The Guild of Guardian Diaries — Edition #5

Welcome to Edition #5 of The Guild of Guardian Dev 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.

After a very long hiatus, the Dev Diaries are back!

It’s been a while and so much has happened during this time, so there’s a lot to catch up on! But you can expect the Dev Diaries to happen more consistently moving forward.

Coming off the back of a hugely successful Pre-Alpha Demo, we’ve been busy collating the community’s valued feedback, while implementing new developments and improvements. Our once small team continues to grow and we can’t wait to introduce you in due time. This edition of Dev Diaries is a culmination of input from the people behind the scenes tirelessly building the game that is spearheading the next frontier of gaming. LFGOG!!

TL;DR

• The pre-alpha demo was a HUGE success. We outperformed all internal and external metrics, albeit recognise there is a lot to still learn and improve
• The Public Alpha is on track for 2H 2022. There is a lot of work still happening and a LOT of complexity behind it (see details below), but our confidence is high
• The big features we’re excited about include: in-game earning of tokens (Gems), guild crafting and raids, as well as custodial wallets to enable us to onboard millions
• We’re investing heavily in upgrades across design, UX and creative. Some of this is in response to community feedback, other things are pure quality and fun upgrades
• The Guild of Guardians lore and universe are being defined and redefined. This will lay a critical foundation for us to build a truly global and AAA franchise IP
• Active staking is under development and we’re targeting a release before the Public Alpha launch
• We’ve massively grown our internal team, and plan to continue to 2X in the coming months. We’re hiring!
• We’re working on additional programs to engage and reward our community members, including Builders Fund, Guilds 2.0, [Redacted 🙌 🎮] and much, much more
• Bull or bear market doesn’t matter for us — we’re very well funded and here to build

Pre-Alpha Demo Retrospective

Performance & Gameplay

Since the Pre-Alpha Demo, we’ve made a ton of Progress. But first, let’s take a look at how the Pre-Alpha Demo performed and some of the exciting stats that tell us we’re moving in the right direction.

The Pre-Alpha Demo launched in late March 2022 and it actually launched while many of us were at GDC where there was a ton of excitement around GOG. In the demo, we invited 7500 players on iOS and Android who had a time-gated experience of the game at the development state of January 2022.

There was 99%+ uptime, less than 0.01% crashes, and infrastructure and stability tests already achieved production quality. We also achieved strong retention and gameplay metrics (e.g. average player spent 1 hour per day, and 7-day retention was 45%). These are really strong indicators for the future.

Analytics helped us identify HOW players play and progress through the game, balancing questions were answered (Obey the Brimstone trap!), and hero popularity and merging were monitored. Essentially, almost every action you took in-game, gave us meaningful data on what you liked and didn’t like, and where we needed to improve.

All of this data is being taken into consideration for future builds and optimisations.

Pre-Alpha Demo gameplay from playtester Tayored

Economy

The in-game economy of the Pre-Alpha Demo was not a priority. We wanted to emphasise fun so gave no regard to Hero summoning and merge rates. Nevertheless, the economy team did provide significant input in balancing progression goals and content consumption/energy levels to ensure that the limited content we did provide could be enjoyed over the Pre-Alpha period.

We learned a ton and we are implementing a huge amount of design work in the economy going into the Public Alpha release later this year.

The Pre-Alpha Demo was the first time we received a large sample of player data where we could analyse engagement rates with our core audience. The timed introduction of the leaderboard and earnings announcements also gave insights into how earning systems can impact those metrics. We retrospectively evaluated what types of data and analytics we want included in future builds and how that can help us better design Alpha.

Game Development Update

Directly after the Pre-Alpha Demo, we got to work on a lot of these improvements we identified. Starting with, rolling out continuous testing and a build delivery pipeline. Every fortnight, sometimes every week, a build for iOS, Android (and PC for internal uses) is delivered to internal and external testers. Additional feedback is continuously fed back into the design and development pipeline.

Easy Wallet Onboarding

One of the biggest challenges identified is mobile and AppStore onboarding. There are many hurdles currently, and we’re working on streamlining the experience.

The first iteration of Guild of Guardians will feature custodial wallets, which enables us to deliver a mainstream experience and more easily onboard millions. This is a system that allows players without wallets or any crypto experience to play, enjoy and collect rewards.

We have been working hard to prototype this functionality, and in our latest internal build, we managed to successfully integrate custodial wallets for all new players on start, upon email registration.

We’ve also had the latest build reviewed by platform holders and it has been assessed as compliant with all their requirements, unblocking us for a massive global mobile launch. LFGOG!!!

There is a lot more detail about our plans with the custodial wallet, including how it interacts with non-custodial options, which we plan to share in the future.

Roadmap!

One of the exciting things to share is that we have high confidence in our roadmap planning for this and next year. Our Public Alpha on testnet is well on its way for a 2022 release — development is on track. Additionally, cooperation between Stepico as a core mobile developer, GOG internal teams, and art/asset partners has improved and smoothed out massively. We are faster and better than ever before. All of this equates to a better, more polished product.

Blockchain Integration & Play-And-Earn Mechanics

Building a blockchain game is incredibly complex and we want to share more details about why and what exactly the team is doing.

There are two main reasons for the complexity. First, is that we’re working with new technologies and need the backend, game client, and Immutable X to all be connected and talking to each other in a scalable and robust way. The second is that there are a LOT of different blockchain features within Guild of Guardians. Below is a list of some of the areas where blockchain is going to be integrated into the game:

1. Token payouts: Players will be rewarded with Gems for playing the game. Part of the complexity is building a system that ties into daily quests (so that we can improve gameplay and retention) which can also be configured remotely so that different play behaviours can earn the appropriate rewards. We are actively working on how this will work.
2. Merging Heroes: Players can merge up to 8 heroes into one hero of a higher rarity. Part of the complexity is this new hero is minted as a new NFT and must be available both in the player’s custodial wallet and in the player’s game account for in-game usage. Merging heroes is an essential element of the core gameplay and game economy — it adds an additional strategic layer to the game, creates utility for Gems, and allows for ‘play-and-earn.’ All of this is built with the intention of increasing the token value and contributing to the play-and-earn cycle of the player. The player chooses their path for the utility that suits them best.
3. Salvaging: Players will be able to burn equipment items (NFT or non-NFT) in return for some crafting resources. This will help both the balancing of game items and of items on the marketplace. It’s a net sink of resources, and lets players get something back by effectively deconstructing equipment.
4. Guild Crafting: Guild Crafting is the most important and most powerful part of the play-and-earn economy. Guild Crafting will allow guild leaders to collaborate with their guild members to leverage the power and inventory of their guild members to earn a significant amount of ETH (shared with the guild members). This is facilitated primarily through guild raids, earned crafting recipes, and crafted items. This is one of our most complex features, as it involves multiple accounts, wallets, and the calculation and distribution of rewards in a secure manner.
5. Guild Recipes: Guild Recipes will be required in order to craft items. These recipes are earned via ‘Guild Raids,’ which is a new game mode that is also being introduced where Guild members contribute to an epic battle for epic loot. The Guild Leader will be able to schedule a guild raid with guild members contributing heroes and cubelets (various resources earned while playing) to the success of the raid. After the raid is finished, rewards are handed out to all participating guild members and the earned recipe is stored in the guild bank, ready to be used for guild crafting. These crafting recipes will be essential to the utility of guilds and their output.
6. Marketplace: To support all of the above, we’re also reviewing the marketplace and trading experience to ensure players have a good time out of the game as well as in-game.
7. Custodial wallet bridge: In the first version of Guild of Guardians, players will have the option to go back and forth to deposit and withdraw from their custodial wallet whenever they want. This enables a mainstream onboarding experience and provides more comfort to players who may want to store higher rarity NFTs elsewhere.

Ultimately, we’re building a big in-game economy that no one in the world has ever tried to do before, and this means a lot of engineering complexity which will take time & effort to get right. Note this is still only the beginning, and more features will come out over time after the launch of test net Alpha.

Game Design Updates

All of the production improvements allow us to ramp up on incredibly exciting new gameplay features and processes. Since the Pre-Alpha Demo, we have structured ourselves post-alpha in 3 core lanes: 1) Features group to focus on key feature development, 2) Gameplay group dedicated to gameplay improvements, 3) Economy group which is dedicated to economy balancing, which is going to be addressed more in a later segment in this article.

UX/UI Improvements

Some of the most important features we’ve been working on are UX/UI (User Experience/User Interface) improvements. Let’s take a look at some of these.

Readability and feedback

When looking at the feedback around the Pre-Alpha Demo, players were left a bit wanting in terms of the information that was being communicated. So we’re adding many indicators to improve readability and feedback. For example, indicators letting you know when you’ve been hit, and when you’ve hit an enemy. This seems basic but makes a huge difference. We’re adding better directional information so you have a better understanding of where you’re facing. And finally, we’re adding better ability indicators so you can see enemies attacking you and the abilities that you’re using against enemies.

Metagame and theory-crafting

Min/Maxers will be happy about the improvements we’re working on. We want to help the player make strategic decisions. What items to wear, which heroes to choose, and what synergies you need will all go into the success or failure of a run. We are prioritising improvements on how we’re comparing items, heroes, ultimates, and more so that every decision you make you feel like it has a real impact. Essentially, we are reducing friction so that you can do what you want and how you want to do it.

One major step to improving this is by reducing the number of steps for core loop activities. When looking at core loop activities, instead of going from A to B to C to D, can we take the player right from A to D. So reducing the number of taps you need to take on the screens to get to what you want to do is really important and something we’re doing passes on across the board.

UX Passes

Speaking of UX passes across the board, let’s dig in a little more into what we mean by that. First of all, as we advance the development of the game, we are looking at adding new gameplay modes. As we add these modes, we want there to be a seamless experience across the entire game from your home screen, to in-game, to leaderboards.

Bots

An extremely high priority for us is investigating bot countermeasures. We’re currently modelling and breaking down how someone can exploit through automated program mitigation. This is a top priority through gameplay and UX as a lot of the various countermeasures are directly tied to gameplay flow.

Live Ops

Beyond the work that’s going on in the game, we are also working on quite a bit out of game. For example, website interaction is a big one for us. How our website is tied into the game and vice versa creates a holistic experience whether you’re grinding dungeons or planning your next purchase.

Level Design Updates

We learned a ton in our Pre-Alpha Demo about our levels and what you thought of them. While many of you enjoyed them, we felt the experience lacked depth. We’ve spent a lot of time asking what we can do to fix our level design.

One of the first things we looked at is automation integration. This is integrating procedural generation of our maps so that they are different and unique experiences. This boiled down to one thing that has become core when we’re looking at level design: more replayability. Going back to levels to earn currency was a viable strategy in the Pre-Alpha Demo, so how can we make that an experience that a player wants to do, and not has to do. This is a huge priority for our Level Design.

One way to address this is through non-linearity and branching. Instead of going from point A to B, you have options in your paths. Maybe one path is quickest, maybe another has more rewards, etc.

We’re also looking into adding secondary quests, optional quests, and more discoverability. Basically, we want the experience of each dungeon to feel as though you are making your own experience and discovering something new each time.

Economy Updates

In preparation for the Public Alpha, we’ve been doing a ton of modelling and simulations to help our game and community scale for the future. We’re implementing a player growth model to help us understand what it looks like depending on how player data changes. This helps us better manage in-game resources if we have a player base of 10 million or 10 thousand.

This further allows us to plan for things like hero summoning and merging. These models help us determine how many NFTs we will be minting and whether there is corresponding demand. This is huge for balancing our economy and ensuring the Play-And-Earn crowd is content.

As mentioned earlier, another key metric we’re building is Guild returns and crafting models. We want to make sure our guilds feel like crafting will be worth their time and reward. Crafting will be a big part of guilds and we want to ensure output has a return on time and resources invested.

We’ve also been doing a ton of modelling around Gems in-game. We have been modelling for value and volume in different scenarios. We want to make sure the game we’re developing is sustainable in environments we can’t control, i.e., fluctuations in bear/bull markets in NFTs and crypto markets. To address this we’ve been working on models for the supply and demand of tokens so we ideally do not create boom and bust cycles.

Overall, what this leads to is we’ve been identifying our economy's minimum health metrics for Public Alpha. This is a set of metrics that need to be hit in order to give us confidence that the economy will be sustainable on the mainnet. We’ve also been short-listing key risks and how to mitigate them (e.g. Bot detection, multi-account detection, controlling inflation).

Creative Updates

Heroes (or Guardians)

Guild of Guardians is about the Guardians (and the Guilds). We’ve been hard at work creating awesome and new heroes that players will be able to summon only by playing the game. Below are a few leaks of some of these. We’re really upping the quality levels and diversity of the Guardians, and can’t wait to share more details on what they will play like and their abilities in-game!

Animations

With some key roles in place, the GOG animation team is, at long last, a fully armed and operational Death Star. With that in place, we can finally ask the question “How does GOG move?”

The answer is, of course, as stylishly as possible.

This may sound like a minor distinction, but one of our creative tenets is that Guild of Guardians isn’t stylised, it’s stylish. It gives us a term, a space, that we can own — we get to define what that means, what it looks like, and how it feels.

For animation, as you can see above, we’re creating juicy, dynamic movements with exaggerated anticipations and powerful follow-throughs. We’re going back to basics and digging into everything from The Illusion of Life to Street Fighter III — taking inspiration every step along the way.

Feel is an often overlooked aspect of gameplay, especially on mobile. We aim to do better, and animation is a key part of that: we want you to feel every impact and collision, and spine-rattling combo.

Beyond that, animation is an opportunity for characters to reveal and express themselves, and our Guardians — from charming idles to iconic, screen-shaking Ultimate Abilities — are no different. We’ve put together a massive, colorful, and diverse cast of characters, and we can’t wait for you to meet them.

Visual style

Given delays to the initial roadmap, the creative team has also taken a deep dive into how we can continue to upgrade the aesthetic style of the game. We’ve done some initial work at mocking this up for Requiem, and have aspirations to continue to level-up the art quality of Guild of Guardians even after launch.

Important disclaimer that the above visual development won’t be what the game looks like upon launch, but part of a long-term project that we have at Guild of Guardians to make the game better. We operate under the philosophy of continuous improvement. Nothing is ever final.

World & Lore

Guild of Guardians isn’t just a game. It’s a gaming universe and IP. And like any good gaming IP, the world and lore is super important.

Ever wondered why the Guardians exist? Where do each of them come from? What is the world that they inhabit? What are the domains and monsters? We’ve been working on all of this in a lot of detail, because lore and world is a critical component of our long-term plans for Guild of Guardians. More to come on this in a later post.

For now, here is a short preview of the world of Elderym:

Old conflicts arise, new heroes are born, and alliances shift like sands in the desert. The Dread has swayed many wizards, warriors, assassins, and agents, some hidden among the guilds. Who can you trust? Who can you win over? Who must you fight? And what resources will you need to end this blight?

Product Update

Staking

One of the main goals of GOG is to provide more utility to token holders through Active Staking. 20% of all primary sales, as well as 20% of all secondary trading fees to Guild of Guardians, must be paid for in Gems. Gems used in this way are transferred to a rewards pool and distributed proportionately to all Gem holders who actively stake Gems.

This is something I know many of you have been waiting for and we’re very excited to share more in the coming months. Staking is in development and is on track to be released prior to the Public Alpha.

This active staking system can later be gamified where more active users get more rewards, and, moreover, in-game items can get upgraded if staked for a long time.

Team Update

Guild of Guardians has experienced incredible growth. Since the beginning of the year, we have almost doubled our team. We’ve brought amazing people with a strong background in games, so that we can build a great game. Recent hires used to work at EA, Ubisoft, Zynga, Relic Entertainment, Grinding Gears, Mythical, Jam City, Glu Mobile, & more!

The growth isn’t stopping there. We’re actively looking to 2 X our team in the next 6 months. Investing in people is one of the best investments we can make to contribute to the long-term success of Guild of Guardians. We have a grand vision that we haven’t even fully shared with the world yet, and ultimately we need a big team in order to execute all the things we have planned. See more details here about what it’s like to work with Guild of Guardians — we are hiring!

One thing to flag about hiring is that it actually reduces our velocity in the short-term. Hiring isn’t free. It takes time for us to find the best people, review everyone’s resume (yes we respond to everyone who applies), hold interviews and get to know people. It also takes a lot of time to onboard someone new, as there is a lot of complexity behind the scenes, not to mention a lot to learn about Web3 gaming. Therefore if we’re being open with the community, hiring is actually a short-term loss in velocity for us, but we strongly believe will have an incredible long-term impact.

Here are just a few of the incredible talent we’ve brought on board:

Shibu Mathew | VP Product

Sangita Sarkar | Head of Marketing

Justin Kruger | Head of Community

Cheryl Fowlie | Engineering

Thomas Smallridge | Engineering

Hox Ng | Product

Ken Wei | Creative

Sarah Smith | Production

Caitlin Lomax | Production

William Thomsen | Production

Sadly, we are saying goodbye to one of our OG GOG members, Nick Kelland. Nick has stepped down from his position in order to travel and look after his mental health after several years of pushing GOG to be the best it can be. We thank Nick for his dedication and passion for bringing GOG to where it is today. NICK! NICK! NICK! will not be forgotten. The community is in great hands as Ryan Tadveen has stepped up into a full-time Community Manager position. Ryan brings a level of passion for NFT gaming that is unmatched.

Again — we are actively hiring, come apply or refer friends here! See what it’s like to work with us here.

Community Update

The beating heart of Guild of Guardians is the community. It is unique, passionate, and filled with intensely creative minds. As the community grows and our ambitions for the game grows, we want to empower our community to build a better community. We want to give you the tools, resources, and guidance needed to build whatever project you want to see, and we have a few initiatives that we’re working on

Builders Fund

Web3 is all about collaboration and building community, and we’re excited to support you with GOG Builder’s Fund. This fund will directly support creative projects being pitched and worked on. More details will be shared in the future.

Guilds 2.0

To Guilds — we hear you. Many of you have been reaching out to us about working together. We are beginning to formulate a strategic and model that we’re calling ‘Guilds 2.0’. We believe that Guilds have an important role to play in the Web3 gaming ecosystem, but that the current models don’t have the right partnership incentive structures which result in a long-term win-win for all. We’re currently in early discussions with some of the top Blockchain Gaming Guilds in the space to figure out what this new partnership model looks like, and have plans to experiment with some exciting partnerships that will significantly grow the Guild of Guardians ecosystem. If you are interested in working with us, you can email us here.

[Redacted] Partnership

As the community and game grows, so does the excitement of our partners that we’re working with. We have several partnerships in the works, some not yet in the Web3 space, that we are incredibly thrilled about. We’re confident that this will be one of the biggest things to have happened in the web 3 gaming space. 🙌 🎮

Market Outlook Update

Finally, we want to share our approach to what would happen to GOG in a bear market. This is a question that’s been asked a few times during the crypto volatility that everyone recently experienced, so we wanted to address it.

We know that bear markets aren’t going to be fun for our community — many people have investments in crypto and we encourage you to practice good financial management.

However, a bear market is actually a great thing for Guild of Guardians. There are a few reasons for this: first is that we have a lot of cash on hand and a strong runway. Immutable recently raised $200m Series C for this very reason. Even in a multi-year bear market where we make zero revenue, we would still be here. The second reason is that bear markets are where fundamentals, utility and quality matters more. Short-term speculation will reduce, and everyone will turn their attention to quality, utility-based projects such as Guild of Guardians. Third, is that during a bear market we will be able to strike at opportunities where others can’t (perhaps because they haven’t managed their cash as well). Just like how investors will buy when others are fearful, we will seize the opportunity when the market is bear. Finally, a bear market will fundamentally reset prices across the board. Lower prices become an excellent entry point for new players, particularly those who come from a more mainstream gaming audience.

But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. Bull or bear — we build. This is the way to spearheading the future of gaming.

Conclusion

This was a long one, so once again here is the summary:

TL;DR

• The pre-alpha demo was a HUGE success. We outperformed all internal and external metrics, albeit recognise there is a lot to still learn and improve
• The Public Alpha is on track for 2H 2022. There is a lot of work still happening and a LOT of complexity behind it (see details below), but our confidence is high
• The big features we’re excited about include: in-game earning of tokens (Gems), guild crafting and raids, as well as custodial wallets to enable us to onboard millions
• We’re investing heavily in upgrades across design, UX and creative. Some of this is in response to community feedback, other things are pure quality and fun upgrades
• The Guild of Guardians lore and universe are being defined and redefined. This will lay a critical foundation for us to build a truly global and AAA franchise IP
• Active staking is under development and we’re targeting a release before the Public Alpha launch
• We’ve massively grown our internal team, and plan to continue to 2X in the coming months. We’re hiring!
• We’re working on additional programs to engage and reward our community members, including Builders Fund, Guilds 2.0, [Redacted 🙌 🎮] and much, much more
• Bull or bear market doesn’t matter for us — we’re very well funded and here to build

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 🚀