Forest Knight Developer Update: 2020 Recap & 2021 Roadmap
2020 was not easy an easy year for many people around the world.
Through it all, Forest Knight is blessed to have such a supportive and enthusiastic community—the journey we knights have been through is unbelievable.
As we reflect on the past year, we want to thank you all for supporting us to this day, through such crazy times.
We are excited to share our last Forest Knight blog post of the year to recap our 2020 successes, challenges, and what you can look forward to in 2021.
Forest Knight 2020 Recap
2020 was a great year for fans of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), gaming, Enjin, and Forest Knight!
We worked hard to push the boundaries of gaming, do pioneering work in this scene, and deliver on our promises — all of which were rewarded by our dedicated community’s support.
We appreciate this so much.
Here’s a quick overview of what we accomplished together in 2020:
Collaborations
Throughout the year, we were honored to collaborate with brands around the blockchain space and showcase the power of #NFTs and Enjin ecosystem in sharing Blockchain items in multiple ecosystems.
We hope you enjoyed these collaborations as much as we did!
Swissborg Gaming Quest
Swissborg’s “Cyborg” NFT was introduced via a quest that spanned 8 Enjin-powered games, including Forest Knight.
In order to receive the final Cyborg Champion token and have a chance to win one of the main prizes, players needed to collect all 3 parts of the Cyborg across various games.
Forest Knight was the holder of the torso, allowing players to hunt down the piece by fighting on the world map.
If you were triumphant in this quest and hold the Cyborg token in your Enjin Wallet, you can use it as a skin for the Forest Knight Paladin Hero!
Binance.US Halloween
To celebrate Halloween, Binance.US issued a spooky NFT as part of the “Boonance.US” community giveaway.
This unique token is supported in Forest Knight as a Halloween-themed sword!
Our goal with such collaborations is to keep the spirit of the token and let the final design be clearly a transformation of the original token.
This helps the players and users really feel that their token has transformed into something else upon entering the world of Forest Knight.
CoinMarketCap New Year
To end a year we will never forget, we’re collaborating with CoinMarketCap, a blockchain industry leader and crypto market data provider, to support their upcoming RIP 2020 token.
We tried to match the token use case to the fantasy ambient of the game.
We decided on an amulet to boost your hero’s strength, and using their brand colors, our talented designer created a beautiful CoinMarketCap Amulet.
The results speak for themselves.
Stay tuned for your chance to win this NFT coming soon!
Challenges
Our goal is and always will be to be very transparent with our community.
It is true that we could make amazing progress this year, yet it was not always glamourous. We learned a lot and faced many challenges development-wise, in addition to the challenges the pandemic created.
Here’s a look through the most important challenges and learnings that came out of this year.
State of Arena
The Arena is not where we want it to be. Although we made significant improvements on it, our players are still facing issues regarding matchmaking, rewarding incentives, and empty lobbies.
This is one area we definitely want to improve on in 2021, to improve the potential of the PVP experience in Forest Knight.
Gas Fees
We are great believers in Ethereum, but not in high gas fees. This year was a tough year for NFT transactions, which were crippled by the high fees.
We had to stop sending out blockchain drops and push back some blockchain features; however we did use Enjin Marketplace API to allow you to browse and buy NFTs directly in Forest Knight when fees are lower.
To ensure the longevity of the project, we aim to find a more financially responsible solution for how to handle blockchain-based items in Forest Knight in the future.
Economy Design
Forest Knight's economy is getting bigger and bigger! We have over 100 unique items each with different strengths and weaknesses.
The merge mechanic introduced even more room to balance the game, however the economy is not where we want it to be, and we need to monitor it more carefully and more frequently.
Lack of Strategic Depth
We believe we have a fun gaming experience with great strategic potential. Yet we see also a huge potential in increasing the strategic depth of the game like introducing elements, passive abilities, etc.
These features came short due to a lack of manpower. Chrono Games is basically still mostly a one-man-show company, which shows in the speed of development.
However, none of these challenges are deal-breakers! We plan to attack these topics in 2021 and will post more updates regarding our decisions in near future.
2021 Battle Plan
iOS Release
When iOS?
This is one of the most received messages on our social media channels.
The reason why we are still not on your iPhone devices is more complicated, but generally speaking we wanted to have an “iOS worthy” game before pushing it to the store or even test flight. Also, Android allowed us to iterate much faster through updates and fixes.
We believe Forest Knight is in a good state to be released on iOS, and we are aiming to create a distribution pipeline to be able to maintain a multi-platform game.
NFT Monitoring System
Right now players have not enough information regarding their findings through the World Map or arena. We are planning to create a better visualization of what items are received already and also allow players to manually send those items to their wallet if they like to whenever they want.
Side Chain Implementation
It is inevitable for any game on the Ethereum blockchain to migrate or at least partially use some sort of side chain implementation to reduce transaction fees.
We are closely looking into several options, with the main focus of course on Enjin’s upcoming Efinity solution. Successful utilization of a side chain allows us to truly start innovating regarding our blockchain features like pets or merge system.
Non-Fungible Is King 👑
NFTs are the reason why we were so excited about the blockchain gaming space in the first place. The uniquely identifiable items can store so much history in them and allow game mechanics never existed before.
We want to use the ERC-1155 contract to its fullest potential, and plan more and more NFT-exclusive features and mechanics.
Of course, these are only a few of many new updates to come in 2021 — not to mention our website overhaul, friend and guild systems, and more.
We’ll be sure to keep you updated on any developments through our social channels, so follow along here if you don’t already:
- Twitter: twitter.com/games_chrono
- Telegram: t.me/Forestknight
- Facebook: facebook.com/ChronoGamesOfficial
- Instagram: instagram.com/chronogames
- YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UC1w_ — ydj35pOgFxiVS1zYQ
