DEFY Product Development Update: Strengthening the Foundations

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DEFY Labs Engineering

6 min readJul 22, 2022

Hello friends of DEFY! I can’t believe it’s been over two months since my last update. Although you’ve no doubt felt like progress has been slow in the game’s development, we’ve been very busy in the background. We’re trying to build the foundations of our company, and there are so many other parts that go into it besides building the game itself.

For example, the largest amount of my time has been focused on hiring. It’s been successful: we’ve doubled the size of our Engineering team from 3 to 6 people! Two new fantastic people started last week, and another Mobile Engineer is starting in a few week’s time. It’ll take time for our new starters to get up to speed, but they’re off to a good start so we’re confident we’ll be able to start shipping more fun experiences faster over the next few months!

Stuff We’ve Done

Let’s take a look at what we have actually done since we last spoke:

ARM Drones

We shipped the first iteration of our Automated Repair & Maintenance (ARM) drones. It was great to see how the community reacted as we eased you into the experience, then turned up the dial on the spawn rates.

This is one of the benefits of using a Content Management System (CMS) to drive our gameplay parameters: it allows us to fine-tune the game without needing to do pesky deployments. We don’t need Engineers to make changes that are really just fine tuning — anyone in the company can do it. So if we decide to change the percentage of the time that an ARM drone spawns when a tower is hacked, we just increase the value in the CMS and publish the change. A 2 minute job!

Releasing Features Under a Shroud of Mystery

We made a point of detaching our deployments from the way we ship features. We do Over-The-Air (OTA) updates wherever possible, and we make heavy use of feature toggles and the CMS for tweaking gameplay parameters.

This means that once we ship the feature, we provide our community managers, marketers and mods with the ability to carefully craft our announcements and the information we drop.

For example, when we feature toggled the drones on in game, we didn’t show them as an icon on the map — we deliberately obfuscated them to see if players could figure out what they were. We also didn’t tell anyone that there was a way to destroy them — intercepting them when they were going to collect wallets. You figured it out, and seeing it shared on Discord was great!

UI Tweaks

We did a number of bug fixes and UI improvements:

Iterated on the drones — improved SFX and revealed new iconography
Mask switching improvements
Changed the colour scheme for the map so it’s more visible in bright sunlight

Leaderboard Improvements

One thing we are observing with other play-to-earn games is that a company highlights the “earn” mechanic as their app’s primary function, it drives player’s attention to focus almost exclusively on it, rather than other aspects of the game like community or fun. At DEFY Labs we’re not building an “earn” app — we’re building a game.

We realised that focusing on FCOIN as the primary scoreboard was blatantly falling into that trap. Sure, we’re still in alpha and we haven’t had much gameplay so far so it made sense to start with, but we want to drive players to compete on more interesting things than just how big their FCOIN balance is.

We transitioned the default leaderboard from “Pledged FCOIN” to “Destroyed Drones” to better draw player’s attention to what we think is more fun. We’ve got lots of exciting plans for the leaderboards in the future! Currently it’s very simple but we have a list of >15 different metrics that represent various gamplay elements we’re planning that we think will be even more awesome to compete on.

Deeper Collaboration with the Community

I finally made more time to meet with some of our community contributors — especially our amazing mods — and bring them in to help out in a more formal capacity. This has been fantastic, and a lot of the work in processing the Alpha Bug Bounty was through increased engagement with a mod. I’m going to continue exploring this, as we do have more need for more help so that we can improve the quality of our support and communication.

One of the main things I need is for someone to help catch serious bugs as they come in from the community submissions, and escalate the more urgent stuff. Now that we have more Engineering power we will be able to handle things better!

Anyway this is why it’s taken me so long to pay out the Bug Bounties. We’ve now finished processing the massive backlog and will aim to pay everyone in the next fortnight. Thank you so much to everyone who’s submitted detailed reports, especially around the security and economy bugs! It’s critical to our ability to continue building a great game where players can accrue value, but it’s hard to protect the fairness of that if hackers are able to game the system too far.

Fixed Infrastructure Issues

Oh goodness, we had a major infrastructure issue that was painful to fix. We moved to AWS Serverless Aurora PostgreSQL v2 and it turns out it’s not production-ready.

We migrated to it about a month ago after testing in Dev, and it turns out that a number of actions, including changes to the cluster, can put it into an irrevocably broken state. This caused us a 2 hour outage. AWS Support was great, but yeah: the tech isn’t ready despite being in Preview for almost 2y.

The worst part was that our CTO, Michael, was going on holidays, and the cluster change that broke it was the night before he left, so it was a late one!

Stuff Being Built

Drones

The main thing we’re focusing on over the next few months is improving the drone experience. I AM SO EXCITED! Wait until you see what we have planned!

You know I’m not going to give away too much — we like to surprise you guys :) What I can say is that Future Systems has taken notice of the number of drones that are susceptible to the software bug that is being exploited to destroy them.

You don’t think Vince Hunter is going to just sit back and let the general public vandalise corporate property, do you? Hell no — you better believe he’s going to take action. I just hope he hasn’t been channelling too much funding into his R&D labs…

Inventory for Consumables

The DEFY R&D crew are working away at new ways operatives can work to take down Future Systems. As these items make their way into testing and production, DEFY will be providing players with an inventory to contain the various items.

Stuff Still in the Design Phase

Levelling

We’ve designed a system to be able to upgrade your masks! We need to make some time between crushing bugs and building drone AI to improve and iterate on the designs so we can ensure that both existing and new players have a great experience and sense of growth alongside our game.

Upgrading

We’ve discussed many times how passionate we are about allowing players to own your own in-game items that can be taken outside the game. We want to improve everyone’s sense of ownership by allowing you to upgrade some in-game items.

We see the ability to upgrade as a form of customisation, so we’re designing upgrade paths that will allow players to do all sorts of creative and cool things with your items.

That’s all for now!

These are early steps on the path to supporting creation and collaboration in DEFY. We’re excited that we’re going to start being able to deliver faster in the months ahead :) Please let us know your thoughts in the comments if you have any input.