Dear Baristas,
April has been a busy month for the LatteSwap team. We have made progress on many fronts in our game development. So, without further ado, let’s get into the progress update for the past month.
Market Research: This has been one of the major tasks in April. The team spent a lot of time reviewing different types of games — both traditional and web3 games. The goal was to canvas all the mechanics in popular and successful games and catalog all the rules, game plays, and unique features that we can learn from and build upon for our own game.
We believe that this is one of the most important things to get right so that we have a good understanding of the various game mechanics and potential key success factors of these games.
Game Design: We are happy to say that we have built a good enough knowledge base and that the research phase is almost complete. With this knowledge, the next steps in our process would be to consider pros and cons and to start narrowing down our design direction, selecting, and committing to a specific game mechanic. We are aiming to finish this in May, and start developing a game design document so we can start prototyping. While we would like to keep some of the concepts confidential prior to the actual launch, we should be able to share more on the game mechanics in our next update.
Development: On this front, we have been actively building our development team. We have been in talks with many game studios and developers and will be able to on-boarded all the necessary resources to work on the game by the time the design is ready. Our devs have also been working on internal POC focusing on security, web3 integration, and security.
While we are confident in our ability to develop smart contracts for DeFi use-cases, we currently do not have much experience in the areas of GameFi. We are currently building in-house capabilities through internal research and development to ensure our development team is equipped with necessary technical skills and is ready to work closely with our game development team to launch the game.
Next steps:
What we have done so far is laying down the foundation for the game development. Over the next few months, we will also start working on in the other important topics, including:
- Tokenomics design: Tokenomics is one of the make & break factors that will play a key role in dictating the direction of the game. The tokenomics design will take into account how value can be transferred to our community at LatteSwap. The specifics mechanics of the value transfer is to be decided. Some of the ways we are exploring is through a direct airdrop or conversion for LATTE/NFT holders to the new tokens.
- Revenue model and monetization: While we plan to build a Web3 game, we have to carefully think about the revenue model for the game in order to build a fully sustainable game. The revenue model and monetization will have to be tied with the design of the tokenomics and will take into account how to give back value to our early supporters.
- Branding: As we are shifting our business direction to GameFi, we also plan to conduct a rebranding campaign on LatteSwap. This will help bring a fresh start to our new project and signify a shift away from the DeFi industry towards GameFi.
