DFK Day: Alpha Announcements
Speakers: Frisky Fox, Dreamer, Hubert Cumberdale, Bearious
Frisky Fox:
We’re excited to get started tonight. It’s been a great day. We’re excited now to wrap up this great day. We have cool exciting things to share about some things that are coming out soon.
Before we get started we do have some cool things for people here in person. We have some raffle tickets we are going to hand out to everyone. Make sure you get one from Bolon and at the end we’re going to draw them and have some cool prizes including a Gen0 and other in-game items. Stay tuned for that. Hubert is here to talk about something he alluded to yesterday in the AMA. I’ll turn the over time to him.
Hubert Cumberdale:
Hi guys. Behind me you can see this promotional video we put together for The Perilous Journey and Crystalvale. In the lore of DeFi Kingdoms, all of the lands are separated away from each other but now Heroes are coming back to the land and starting to explore. Someone came from Crystalvale to Serendale and told them about Crystalvale but couldn’t explain how to get there, but what The Perilous Journey is, is allowing Heroes to find a safe route to Crystalvale. There is a lot of unknown danger, and not all the Heroes are going to make it. But they are going to go and come back and tell people how to get to Crystalvale safely.
People are going to get to submit their Heroes to go on this journey. Based on the rank and quality of the Hero, it will have a greater chance of survival. Based on awards, there will be Crystal airdropped to those that survived. We will do a Gen0 raffle for 25 Gen0 and you’ll get a number of tickets tied to the quality of heroes you send.
Frisky Fox:
I’ll just interrupt and say for Serendale we had 2000 Gen0 that we sold, and people have asked us about Crystalvale and how we are going to make it fair. Our strategy is to incentive in-game things to use them as awards rather than just being sold, to award our current players in Serendale.
Hubert Cumberdale:
We will give an xp bar for Heroes that go and come back. A small group of lands will be exclusive to survivors of the journey. We’ll also give an achievement to the Hero that will give it access to Quests that will be exclusive to Heroes that went. So we have an achievement system in place that we use as various things. This will be one of our first forays into using that. Heroes will be permanently marked as Heroes that survived the journey. For those that don’t survive, those will be burned. We will give some consolation prizes and raffles for another 25 Gen0 heroes to those.
Frisky Fox:
So is this completely dead forever?
Hubert Cumberdale:
Yes, dead. It goes to the burn address. This is a Perilous Journey. This will also be our first introduction of the MM Rune, you have to be above a level 4 to get that. Lastly we will give a number of enhancement stones and attunement crystals for those that die. Those will be based on the top two highest stats of the Heroes and will enhance those specific stats. We’ll have actual numbers released on Discord so I don’t get you all bogged down now. It will be launching fairly soon.
Frisky Fox:
Can you talk about how the lore played into some of these things we are doing? If they die, how come they get $JEWEL? Is that part of the lore?
Hubert Cumberdale:
That is more of just a severance package from the Kingdom of Serendale. It’s for their friends and surviving family.
Frisky Fox:
So like life insurance?
Hubert Cumberdale:
Yeah, like life insurnace. Sometimes with lore it’s hard to make it all fit. And we’ve been wanting to have a burn mechanic for awhile. This is a one-time event. These are the trailblazers and everyone else can go safely to Crystalvale after that.
Frisky Fox:
I am excited about it. I have a lot of heroes to send over to Crystalvale. Oh, Ogre has a question.
Ogre:
Burn percentage?
Hubert Cumberdale:
A level one common basic has a 35% chance to survive. But then chances get higher. Gen0 are not allowed to die, but they can still get sent so you can get achievement but you can’t get other awards. But you can send them with another hero to help them survive.
Frisky Fox:
So it will scale up. As the heroes are stronger, they will have a higher chance of survival. That’s awesome. I am excited about this. Thanks to Hubert about this great info. Stay tuned in our channels for more info. We’ll be announcing the timeline next week, and it will be pretty soon because Crystalvale is coming soon. Thanks Hubert.
Next up we’ve got Dreamer to share some exciting news.
Dreamer:
So another really important topic is the high barrier to entry as we’ve seen the price of $JEWEL increase. We are trying to build a game. It started as a gamified dex, but very game-like with our NFTs and people have been playing to earn. When I tell people what I do, they get excited and want to get their kids involved, but right now it’s not possible to get everyone in the world involved with the high cost of entry. Some of you might know about our scholar program. But what we are working on right now is called the Champion program. Currently we have what people call “Whales”, who are heavily invested and may or may not have time to effectively use all their assets. But there are others with a lot of time but no assets. So being able to have that trade-off is where Champions come in. So where a Champion comes in using another wallet to Quest and get compensated for their efforts would be beautiful for lowering barriers to entry. People could come in and enter immediately and help those with Heroes who don’t have time. How would that work? If we think about summoning, right now you need two heroes to summon but if you only have one you borrow one from someone else. So right now a feature we are testing is allowing someone else to Quest with your Hero and send them to your account without sending them to someone else’s wallet.
Frisky Fox:
So if you send a Hero to someone else’s account they could do anything with it like sell it or lose it, but if you allow them to Quest on your behalf it would be a lot more secure?
Dreamer:
So the initial functionality would be having the ability to commission another wallet go fishing for you . It will be like a private questing contract.
Frisky Fox:
So like quest-lite?
Dreamer:
Exactly. You could have a contract like that if you Quest these Heroes once a day for a week, I’ll give you 25 $JEWEL. Someone else could see that contract and accept the terms.
Frisky Fox:
I remember when we started out Heroes were expensive and people would ask how this is sustainable, and even though you could send 30–50 $JEWEL and earn that back in a few months, some people don’t even have that to get started, so this is great for players who don’t have that opportunity to play to earn, and now they could potentially earn their own Heroes.
Dreamer:
I think about people who have been in the game for a long time and they just got their first Hero and now they can only Quest one Hero. This you could pick up some extra Heroes and Quest them when you have time and earn that way too.
Frisky Fox:
So Axies is the first play-to-earn game, and we are offering a lot of cool features that I like a lot, and Axies are 700 or something to play and they have players from all over, and if you look at our numbers we are up to the same number of transactions but if you look at our players we are trailing behind and I think it’s because they have their scholarship program. So if the first iteration is having a Champion that you can Quest for each other, so what is the end goal?
Dreamer:
For those coming in, we really want it to be a progression where you progress to a Champion. It will be like yelp where there will be reviews like potentially stats, and if you come in as say a squire you can take one contract at a time, and maybe after that you become a contender (name pending) and potentially take on 10 contracts at a time, and then progress to a Champion, and then you become a free agent, and some of the guilds out there can look at your stats and then you could potentially have a career through becoming a Champion and being trusted in a guild.
Frisky Fox:
Speaking of guilds there are other types of guilds out there that are excited about blockchain games and are investing in games that have lands and NFTs and they are waiting for something like this to help them invest. Any other thoughts?
Dreamer:
If you could take a moment and think about the parts of the world who could benefit from this it could be huge. We are here to make change. This effort if we can do it right and continue to grow we can make this life changing for so many people. This is near and dear to my heart and others on the team. We want to do this right and we will roll this out slowly and we need feedback.
Frisky Fox:
We have already touched the lives of 10s or 100s of thousands of people and we want that to reach millions. It really is life changing to bring a lot of people up in life with opportunities they might not have had. Thank you Dreamer.
So next up to finish this up we have Bearious. A newer member to the team who has made a huge splash as our game director who makes sure that the game is fun and challenging. He has a lot of experience creating games. He is here to talk about combat.
Bearious:
As Fox said I’m Bearious. If there is any problem with combat in the future I’m your guy. The first thing is that combat is going to be 3v3. Each team will have 3 people. We want you to start thinking about what your team will look like. We want every class to be unique and have a purpose on the team. We are being consistent with a lot of RPG tropes. We want to say that this is going to be idle combat. You might be familiar with that. Most people are familiar with turn base combat, but we’re on the blockchain and that would be very cumbersome to have each action a transaction, so we’re taking that seriously which is why we decided to go with idle combat. So you’ll set up a team and a skill list, and then your team will be running. The fun will be setting up your team and skill list and overall strategy. A lot of people will be familiar with skill rotations. Each hero will have a bunch of unique skills you can choose from, let’s say 5, and they will go through each of those skills and they will perform those as a skill rotation and then you’ll watch that play out.
Frisky Fox:
A lot of games that use NFTs that I have seen have the NFTs as an award that you get from playing. Our game is on the blockchain and all the game logic is on the blockchain and we’re the first that is doing it this way. How does that impact design choices when it comes to combat?
Bearious:
So the blockchain effects a lot of this so we can’t just have people submitting transactions. It’s a meta strategy that happens before the game starts. What is your team trying to accomplish. How will those function together? You want synergy between them. So you want to think about what skills you want to use when so you can make sure your heroes are functioning together.
Frisky Fox:
Where do those skills come from?
Bearious:
So you’re going to unlock skills. As you level up heroes you’ll get skill points and eventually you’ll be able to unlock skills and have the ability to put them in your skill list. So you’ll have to choose which skills you want to use for different fights. We want to give people a range of options so this is strategic.
Frisky Fox:
So a priest might have a different skill than a warrior? Are there any genetic skills? I think that’s the plan right? It is. Spoiler.
Bearious:
You’re trying to think about skill distribution, so where do you want to put those points to be the most effective? The big thing is 3v3 combat. It’s not just having one incredibly strong hero that just runs over everyone. It’s about interesting strategies. We want a wide range of options available and we’re trying to design this so that we don’t know the best team comps. We want a lot of possibilities and we want players to figure out what is interesting. That’s what is fun for me in games I play, so I hope we can build a meta strategy into this game.
Frisky Fox:
Can you speak to strategy for rollout?
Bearious:
We are working on PvP first, so we’re trying to define all Hero abilities and how they will work against each other and then PvP will be the most straightforward in the initial rollout. Then we’ll be moving to PvE after.
Frisky Fox:
How do you envision PvP and PvE?
Bearious:
For PvP the plan is to mostly be monetary rewards. For PvE the awards will be more interesting. I don’t want to go into details but they will be interesting. We do also want to do dungeons which will effectively be another PvE scenario that will be more epic. It’s all still in very early planning phases but we are all thinking about all that stuff.
Frisky Fox:
Since the start of the project I have been the most stoked for combat. It adds strategy and utility to these heroes. There is so much we can do with guilds and tournaments. There are so many cool things we could do with all this. It’s a lot of work and there is a lot of work ahead of us so we will roll things out in phases and pieces as we build out and perfect this combat engine. A lot of complex things. It’s historically really hard to write complex things into the blockchain. Thank you all for the hard work that has been done for this.
I think that is it.
