DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Design Team) — November 8, 2021

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 the DeFi Kingdoms subreddit.

This week, the AMA was from 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

Design Dev Team Present:

Sinstar: Lead of the design team. https://docs.defikingdoms.com/community/meet-the-team

CinnamonBun: New artist team member.

LiterallyKantEven: Doing a lot of creative writing for the team. Biggest thing he is working on is tutorials, specifically for new user onboarding, but also with gameplay dialogues and working on expanding lore and integrating it into the game.

Updates:

Plans to design library in game to be able to access lore, etc in game?

Sinstar: Yes, we have been collaborating on something like this, but it will be a ways out because there are more important features to be working on. On our schedule to try and start working on it in a month. Considered things like bestiaries or compendiums of lore similar to Castlevania. Not going to be Elder Scrolls level of lore, but definitely want to get some more story into the game.

Plans to be able to use hero picture as your portrait?

Sinstar: Yes — its an immediate issue. Hoping to get it in for next Wednesday (i.e. 9 days from now). We’ll have more base hero portrait pics, but also a feature where you can select a hero and that will be your profile portrait.

Any plans for any new NPCs?

Sinstar: Yes — we have quite a few different NPCs coming in in the next couple patches. The Alchemist — who will be the person you go to to make potions. Docks master. Vendor — already in the marketplace. Stylist — going to help with profile picture switches. Crier — already in the marketplace. Seedbox — non-living NPC, this will replace the druid in the gardens (so you create a pair with druid in the marketplace, then you go to the gardens and put them in the seed box to “stake” your LP tokens).

Alchemist

Docks Master

Any plans for new environments?

Cinnamon Bun: As far as biomes go, its going to be mostly deep forest, and then cities, towns and farms. We want to give a good feel of the world being lived in. But for specific maps, we have some maps coming up (Docks, Meditation Circle, Alchemist Shop as well as a Castle). Several images were shared in the chat during the AMA and can be found below:

Sinstar: We are super happy with this overworld refresh. There’s a lot of quality and the design team having grown (he mentioned several new team members) is going to allow the design team to create some really great content.

See at the end of this post for some sneak peak pics provided!

Any plans for hidden objects or Easter eggs?

Kant: Yes — there’s already the Tom letter. Looking at ways to bring in more lore to the game and will do that a lot through these little Easter eggs.

Any plan to change marketplace to work better on desktop so we don’t have to scroll?

Sinstar: We’ve been thinking about this. It might be that they consider making that map a bit more square/abbreviated, but they might also move the NPC’s into a location closer to the center of the map. No definitive answer yet, need to brainstorm more on how to resolve this.

Any plans to add more animal NPCs like dogs in marketplace or trees around the statue?

Sinstar: There is a dog in this update coming up and the gardener interacts with him. We love the pets. However we need to focus on the world map first. Planning to hit pets pretty hard in the next phase.

Any plan to add content about the design process for the community?

Kant: Don’t want to steal Rissen’s thunder who is handling a lot of our social media, but one of the projects he is doing is to work some of the behind the scenes content on how some of this art is made. We met last night to talk through some of these ideas and how they’ll look and what Rissen will need on the creative side so that he can share it. So there will be some interest sneak peak type of material.

Any plans to allow for interactivity with the game world (i.e. splashing in the well, walking around doing different things)

Sinstar: We get this question a lot, and every time it is brought up to the team it is positively accepted, but this is a feature creep type of item that will have to be a long way down the road. We have to get the smart contracts built out first, and those contracts take so much time and effort to plan and implement. So this is something we can consider after we get the contracts in place. The next few months are going to be trailblazing all of our contracts and making sure that they behave properly. Of course everyone wants these interactivity features, but those are like the toppings on the cake and we have to build the cake first.

Any plans to have a character or representation of the character in the game world?

Sinstar: The player has been talked about in meetings. Usually its focused on heroes but we’ve discussed what role the “player” plays, i.e. are they the lord and their heroes are like their knights? These are things we are brainstorming about but we haven’t had to create a relationship between the user (the human players) and their heroes and the environment, so we haven’t defined the “user” as a character in the game yet.

Are we planning on adding a feature where we can see NFT objects like Tears?

Sinstar: Yes

Sneak Peak of Overworld/Map Art:

Shared in the AMA chat during the AMA

Closing Remarks

Kant: working on a series of tutorials, specifically for people not familiar with the crypto space. So these will be targeted to people that don’t know what Metamask is, or don’t know what liquidity pools or DeFi are and we want to make sure its easy for them. When we get good press and people start coming more and more to our website we want to make sure they don’t run into brick walls when they are trying to get things set up. So our first section is going to be very basic (making sure they have a compatible browser, explaining they have ONE to pay gas, how to set up a custom RPC, how to download Metamask, etc). Step 2 how minting NFTs work, how you can summon, etc. We are trying to touch as many skill levels and backgrounds as we can so that anyone at any level has access to the information that they need. Long term we’d like to integrate it into the team, but that's a long ways down the path because it takes a lot of dev resources, so it will mostly just be hosted on the website.

Sinstar shared some screen shots of what these could look like eventually.

Sinstar: This one has been focused on tutorials, and some of the in game art — but we are planning to have Pogo, our music composer join one one in the future.

Xeno: Thanks everyone for joining, we want to hear your questions, so fill out the form in discord to submit your questions to us. Next week will be another Development AMA so probably Frisky Fox, Professor Tango and some of the other core development team.