DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Design Team) — March 7, 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 live recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1soqTRPYq8
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.
Team Members Present:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Team Updates and Opening Statements
New Introductions
- Secondbestdad — Pixel artist that works with Cinnamon Bun and Atlas Parker. He is working on combat art primarily.
- Jakxicles and Bone Pillar — both work with Sinstar on Lore.
- thisislux — taking charge on a lot of the UI. When doing UI for fantasy games you tend to make things more materialistic. In sci-fi games the UI is part of the screen itself, but for Fantasy UI is often an object like a piece of paper or a bulletin board. She is really good at rendering. She’s been adding portraits to a lot of our UIs, they mesh super well with everything. I can’t wait for you to see more of her work because we love it.
Frisky Fox — State of the Project
Start of a new week and its a big week. We have some exciting announcements for later in the week. This AMA we have our very talented creative team here. I did have a few things I wanted to touch on first.
Perilous Journey — this has now set sail as of a few minutes ago. This is the first step into the Crystalvale expansion. Heroes going out and paving the way. It’s dangerous and some of them will die. The rewards in place are awesome and we are excited to see how that plays out. They will sail until March 16, and we will see the results. In the meantime we will have a lot more information dropped about Cyrstalvale timeline, how it will work, how bridging will work, and how tokenomics will work. Those will be released over this week and next week.
Release Schedule — we have a team now that is at a size where we have QA and really good alpha testing. FSD’s and requirements docs. So we are a lot more organized in what we are doing for the releases of features and at the same time are staying very nimble for bug fixes. What we want to do is switch things up so that we will now release any bug fixes that are critical enough rather than only on Wednesdays. So you should see little patches here and there throughout the week, but some of the bigger ones with new features we’ll do every two weeks. Things like smart contracts hand off to front end, art hand off to front end. So we will have a two-week cadence for things like new features and content. Whereas bugs will be ASAP as they are ready throughout the week. Last week we had a re
Snapshots — Just released the info about the new snapshots. Going to try and get those airdropped out this evening. There’s also a Gen0 raffle in there as well, so congrats to the future winners of those.
Dreamer — Growth Update
Just a couple of quick updates. Been progressing a lot with in game bridging. Looking forward to that and its progressing a lot. We have a meeting this week to see if we can get to later stages of the fiat on ramp we’ve discussed before. There was an announcement last week for all of those that participated in the review of the first proposed grant and the AMA in the middle of the week, there was a lot of helpful comments and rather than unnecessarily rush the vote we’ve paused and Sunbear is working hard on that whole process. I think it was a great start but we will try to add onto it more standardized process.
Cinnamon Bun — Crystalvale Art Teaser
This is the center of Crystalvale. It’s kind of inspired by Norse mythology and a combination of other things. We wanted to mirror Serendale where there’s a giant castle and mountain that acts as a backdrop. We wanted a magical feeling of something really epic in the middle of the map. With that, I can also jump to some of our lore folks and see if they want to add
Sinstar — there’s quite a bit of lore going on here with the snake. It has a name. Don’t want to give too many details away right now, but you will over time get to know more about the story there because a lot of times you will be drawn back to that particular story when you enter this land. There will be some quests associated with it. The town is built around it. There are quite a few items there. We’ll have plenty of time to get into as we roll out features.
CinnamonBun — The dwarves in Crystalvale work closely with the citizens of Crystalvale. There may also be dwarves in Serendale. These Dwarves in Crystalvale handle a lot of the mining and the various currencies.
Written Questions
Inspiration for the Serendale Map — where did that come from, real geography? Fresh? How did you design this.
CinnamonBun— One of the things I love about working on this game is the epic scale required. With all of the land plots that we have and as we want the map to grow over time, the map is inevitably going to be very big, so its very much like designing a whole world. As you can tell as you click on a land you see that they are in a region. Some of the named areas are references to things, other ones are just us trying to think about what kind of creatures or enemies and such and what kind of like society is like here. The name of the main city is Adelyn. But there are other kingdoms and towns in between those kingdoms, so what is society like, what is trade like, are there bandits in between these places. What are the various landmarks? The goal is for each region to have one unique land mark. In Ilyeria’s rest there is this huge purple wysteria tree. Then in Adelyn’s highlights there is this big hollowed oak tree and a giant tomb. A lot of these have a lot of lore being worked on and we are working on how they tie into quests as well as traveling and what you will eventually be able to do with your heroes out on the map.
Atlas Parker — I’ve been doing the work on the landmarks. Get most of the inspiration from the lore department.
CinnamonBun — For example the ruined Abbey, might be from a civilization from before the current citizens of Adelyn and after the sundering and before the convergence.
Atlas Parker —Just trying to keep up with CinnamonBun. I made the temple at the bottom of the map.
What kinds of creatures can the heroes shipped out plan to encounter on the way to Crystalvale?
Jakxicles—most of these are uncharted waters resulting from the Sundering. The kingdoms are going into this blind. One of the most notorious creatures is the Kraken. They prey upon unfortunate ships that stray across their path. There is more than that. Who knows what other leviathans were forgotten about and what was awoken from the sundering.\
Turning to pogo and his experience in working on the music. Can you give us some history and background on this?
Pogo: I really appreciate all the love that the music gets. It’s an honor to serve this team. A bit of context into me — I started playing music at the age of six and have been composing for over 15 year, hard to quantify. Studied music at college and university. As of October last year, I took the plunge into freelance composition. Jumped into video games. That was the start of a slow journey of becoming a member of this team, which reminds me and some of you might be interested in a bit of my history outside of DFK so today I am deciding to officially dox myself. My name is no longer Pogo, it Sam Shandley, I’m 23 and from the UK. A tweet has been sent out about me and some of my portfolio. I’m reinventing myself for this team rather than being Pogo:
Live AMA Questions
(Jared — Unity DAO) Had a question about grant proposals and if we were accepted would it be possible to get help with Art from people on the team? Like if we are working on a project that was accepted for grant proposal would it be possible to get help from the team with art?
CinnamonBun — our main focus is obviously the game itself.
Dreamer — I’ll take a stab at this, there is kind of a couple of different ways. Some projects the proposal involves maybe a related game or a service that uses part of our tokens or assets in which case some of the plans have been to work with designers here to create a zone or NPC to link to that potential project that the community would vote on. In that way there could be some support. Anything we use our resources to build outside of our game, that’s not currently in scope. We don’t have the capacity. potentially in the future that could be a focus but that’s not in the realm of possibility right now.
(Faulty Poker) — Would new main class cosmetics or races introduced by CV include things like Dwarves?
CinnamonBun — Currently we don’t have new races, but it's something we are open to in the future.
Closing Remarks
Sam — So happy to finally dox myself and continue writing amazing music for this team. Really excited to show you what we’ve got in store.
Kant — Glad the creative team got to show off some of their work for Crystalvale. Super excited for the launch. Very excited for Sam. Go and give him a follow and check out his music. This is a cool opportunity to see what he does outside of DFK. We’ve talked before about making his ID public and what he works on outside of DFK is very cool.
Jakxicles — Thank you for having me up here. It’s been awesome to share a bit of lore, there is a lot more where that came from. Excited to attend more future AMAs. If anyone has question regarding story, lore and creatures, feel free to come on stage and ask anything that comes to mind.
Bonepillar — My side of the lore is heavily focused on editing, but I am really enjoying going through the work that Jakx does and excited to keep working with him on his vision of the world.
Sinstar — It’s been real fun. Lots of stuff regarding quest work. We are excited to get those thing pushed through the pipeline. That is something that we are going to start delivering lore through, along with easter eggs. Those are things we’ll let drop through updates. A lot of work and love is put into these. Excited to be writing in DFK and happy to be here.
Dreamer — I’ll just say, I’ve reiterated it a few times, when talking to people, the music, the art, the UI is complimented on. Its really helpful for all of the people that are working on these things. There’s a lot of builders behind the scenes that aren’t in front of others. When you hear people in the planning meetings, its much less transactional and much more creative. A creative environment is hard to maintain. I’m impressed and inspired with the team. For those in the community who appreciate that its never a bad thing to express it. It makes people feel good about the joy and excitement that comes to all of us when we zoom in and appreciate the art and lore. Some of what was talked about or shown today will be expressed or released in a different and exciting way. We’ve had trailers in the past. There may be one in the future. There may be a few things being announced this week so stay tuned. Excited for the direction we are going and the awesome things we are building.
FriskyFox — Dreamer kind of touched on it, but we do have a few exciting things waiting to be announced. We like to time our announcements with some of our partners that are out there. We do have some we’ve been ready to announce for a while but have been waiting for the opportune time. You should see some really good stuff this week. We have a lot of really cool things coming for Crystalvale, more than we had originally visioned we would do for it. In a scale of difficulty and meat, there are multiples more we are releasing with this than we’d originally thought. It’s a really good direction for the project and I’m excited to see that soon. We have a lot coming up. Pets, land tournaments, combat soon (not super soon, but we are hard at work there and its a fully fledged effort). Happy to be here and innovating in this space and serving a community as awesome as this one.
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!
