Guild of Guardians — Onboarding the next 100 million gamers to NFTs

Introduction

Welcome Guardians, to the very first blog post of 2022. We’ve recently finished our planning for the year and we’re super excited to share this special edition with you all!

In case you forgot what happened in 2021, make sure you check out our year in review recap!

If you take away just one thing from this article, it should be this:

We are on a journey to onboarding 100 million people to digital assets. 2022 is still just the beginning and will soon be a blimp in our history. Some things might not go to plan, but we’re incredibly excited and grateful to be building Guild of Guardians alongside our amazing community.

Recap of mission and vision

Our mission is to onboard hundreds of millions of gamers into digital ownership via NFTs. This hasn’t changed. And given how quickly the space has grown in the past year alone, we couldn’t be more excited by this challenge!

Our strategy is very simple. Play-and-earn. We want to build an amazing game that players love, in combination with the best of web3 by empowering and rewarding players.

We believe a mobile RPG is the perfect starting point to achieve this mission — a hyper accessible platform, popular game genre, and a design where NFTs can be minted sustainably and gas-free.

We’re already planning for the years ahead, but this year, launching Guild of Guardians is our number one priority.

Roadmap Update

The current timeline in our whitepaper is as follows:

• First-quarter of 2022: Closed invite Alpha.
• Second-quarter of 2022: Soft launch of Alpha (GEMS will be integrated as part of the GoG game economy).
• End of 2022: Launch Beta (possible additional game modes available).
• Second-quarter of 2023: Full launch of the game.

This was written quite a while ago, therefore this roadmap is no longer accurate.

Like all game development, the team is iterating plans as we go, so in the interest of transparency, we wanted to share our updated roadmap for 2022:

2022–2023 roadmap update *Subject to change*

It’s important to note that these dates may change or could even be delayed. Not just because delays are typical in game development, but because we’re working with brand new technologies in ways that no one has ever done before! (including wallets, NFTs, tokens, layer 2 blockchains, etc).

Launch Approach & Rationale

We value transparency and believe it’s important that everyone in our community has a clear and consistent understanding of our launch plan. “Alpha” by itself, is used differently by different games, so we want to share our approach and the rationale behind our plan.

Pre-Alpha Demo

First off — Guild of Guardians is currently in development, and will continue to be in development for a very long time. We have a multi-year roadmap!

As part of development, we would like to invite select members of the community to playtest a demo of Guild of Guardians, which is what we’re calling Pre-Alpha Demo. This will be your opportunity to have an impact on what actually becomes of GOG. It also serves as a small thank you for coming along with us on this journey and is ‘proof’ of the progress the team is making!

The demo will include limited (unpolished) content, won’t be connected to the blockchain and will be run for a limited period of time. More details will come prior to its release.

Alpha Testnet

Once the Pre-Alpha demo is complete, we’ll compile our learnings and apply them to the game, while also working on blockchain integrations in the backend. There is a lot of work to be done with many unknowns. This is due to the multiple complex systems that all involve NFTs and tokens, which work together as part of the core gameplay.

Blockchain + untested economies = high risk, and this is why alpha (testnet) will be run on testnet.

We are still planning to incentivise and reward players, however, we will do so in a controlled environment that will allow us to better optimise for learning.

Further, Alpha Testnet will run for an indeterminate period of time and this will depend on how our systems respond to players from both a technical and design perspective.

Alpha Testnet will include the core systems and content in Guild of Guardians, but players should still anticipate that it is “unpolished” and will continue to be improved.

Beta Mainnet

Once we’re ready (based on data and feedback), we will then proceed to the next phase of launching Guild of Guardians on mainnet. Beta Mainnet will aim to be a more polished and robust version of Alpha (Testnet), both in terms of gameplay and systems. It may also include changes to balance or game features, depending on feedback from the previous launches.

Release

The final phase of Guild of Guardians is to have live operations with regular updates. Our goal here is to have a polished game that can onboard millions of players. We have plans to release additional features, systems and gameplay modes.

What else?

Launching Guild of Guardians is our number one priority. It’s a mammoth team effort and will surely take up most of our time. The team is going to be heads-down focused and as the community knows, we aren’t in the business of ‘hype’ or announcing things before they are ready. This means we may be quieter than usual.

With that being said, we appreciate that we are building this together with the community and we want to provide a high-level update of our other plans for 2022:

1. Growing the team — Guild of Guardians is less than 2 years old. Compare that to popular MMORPGs and MOBAs which have been growing for decades. We need to gear up! So far we’re proud of having grown from a team of 1 to a team of 100+ including contractors and partners, but that isn’t enough. We’re looking to multiply from here. A big focus of this year will be growing the team, consolidating our internal processes and collaboration approaches, and getting ready to scale. These things won’t be visible, and will slow our short-term progress, but are necessary in order to arm ourselves for the challenges ahead!
2. Preparing to scale — The alpha and even beta of Guild of Guardians won’t be its final form. The game will continually evolve and balance, even after it’s released. We also anticipate we’ll run into scaling issues, and will likely be spending a lot of our time in 2022 preparing and dealing with these. We are aiming to serve millions of players and will need to invest the time to ensure this is possible.
3. Supporting and building out the GOG Universe — Guild of Guardians is more than just a mobile game. It’s a community-driven movement to reinvent the gaming industry! We strongly believe that millions of opportunities can evolve and be built out in the GOG Universe. We’re already beginning to see this, with community tools, websites, analysis and even mini-games popping up. In 2022 we want to take this to the next level, by empowering our community to get involved and build out the GOG universe.
4. Project 🦅 — The world is only just now realising the potential of NFTs. We want to be the game that brings NFTs to a mainstream gaming audience, and we have a special project in place to help us achieve this. We’ve had some amazing announcements and partnerships previously, but have plans in place for something bigger than anything else we’ve ever done! Stay tuned and stay curious!
5. Preparing for GOG 2.0 and more — We’ll be working hard this year to refine the Guild of Guardians ‘2.0’ Release roadmap which includes new systems, features and other game modes. While these won’t be implemented this year, it’s critical that we finish designing to get ahead of 2023. We’ll also begin to find new and innovative ways to add utility to the token and NFTs beyond the Guild of Guardians mobile game.

That’s it for now!

None of this will be easy. This is a multi-year, hopefully, multi-decade journey to onboard the next 100 million gamers to NFTs. 2022 will be challenging, and we expect and fully anticipate hurdles along the way.

We’re excited to keep building this together and look forward to an exciting year!

If you want to join us on this journey, we are hiring! Check out the job board here and search for Guild of Guardians!

If you have a big project you want to build in the GOG Universe, please reach out as well! Bonus points if it involves GOG NFTs or tokens — we will try to find a way to support you!