DeFi Kingdoms Team AMA (Project Updates — December 1, 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 the transcripts/summaries of the prior AMA’s in my index of DeFi Kingdom’s Articles.
Note that this isn’t a perfect 1:1 transcription so if you need to double check anything said please see their recording linked below.
Link to the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHZNqFCE3tM
This week, the AMA was from members of several teams relating to updates on the project. Go to the website https://dfk.rapidr.io/ and submit AMA questions there and Join the discord to also see responses to AMA questions not covered on the weekly calls.
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. Note: These are provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein or therein is intended to be financial advice. If you are seeking financial advise, contact a financial adviser.
DeFi Kingdoms Website
DeFi Kingdoms Official Medium
DeFi Kingdoms Discord
Core Team Members Participating:
https://defikingdoms.com/team.html
Project Updates
Frisky Fox (General) Updates
Frisky Fox —
Serendale 2.0 Timing
Serendale 2.0 is getting very close, if you look at the transparency document we update it every day. We open it up in most of our meetings. Most things are ready, and getting very close. We noted that some of the items from old Phase 2.0 are ready now as well.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dDbqU3rTpP5YFKyii27z4FtfbUqt9HpYouU1nyKKIoc/edit#gid=0
Even though we held off on the initial launch date, we are trying to squeeze as many of the items from Phase 2.0 into it as we can. It will be a more well rounded release where you can do more at the start. We are planning to launch out the gate with most things in place.
We have been targeting internally December 7 for that date and we’ve been working hard on that. We haven’t communicated that yet, and based on where we are now we feel safe enough at least communicating that, assuming we can get the remaining open items in place. That would be next Wednesday (release day). We’re going to be staying up all night with caffein trying to make sure everything is 100% ready for that. If things come up, we will hold off. We don’t want to launch a product that will have any issues at all. We’re confident with the product though and that’s the date we are SHOOTING for.
Duels Season 1 Ended
Turned off yesterday. UI is still there but if you try to start one it notes that its turned off. Plan was to launch Season 2 next Wednesday, but talking internally, we felt like it would make more sense to Launch Serendale 2.0 since its ready and then launch Duels S2 the next week, which will reduce risk and make sure that its solid.
We are planning to do Duels the following week then, which would be the 14th of December.
I saw a lot of Q’s about Duels in the AMA channel and in the talk site. There are a lot of things we’ll be changing in S2 and we need to make sure its solid for S2 and a lot of the pain points we felt will be alleviated. We’ll have extra things in place to, like claiming your rank rewards right when you hit them, or being able to see what the rank rewards will be ahead of time. Speaking of rank rewards we will be sharing them either later in this AMA or after in an announcement via a spreadsheet.
Plan is that you will be able to claim those once S2 is released. You’ll have to claim each of them. Then in S2 the rewards will be claimable as you hit them.
Optimization of Code
A lot of the Serendale 2.0 prep has been around code optimization. Magnus, Hubert and I have been hitting home runs, and we’ve squeezed out a lot of optimizations there about how we store variables, and messing around with assembly to get extra speed out of it. A lot of those things will be updated on our own chain as well, and those will turn into savings for gas across the board. So kudos to Hubert and Magnus working on that and huge Kudos to the front end people (Typicool, Beetle and others).
Winston and all of the Alpha testers have been hitting it out of the park. They’ve been really thoroughly testing everything and I’m surprised with all of the things that they are trying to see if it works. Some things changed, that were very obscure, and they have been very thorough. Huge shout out to them and their diligence.
We had a really important item we announced internally, and it is that we have promoted Sashei to the project manager role within our team. That is a huge thing. It’s been a really important role that we’ve had a hard time trying to fill for the longest time. We’ve had some people do it for a little while and for some reason we haven’t found the right person for it. Sashei, of his own accord, has kept track of everything with spreadsheets, he’s following up with people, etc. He was doing these things voluntarily and so we asked if he would be willing to do that for us and he said yes and we think it will be great for the team and also for the community.
Our project is a distributed project, the team is building it, but we have the community, and the project manager should help represent the interests of the stakeholders to the persons developing it. Sashei will be helping to represent the interests of you guys and making sure that we are aware of them. Hope you can all reach out to him and say congrats to him.
Game Mechanics Updates — Hubert
Hubert — Not too much to follow up on other than that I’ve been working on the power up system and getting that closer to being ready. Still have more to go. Lot’s of menus need to be created for it, but its coming along nicely. There was some confusion about what I said last week with the Stamina Recovery and EXP power up, I gave a ballpark of 10–30 cJewel on a per hero or group of hero basis, for those two in particular, the 10–30 is intended to be for 6 heroes, not for a single hero. Just wanted to make sure that was clear, and also we haven’t finalized the exact numbers, that is just a ballpark. Actual numbers will come out close to the actual release of power ups or with the actual release.
We’ve been working hard to optimize things. We’ve been learning a lot about what we’ve set up and fixing issues that we didn’t know were there. The optimization should result in a much smoother experience.
BeetleDude (Builder) Updates:
Beetle — Excited about all the things coming up. There’s a lot of stuff that Secondbestdad, Cinnamon and others have been working on that will go in with the update that aren’t on the spreadsheet. New NPCs, cool new zone. Even our DFK chain folks are going to get some new and cool stuff to look out.
Magnus (Chain) Updates:
Magnus — Optimization of the contracts has been a lot of work but has been really rewarding. Everyone on the solidity side has chipped in. It’s been nice to work with the various teams on this launch. I feel like we’re operating as a well-oiled machine now. We’ve been able to dig in and change a few things that will be good going forward, including on DFK Chain.
Sunbear (Dcentral) Updates:
Sunbear— Just a quick report on DCentral. Thanks to the community members that showed up, we had a ton of community members there. People flew from across the country to be a part of it. Not only were they just there, but they came and worked, helping at the stands, talking to other companies, explaining how we’re building the environment and addressing FUD. We had what I believe is the busiest booth. Lot of new players. Even players that stepped away for one reason or another and in awe at what we’d built while they were gone. Thanks to all the community members that showed up, I think it was 25–30 people. They even helped us break everything down and carry it out of the convention center.
Shout out to all the core team members there. It was great to have art represented, and also Beetle with the build side. Also CinnamonBun, the community saw him as a celebrity, as soon as people talked about the art, we could bring him over to them and meet them. He does such great work.
If you haven’t had a chance to hear Dreamer speak on the panel, he knocked it out of the park and demonstrated who we are and the confidence and excitement we have from the team.
Rissen (Dcentral) Updates:
Rissen—Just wanted to tag off of that, amazing job by community members. The fact that other booths and participants thought they were employees, they did so well, they spoke highly of us, they spoke intelligently of us. Based on the reactions from people there, every event going forward, I’m going to try and get tickets for community members. Grady, Primetime, so many there that did such an awesome job.
Frisky — I was watching the stream and I could hear what I think was CryptoGrady in the back yelling, which was awesome.
Rissen — Grady got us on Crypto Lifers live stream. They were bringing people to our booth, making connections for us. We should have paid them for what they did, thankfully it was free. Anytime I’m negotiating a booth at future events I’m going to make sure we can get community members there.
Bolon — Shout out to all of you that went to raid the panel with Dreamer on the YouTube stream. Whether you were live or online, you could see the power of our community. Having our community there made it such a better event than it otherwise would have been.
Pieface Updates:
Pieface— We have another opportunity to win a Gen0! We had our raffles with the cJewel and Dark Summoning, but this will be a first time where we will host a Gen0 raffle through the Merch store. Just some quick high level details is that we will have a dollar amount purchase requirement but then you can submit your social post of your DFK merch to a social forum. This will be a unique way to represent DFK, physically. But, guess what, all of you guys have been seeing bloater plushes everywhere. A few community members were able to snag some in San Diego. Some may have even seen a Bloater overload at the Dcentral booth. Bloater plushes will go live on the merch store, along with this Gen0 raffle opportunity, which is super exciting. They are a very custom and exclusive item. It is very limited in quantities. Right now, no need to rush and buy anything right now, we will announce more details on this opportunity soon but I’m so excited about this and can’t wait for you to get a bloater to hug, and squish and punch.
Bolon — Had to make sure the bloater was positioned so that it could adequately look down on us. there were so many comments on the Bloater plush and plans to kidnap it.
Pieface — More details to come on this later in the week perhaps.
Sashei (New Project Manager) Updates:
Sashei— We had the Gen0 raffle and there are a few more to be given away. So happy to announce that with Serendale launch we will do a few more. There will be 100 more doing an sJewel snapshot. We will also allocate another 75 for a Serendale based summoning raffle. Every summon will be a ticket. Every subsequent summon will give you more tickets like the last one that we did. We are going to announce the timeline in a few days. For the summoning raffle, it will be every summon from start will count towards the raffle.
Frisky — To clarify, sJewel will be available in Serendale. You’ll have to bridge Jewel to Serendale and stake it there and that will give you entries. Summoning in Serendale you’ll do with Jade, which you can acquire over there or that you may get from the locked token splittening.
Bolon — Note that sJewel is the cJewel equivalent in Serendale.
Frisky — I’m stoked about the sJewel/cJewel architecture, because our site for the voting proposals will count both sJewel and cJewel. It’s also very resistant to any big whales that want to come in and swing a vote and then exit quickly. Plus airdrops and things are much easier to do and you’ll see a lot more of those very regularly in the future. Even automated ones, I’m working on a script for that. How it works is that cJewel exposes you to earn rewards from activity on Crystalvale, whether that's summoning, questing, leveling up, etc., and sJewel exposes you to earn rewards from activity in Serendale. If you want both then do both. If you want to be a beneficiary of activity on that realm, then that is how you do it.
Bolon — Also power ups.
Bolon (Synapse) Updates:
Bolon— Synapse put out an update for the Klay bridge. Anyone that previously bridged Klay got wrapped Klay and they’ve put a fix out to get regularly Klay. I’ll drop an announcement on how to do that in case you did that and got wrapped Klay and how you need to unwrap it. The bridge should have given you Klay dust, but if you didn’t reach out to the Synapse team and they’ll give you some dust to do the unwrap.
Frisky — I tried it on mainnet yesterday and also got some Klay dust.
Duels Updates:
Raffle Master will continue during off season
Frisky— We had some question about when we turned off Duels. People asked if raffles would be turned off and the answer is no. That’s because raffles are used for many things. For example, Fight Kulb uses Raffles and other projects are integrating that as we speak. You’ll see more than Duels using tickets. A strategy might be to save your tickets up for the off season and use them on raffles during the off season that might be less crowded.
Rank Rewards
Frisky — Instead of doing an airdrop this time where the team executes a script to send out rewards, we will have a smart contract and interface page that shows your rank, all the ranks you qualified for and your rewards. Each duel type has its own ranks, scores and rewards. 1v1, 3v3 and 9v9 all have their own. I’ll drop that into chat now:
We had a lot of back and forth about this, talking about how much we wanted to do and the amounts. One thing we kept returning to is that what we did for S1 is going to change a lot for S2. Ranks for example will have a much lower threshold to climb ranks and then it will scale up, kind of like the amount of XP you need to level up your heroes, so each rank will require more to level up. There will be less ranks in S2 and there will be prizes that will be harder to get because its harder to hit those ranks plus a lot of changes to matchmaking to make it more fair and balanced. This one for S1 is good, but S2 will be even better and will really incentivize the right things that we want to see for duels. That’s what we are thinking and we’ll probably share it in the announcements later. Thanks everyone.
AMA Questions
Duels — Recommended gas for duels leading to failing transactions. Any update?
Frisky—this was one that had plagued me for a long time trying to figure out why it was failing. The reason why is because the estimated gas is exact. Currently on the front end if you submit a transaction the frontend simulates it and guesses how much it should cost and gives the exact amount. The problem with Duels is that if someone else submits a transaction right before you in the same block then it changes the gas even by a fraction. So the plan for S2 is to overestimate, maybe 5–10% on the estimate and then the transaction will still only use however much it needs. It will also probably fix meditation circles too if you’ve started to see some of those fail. I’ll be implementing a change there and submitting it as a PR soon over to Beetle Dude.
Timing of Raffle Rewards for S1?
Frisky—Plan is to have those open up when S2 launches. There will be a page that shows your score for each type of Duel in S1 and all of the prizes and you can just claim them there. Then there will be a page for S2 showing all of the queued prizes that you can claim as soon as you hit that rank.
Duels — What about having a similar system for duels like we did for summons where the more matches you have the more benefit you get.
Frisky —That is not our plan right now, we want to reward quality over quantity for S2. But we are switching up some of the ways that you can participate in S2 so that Multi-Walleting will be even less of an issue. I think it’s going to be a great system.
How long until additional hero data, skills, runes, recessives will be included in game?
Sashei—We actually talked about this this week. I can say it is very close. We received some requests for things like showing what stones were used for summoning, or crystals used for leveling up, or if there is a duel time out on the hero. We are looking to add additional hero card backs which will display all the information along with active and passive abilities, potentially recessive genes and we are getting very close.
Beetle — we’ll get it on the timeline and try to get it out as soon as we can. A very cool feature.
Gen0 1–19 and tainted abilities. With the launch coming up on Klaytn, any added sense of urgency to get those rerolled or displaying them?
Hubert—The short term goal is to be able to display that on the card so people are aware if there is a tainted hero, hopefully we will also be able to show more details beyond just that, but that would be the first step. As far as when we would do that reroll, goal would be to do it before or along with the launch of PVP, might be before but can’t commit at this time. It’s on our radar. I know its caused some people to be surprised, and that is unfortunate so we do want to get this out soon so that at least you have a visual indication that it will be changing for that hero.
Marketing for Serendale 2.0 Launch and Marketing with Klaytn — what does that look like?
Pieface—We meet with them weekly. We’re keeping them up to date on the change on the launch date. In terms of marketing we are working on getting things translated for some medium articles and a lot of onboarding and education, which Bolon can get into a lot more detail on.
Bolon — We are working with a translator now, who has been translating as fast as they can, trying to get educational material, medium articles, etc translated. Once we have a healthy repo of educational content ready, we’ll move into translating the game itself. That will be a massive and never ending task. Wanted to do edu first so people could learn how to play first. The chrome browswer will do some of the translation for you, but its not perfect which is why we want to do our own. The educational materials will give you a reference point to be able to play the game relatively easily, and then as we update the UI to be translated we’ll also update the articles to reflect the translations as well.
We meet with Klaytn marketing team weekly and they are excited for our launch and we’ll definitely be doing some social mediaing for the launch and Klaytn is very much looking forward to that as well and so they’ll be supporting as well.
Game Mechanics — Travel and hero locations. It doesn’t seem like Hero NFTs have storage for that kind of information at the moment, and then would we just have contractions that are locationally aware?
Hubert—True that hero data doesn’t have a slot for location. That’s fine. We use multiple contracts to track things and its easy to say that you have a travel contract and any contract that needs to be aware of a location can refer to the travel contract rather than hero data itself, which is good since if we are cross chain if we have travel on both chains we wouldn’t want to say the location number is the same on that, but we may also have restriction on bridging as well where you might have to be in the central town in order to be able to bridge. It’s not that difficult for us to do that. It’s pretty easy to have contracts refer to each other. There’s always the possibility if we want to down the road upgrade the heroes, that could be something that would be added but at this point the plan has been to just have its own contract.
Game Mechanics — Inventory — won’t have carrying limits, but are there some areas may only let you have access to so much stuff at one time, would inventory need to be assigned to heroes, can any item be used anywhere?
Hubert— at the moment plan is to have items be used anywhere, but when it comes to combat you’ll have to submit what you will take with you into the combat event, so you won’t have access to all potions in combat, just the ones you brought with you and the equipment on your heroes. Inventory based hero management would probably be too tedious for most people. its interesting and maybe down the road we’ll see value there, but for now we will keep it streamlined. I don’t see an issue with a global inventory.
Shout out to Wisdom Gaming and 0xWorkhorse (Ian)
Bolon — wanted to give a shout out to WG and Workhorse (Ian), he was willing to jump on a chaos cast with Rissen and I yesterday and then we had a suprise guest appearance from Hubert as well. It was a good conversation. A lot of good information. No alpha given, but a good discussion about the direction and vision about our partnership with Wisdom and PVP and PVE. We do plan on doing AMAs with Wisdom as I mentioned last week, but if you have not see that chaos cast I just dropped the link in the chat. It was a good stream. Hubert and Ian were phenomenal. It’s worth the hour to watch it. Easily the best chaos cast, only deterred by myself and Rissen. Appreciate Ian and all of the Wisdom team being willing to join us.
Reminder on Jade Fake Tokens
DO NOT BUY JADE TOKENS THAT APPEAR ON KLAYTN, THERE WILL BE A LOT OF SCAM TOKENS. THEY ARE NOT DFK JADE UNTIL WE HAVE RELEASED OUR CONTRACT. THERE WILL BE FAKES FLOATING AROUND. BE CAUTIOUS AND WARY.
Closing Remarks
Sunbear—Just wanted to say I’m super excited about the upcoming launch. Couldn’t be happier about the team and how we’ve pulled it together over the past several months. At Dcentral you could see people building, but there was also a lot of fear and it came up in a lot of presentations. But there wasn’t a lot of fear felt at our booth. It was almost like we were one of the bright lights in the space and that’s how I feel right now with us building and how we are moving forward with Klaytn and all of their amazing partners. Just feeling a lot of hope.
Bolon —Forgot to give one update, we have not forgotten, we said we’d put out a list of any edits to the locked Jewel snapshot, which would include the project wallets. We have not forgotten that, just finalizing it and getting it put together.
Frisky — Yeah stoked about the transparency, we’ll be putting all that information out there for anyone to see.
Sashei— Just want to say I’m super excited for Serendale launch. Been spending most of my days on Testnet. And its really picking up where we left Harmony. Klaytn forced us to make improvements on back end and front end, and new classes, its all great. A lot of the stuff will roll over to CV which will improve the experience over there as well. Many hours of hard work went into this launch.
Pieface — Thanks for tuning in to this! Lots of exciting things coming. Long awaited things. I totally understand the irrational emotional response to wanting a bloater. When I look at the bloaters face it just brings up a lot of emotions. Sometimes it makes me want to hug it and sometimes smack it. I highly recommend when we announce a time to get bloaters on the merch store that you set an alarm to get your hands on one. Thank you guys so much.
Magnus — My only final thought is that I want to hear a bullish from Sashei.
Hubert — I would also like to hear that. Thanks for bringing up Chaos Cast. Forgot to mention that whole side of what I get to do. Had a great time on Chaos Cast, been great working with Ian and Wisdom Gaming. This partnership is one of the best things that has happened over the course of game development. It’s given us a lot more resources and the way we work together has been really great. It gives me a lot of excitement for the future and what we can do. If anyone hasn’t watched that chaos cast check it out.
Beetle — Don’t think I mentioned before. Being at the event was amazing. Meeting all the community members rooting for us, sometimes very loudly, which I appreciate, because I’m more quiet. Cool to see what our events team does. Sunbear, Rissen, Bolon and Dreamer, explaining the product. Also Cinnamon for popping in, he did a great job as well. The community gives me a lot of energy and excited for you guys to see what is coming out soon.
Bolon — Stay tuned for the recording of Beetle’s panel. We’ll make sure you have access to it. Dreamer’s was live streamed so you’ll be able to see it there.
[Samichpunch: here is the link to the specific timestamp where the panel Dreamer was on]
Frisky Fox — I said a lot of this at the start. It’s an awesome time to be in the Kingdom. We’ve been so busy. I have so many things to be grateful for. really impressed with our team and how they showed up at teh event and Dreamer and all his excellent responses on the panel and all the people in the crowd cheering him on and our booth and how it sounds like it was one of the best booths there.
I was also informed that we neglected or forgot to announce a position a few weeks ago. We made Hubert our Director of Game. So he is the game director. He has been the primary driving force on that front since the start of the project. Just wanted to make sure that was known as well so if you see him say congrats and thanks. Very well deserved.
Speaking of that, we are in the process of redoing our org chart. So we will probably have a few of those we will be iterating thorugh and will be sharing with the community and updating our site so you can see who does what and how all the pieces fit. Huge kudos to team and all the work they’ve done. Also huge thanks to our partners, Ava labs, Klatyn, Chainlink, Dapp Radar, Layer Zero, Synapse, Wisdom Gaming. All these great projects that are almost every day in our slack channels communicating with us and trying to build build build. That’s what it is all about here in the web 3 space, creating. Working towards that end dream of the metaverse. I’ll end that with a huge Kudos and thank you to the community. We have the best one. Everyone at the event was jealous that they didn’t have all those peopl ein the crowd. Blessed to have you all here in the AMA right now. You guys are great and the reason why we do these things. Over to Sashei to finish it off.
Sashei — BULLISH!
