The Guild of Guardian Diaries — Edition #6
This is our newsletter to the community. We value you all greatly, and we want to ensure a certain level of transparency around what’s going on behind the scenes at Guardian HQ.
We cannot promise that everything we say here will come true. In fact, we’re confident that timelines will occasionally be inaccurate (as they sometimes are). However, we will endeavour to set clear expectations and communicate with you all about the upcoming roadmap and priorities.
TL;DR
- The surprise GOG demo was a success! We received valuable feedback from a wide audience of gamers which will help improve the game for everyone!
- WEN Alpha?! The Guild of Guardians team is heads down and focused on our next milestone, Alpha-Testnet
- We’re excited to share a cheeky peek into the lore and story of Guild of Guardians. See below for more details!
- Community is KING! We have some exciting community growth programs in development that we’re excited to share
- We keep growing! Meet the newest team members that are building Guild of Guardians
The #GOGDEMO retrospective
Last month we surprised the community with a playable version of Guild of Guardians. There were two core objectives:
- To obtain valuable feedback from a non-crypto, gamer audience
- To showcase a very small window of our progress since Pre-Alpha
Registrations for the demo went live on the 1st of July, and we received 20,000 applications — 10,000 of which came from non-crypto gamers.
Unlike pre-alpha, we decided to run the demo with zero leaderboards and incentives in order to test retention and gameplay on its own. 13,000 playtesters were invited to participate, and 8,000 playtesters participated, with 30% of players from the US.
Here are some quick stats 👇🏽
On average, playtesters rated their overall GOG demo experience an 8 out of 10
When asked how likely playtesters would be to recommend Guild of Guardians to a friend, playtesters answered with an average of 8 out of 10
92% of playtesters said that gameplay controls were easy to understand and use
85% of playtesters said their skill level (controls mastery, reaction speed, and pre-combat preparation) improved during the demo
Gameplay stats 🎮
⌛ Over 11,000 hours played
🔮 156,158 dungeons crawled
🦸 256,437 ultimate abilities cast
⚔️ 15,852,328 enemies defeated
✊🏽 233,675 Heroes died honourable deaths in battle.
While we are thrilled overall with the feedback and results from the survey, this is just the beginning, and there’s still much room for improvement!
Thank you to everyone who participated and took the time to provide valuable feedback. As a token of thanks, those who playtested and completed the feedback survey will be receiving an exclusive GOG Demo POAP in the coming weeks. Keep an eye on your inbox for more info!
Game Development Updates — June & July
You may have noticed that over the last couple of months, the Guild of Guardians team have been heads-down focused on our next major milestone — soft launching an early version of GOG on testnet! Broadly speaking, this breaks down into a few major areas of work…
Content
First, we are completing the content of the game. This means finalising all the heroes, weapons, enemies, the VFX, sounds, descriptions, abilities, and so on. Not only are we working on finishing all the content (which is a big task in itself, given the volume), but we’re also making sure that it is properly integrated into the game and streamlining the performance so that even older phones can run Guild of Guardians. Things are mostly on-track here, and the major challenge we’ve had is having to re-optimise assets that do not perform well on lower-performance phones.
Additional Features — Guild crafting, energy tokens, pets…
Second, we are making the game (or at least the MVP version of it) functionally complete. So far, players have experienced playable demos for the first three worlds in the campaign and for merging. But GOG will also have additional features: more dungeons, guilds, guild crafting, energy tokens, pets, guild raids, salvaging and so on. Things are going well, and most of these are now functionally complete and can be tested internally. The team is now focused on finishing one of the most complex features in the game — guild crafting — as well as minor changes to the core gameplay based on your feedback from the most recent demo!
IMX Integration
Third, we are integrating the game with Immutable X. Now, this is where it becomes complex! We’re essentially doing something almost no one in the world has done before — releasing a mobile native game that seamlessly integrates with the blockchain.
Unsurprisingly, there have been some challenges. First, we will soon have to spend some time migrating our testnet from Ropsten to Goerli as a result of the Ethereum merge. We will have to wait for our partners (i.e. IMX, custodial wallet, marketplaces, etc) to migrate first, which will push back some of our integration and testing work. Second, there have been some legal questions around introducing an ERC20 trading feature to players (so they can swap between GOG & ETH on Immutable X). We have found and will implement a workaround so we can still offer a smooth trading experience. Finally, the team is upgrading some of our infrastructures so that we can be more confident we can service a large volume of players once we’re live without the servers crashing. These challenges have admittedly eaten away at our development buffer (which we knew we would need) and increased the risk of timelines slipping, but if everything goes to plan, the alpha is still on track for this year.
Game Development Expectations — August onwards
Looking forward, the remaining months of this year for Guild of Guardians will be focused on finishing the soft launch version of the game (the points above) and making sure that we’re releasing a meaningful experience that will move the entire Web3 industry forward.
As such, our upcoming focus areas will be:
- To ensure the core gameplay is engaging and strategic (i.e. retention and first-time user experience)
- To ensure the economy is sustainable for years, not months. This means finalising every number in the game and balancing reward outputs with inputs.
- To ensure the game can be scaled to millions of players (i.e. scalability and liveops)
Building an amazing game is our #1 priority, and we’ll be investing most of our time and resources in this area in the coming months.
World and Lore
We’ve been busy finalising the lore of Guild of Guardians, with a significant focus on the ‘how’ — storytelling is an intrinsic human characteristic and a critical component of our vision for Guild of Guardians! In the meantime, check out this sneak preview of the world of Brimstone 👀
Brimstone is an unruly realm of ash and fire. Its unforgiving terrain overwhelms most travellers. Only the Draek have fully adapted to its heat.
The Draek are an ancient, fire-breathing race. Over millennia, they carved their civilisation out of stone. In the heart of a volcano, they designed and constructed the Instrument — a monumental engine that channels lava into aqueducts to power their kingdom of Hearthfire.
But nothing could prepare them for the Scorched. Corrupted Dread monstrosities of flesh and coal swept through Brimstone, bringing Hearthfire — and the Draek’s legacy — to its knees.
Community Update
Community is KING! Always and forever, AMEN. We’ve been busy working on a series of incentivised community initiatives to grow and engage the community while we patiently await alpha testnet. The core marketing objective this quarter is to grow our pre-registration email list, so here is a breakdown of some of the live and upcoming community initiatives designed to help us achieve our growth goals and engage this amazing community…
Loot Bolt
You may have noticed that we’ve been demoing the community building platform, LootBolt, to expand our reach and enhance the experience of members within our community. LootBolt will provide new opportunities for community members to earn rewards in $GOG, NFTs, and exclusive experiences by contributing to bounties via Bolt. The objective of LootBolt is to grow the GOG brand, expand our game to new audiences, and reward our most loyal community builders. If you’ve been following our Discord, you may have participated in some bounties already, such as the TikTok challenge, meme contest and newly released ‘Touch Grass’ bounty. Jump into the #bolt-bounties channel on Discord to get involved in this exciting community experience!
The GOG Influencer program
The Guild of Guardians influencer program is a result-driven campaign designed to reward influencers for growing our pre-registration email list. We recently shared an application form via Discord and received over 200 applications! This program is ongoing, as is influencer recruitment. So if you think you’ve got what it takes to influence and help grow the Guild of Guardians community, apply now!
The GOG referral program
We’re also busy building an ongoing and self-sustaining referral program. Similar to the influencer program, we want to empower and incentivise the community to spread the good word of GOG and to enable consistent growth. Keep an ear to the ground, as we’ll be sharing more info on this soon.
Product update — Sushi Onsen Rewards
We’ve topped up the Sushi Onsen reward pool again! Our liquidity incentive remains at 4,000 $GOG/day until September 19th and will halve to 2,000 $GOG/day thereafter. You can find the rewarder contract here.
Team update
Can’t stop, won’t stop! Bear market or not, we continue to grow and recruit top talent. Please welcome our newest Guild of Guardians team members 👇🏽
From top left to right — Tom, Debra, Hensley, Collin, Romana, Przemek, Nik, Brooke
Tom Ngo | Marketing — Social Media and Content
Debra Anne | Marketing — partnerships
Hensley Edwin | Production — Live Operations
Collin Li | Token Management
Romana Witschi | Production
Przemek Gladkiewicz | Game Design
Nik Goundry | Production
Przemek Gladkiewicz | Game Design
Brooke Clarke | Game Analyst
Closing remarks
Thank you for all your overwhelming support. We’re always open to feedback and improvement, in particular in how we can communicate better and share updates with the community. Let us know what you liked and didn’t like about this Dev Diaries and which areas you are most keen for us to share more information on!
Guild of Guardians — the community that is spearheading the future of gaming.
Oh, and in case you missed it, be sure to check out our latest pre-registration sizzle reel! 👇🏽
