sam — Want to mirror that sentiment. We are all thankful for how you’ve responded to this launch in the past week. Thanks everyone for cool design and creative based question. Thanks for the great reception to the music. You guys are a super awesome community and I’m honored to be part of the community and a part of the team.
Purple Onyon — thanks for having me. I’m super excited for pets and excited we got to show you a bit of that today. I’ve finished my other job and I’m now full time DFK and I will be around so much more now.
Cinnamon Bun — thank you so much for the successful launch of CV. Thank you for coming and asking really great questions. The sky is the limit, now that DFK Chain is set up and all the content we are working on to build the game up.
Atlas Parker — the amount of effort that went into CV can’t be understated. The crazies thing is that there’s just so much more coming up. I know it’s hard because we can’t reveal too much but sometimes I just want to say “You guys are going to lose your minds when you see what’s coming!”
Frisky — we did go kind of long on this, but there’s so much to talk about with content. I think that our artists and our lore writers have really hit this out of the park. I still haven’t had time to go through all of it yet. I was surprised and shocked too when I saw the cradle. I am really looking forward to the stuff they are working on and being turned over into your hands. I’ve seen a lot of it behind the scenes and there’s some really good stuff. We are excited to be transitioning now into focusing on the game, the content, lore and making this a really fun and cohesive experience. Thank you to our creative and our artists here. Thank you to the community and the wonderful support you’ve shown. I couldn’t be prouder of all of the people and all of the hard work.
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!
