The Guild of Guardian Diaries — Edition #4

10 min readDec 3, 2021

Welcome to Edition #4 of The Guild of Guardian Diaries!

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.

Quick recap of Accomplishments, since we last spoke!

1. Wave 3 NFT Founder Sale

We sold 190,000 wave 3 founder NFTs in around 90 minutes. That is insane. We were excited to distribute our precious Pets and Rare Heroes to our ever-growing community. With that, we have now officially closed all founder NFT waves. No more!

2. Gas refund

We experienced a front-end issue during the drop, meaning lots of users had failed transactions because of a mistake we made.

As always, we keep the community front of mind, and we care. Alot. We decided to refund the gas fees for ALL of those failed transactions from the start of the sale until the end of the sale. The total amount refunded was 50 ETH (or $210k).

3. Unique owners and trade volume

We are about to broach 10,000 unique owners, and $10m USD traded on Immutable X (with no gas!). That is such a healthy figure, and we can’t wait to see it continue to grow. This game is going to melt faces, and we have the community to match it.

4. Moonpay integration with Immutable X!

We are deadly serious about taking play-AND-earn mainstream, and to the masses. The GOG family, brand and project is a flagship product in the space, and we strive every single day to get to that goal. In-game asset ownership is something we all care passionately about, and we have already achieved so much.

Immutable X is partnering with MoonPay, which is another leap in the right direction for us all. Their service (and this partnership) essentially means that alongside gas free minting and trading of your assets on Immutable X, we will have a future where Instant credit card purchases of L2 $ETH, $USDC + $IMX on Immutable X will also have no gas fees.

5. New team members!

Since our last update, we have made a number of key hires. We’ve brought in a content and social media manager, a head of game economy, an engineering manager, and we have just extended an offer to our new community manager, who has accepted. We’re excited to introduce the community to our new team members!

6. NRG Sale

The NRG sale will be live soon! Keep an eye on Discord and Twitter for more details. Final engineering tests are underway at HQ.

7. Coinlist Token Sale

We sold out our token sale on Coinlist (6% of total supply pool) with an 82x oversubscription rate. There are more than 10,000 token holders, from more than 100 countries, before the GOG token is even live on secondary exchanges/DEX’s.

Now… UPDATES!!

Words From The Senior Game Designer

Hiya Guardians, we’re back and got lots more to talk about! As we’ve gotten closer to the end of the year you’ve all probably noticed the leaks have been getting more and more detailed. We’ve been growing our team and putting in hundreds of extra hours into making our vision come to life. Things are looking PRETTY COOL on our end! Let’s dig in!

And as usual… The things I’m about to speak to are all subject to change. We’re a game in active development and WILL change things constantly.

Heroes

Let’s kick things off with the foundation of GoG’s gameplay: Heroes. We’ve done a few chats about them in the past, but over the last month or so we’ve made tons of progress on balancing all the individual aspects of each Hero. Right now we’re up to 70+ Heroes and counting!

Each of those Heroes comes with a few things.

Faction

Horde
Empire
Glade

Class

Melee
Ranged
Mage

Role

Damage: High damage, self buffs, and nukes
Support: Allied ability buffs
Tank: High survivability and damage mitigation.
Bruiser: Mix of survivability, sustainability, and damage.
Control: Debuffs, crowd control, and area of effect.
Healer: Health recovery and Shielding

Rarity

Common
Rare
Epic
Legendary

Chroma

Cosmetic variations of Heroes.

Normal
Warrior
Elite
Mythic

Element

Fire
Water
Earth
Light
Dark
Aether

Ultimate Ability

Each Hero has a unique Ultimate ability that corresponds to their Role.

Control: “Create a black hole that pulls enemies towards it and deals damage based on their proximity.”
Damage: “Deal moderate damage to enemies in a wide cone. Blinded enemies receive extra damage.”
Bruiser: “Deal a rapid flurry of blows in front of the Hero dealing 5 guaranteed critical hits. Double dodge chance for 10 seconds.”
Tank: “Taunt surrounding enemies for 5 seconds.”
Healer: “Throw a flask that creates a pool of liquid that heals allies and damages enemies.”
Support: “Apply armor reducing debuff to all enemies in front of Hero. Apply lifesteal to all nearby allies.”

Passive Ability

Each Hero has a passive that provides a bonus to core stats or abilities.

Eg. “Last attack in combo creates a small blizzard on target that deals damage and slows enemies.”
Eg. “When slowed, deal damage to all nearby enemies.”
Eg. ”Every enemy this Hero kills provides bonus armor that stacks up to 10 times.”

Core Hero Stats

The building blocks of a Hero. Some of these increase as you level up or can be increased by Equipment, Artifacts, Synergies, or the effects of squadmates.

Health
Mana
Mana Gain
Attack Damage
Attack Speed
Attack Range
Movement Speed
Armor

Equipment

Equipment is meant to be the main source of additional stats for players and can be obtained from Dungeons and the marketplace (after being crafting by Guilds).
Each piece of equipment comes with a power rating and a set of stats that directly affect the Hero they’re equipped on.
Equipment follows the same rarity table as Heroes. Rarity determines how many different stats a piece of equipment can have. The rarer the item the more stats it has.
Each piece of equipment has a level requirement to equip. Each rarity tier requires a higher level requirement than the one before it.
In Alpha equipment does not change the outward appearance of heroes.
Equipment stat distribution is designed to favor specific roles. This is to avoid specific scenarios like finding Damage gear with Tank stats.

Stats that equipment can currently have are:

Health
Health Regen
Mana Gain
Attack Damage
Attack Speed
Crit Chance
Crit Power
Life Steal
Armor Penetration
Armor
Block Chance

Artifacts

Artifacts are some of the most powerful items in the game. They are not easily acquired and meant to be late game items to give Heroes the edge they need to overcome our most difficult challenges.
Each one gives the equipped Hero a special passive ability that can easily tilt battles in your favor.
These special abilities need to be triggered in order to activate. Some Artifacts may only proc on critical hits while some only proc while the character is moving.
Players can craft Artifacts with Artifact Shards
Artifact Shards are a special currency that are specific for each Artifact (meaning each artifact has its own separate shards)
Eg. To craft the “Josiah’s Ring of AMA” you’ll need 50 Josiah’s ring artifact shards. Shards for “Nick’s Spear of Wen Wave 3” cannot be used to craft Josiah’s ring.
Artifacts can be upgraded to make them more powerful. Each time you upgrade an Artifact the costs increase exponentially.

Speak soon!

Words From The UX Lead

Hey again 👋 This is Nalin. In my last update, I shared some of the UX design progress on various aspects of gameplay and how their information and interfaces are presented to the player. Between the core loop, the metagame, and everything in between, there’s a lot of information for a player to understand and navigate! Where do they get started? Well, at the beginning I suppose.

Over the past month or so, a large part of our focus has been on designing just that — the first few minutes of the game to best onboard our users to feel awesome and empowered. A new player needs to quickly grasp the basic parameters of how to play so they can attain a sense of agency, but this has to be balanced against managing cognitive load and a feeling of overwhelm. Beyond the mechanical aspects, a new player needs to quickly feel drawn into the lore, immersed in the world and its plight, and invested in the heroes who might just have a crack at saving the day (with a little bit of help from you, that is). Below are some select moments from the balancing act of designing this first experience for Guild of Guardians.

Note: A lot of this is work in progress (depicted as monochrome here) and thus subject to evolve as we develop the game and take in feedback from people like you!

Learning the basics

Guild of Guardians starts you off with one hero on their way to a safe station. Here you will learn the basics of movement and exploration.

Meeting other heroes

Along the way, you will meet your first hero who will join you on your adventure.

Fighting together

Only by sticking together and fighting hand-in-hand will you be able to get to safety, (mostly) unscathed.

Arriving

After surviving your first ordeal, your heroes arrive together…

Entering the town

…at an encampment where they can congregate.

Get ready, get set…

At this point, you finally get to meet them, learn about their traits and how to best optimize your squad for the journeys ahead.

With an understanding of the who, what, where and why, we intend to gently enable the player to start writing their own script instead of following ours, all the while guiding them contextually with new information and abilities as their situations dictate. This is an ongoing journey for us to design, but it’s come together in a big way in recent weeks. We can’t wait for you to start your journey and first experience Guild of Guardians soon! :)

Updated Gameplay stills from the Senior Game Producer

Improved pathfinding and AI companions behaviour, Tanking and Kiting works a LOT better now, and reworked light calculation, color lights & shadow casting

Victory screen overhaul

And from the dungeons of production -> New hero selection / squad screen

Images and Words From The Art Director

Aaron here, and I am back with more juicy assets for you all to feast your eyes upon!

As Josiah has previously mentioned, we are up to around 70 fully created and designed Heroes. Seeing the progress in our backend makes me so happy. You all are in for an absolute treat when you get this game in your hands.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a deeper look at how concepts are taken from ideation, through to execution. As an artist, it’s easiest not to explain this with words, but, well, to illustrate it!

And yes, I’ve included your first OFFICIAL boss leak. ENJOY!

That is all for now. See you at the next update!

What’s coming up next?

NRG sale

The GOG x NRG Hero Sale will also be going live soon. The details of the partnership can be found here.

This is a playable in-game Legendary hero, and it represents the collaboration between NRG Esports and Guild of Guardians.

We are essentially at the final stages of our engineering and testing. Dropping this through an L2 solution (end-to-end) means build up and testing does take longer. Security and safety > speed, as always.

You can expect news on specific dates pretty soon, though. Exciting times!

Other activities and Q4 plans

Keep an eye out for token updates.

And, what is this?????