Our challenges from the start ( 2021 to Q2 2022 )

As I mentioned in "Why we or I do this project", there were five people in our founder teams. Even though we share our goal in this project but not all of us can devote ourselves wholeheartedly to the project.

I, Utu as the leader and founder of the project start this project alone in the midyear of 2020. At that moment what I want to do was only private space project liked. It was basically just like the OnCyber platform with more features but at that time there was still no platform like OnCyber.

I tried to ask my other co-founder to do the project many years before but it didn't work so I had to learn coding by myself to create a product just for myself but at the end of the year 2020, the cryptocurrency craze took off, so I did succeed in finding more team members. All of them majored in computer sciences and were my friends back from university days. The team started to increase from me alone to 3 members, all developers, so we need to find some artists, we start by finding around our circle, and we got our 4th and 5th but in the end, all of the artist co-founders decided to quit the project. That time we got 4 founders, all developers, so we decided to try to do the art part by ourselves for a month, but the result was not good enough for our project. I decided to post the team member recruitment on the Internet and finally, we got our current artist as a co-founder. Before starting to work together, I ask him the purpose of joining our project, is it about money? He said it was not about money, he wanted to try something new. He has already got enough money from his main NFT collection at that moment. This seems to match my purpose as well. It took us about 2-3 months until we finished all of the 10k animated files.

It was very tired before launching our project. It was around a week before Christmas 2021, the deploy gas for the smart contract was around 0.04-0.1 ETH at that time, even though it's on Optimism ( Mainnet was like ten times higher ). We were quite afraid that there might be some bug we didn't see and will have to deploy more than one time. But finally, it's seem like everything was ok after then.

The website launching was in the time of the play to earn craze, many people thought we were gonna use the classic model of play to earn which was similar to a Ponzi scheme. So we had to clarify on our discord FAQ and on the website that we did not use that model. We intended to create a free market where real demand meets supply, just like a traditional online game with the feature to put all of your valuable assets in the blockchain. So you can transfer them anywhere and do anything you want with them.

We believe that most people who buy products or services should buy for the usage purpose, not for speculation. It is understandable that there could be some speculation, but the ratio of speculation should be quite smaller than the buy-for-use one. We didn't want to cause financial problems to any of our end-user or buyers.

We did open the whitelist registration form and got a number of around 100 NFT that they intend to buy, but on the first day that we opened for whitelisted mint, we got only around 2-3 people, by the first 3 months after we open for whitelisted mint, we sold only 10+ NFT. The main reason might be the low amount of people in Optimism, the price of 0.08ETH, the bear market, and the organic way of PR our project, or else.

But while we were thinking about the plan to PR and attract more people to our community, some problems occurred to our team. The co-founder (Dragonis) who proposed the game idea decided not to develop the game if there are not enough funds, even though it's just a mini-game. Since not all of us can do this project full-time, I could not force anyone to do anything they didn't want. We still have the co-founder Rubbadiator who is the most experienced game developer, but his role was agreed upon as the main advisor. So I (Utu) and Aztech, decided to learn Unity to replace Dragonis who left the team. It took us around 4 months until we understand the fundamentals of the game dev. For the mini-game and private space or virtual world, I think it's not that hard but it consumes a tremendous of energy and a lifetime. So you could say that it's hard if we have to deliver it fast. So we decided to cut down the price from 0.08 to 0.04 ETH and refund the 0.04 ETH to everyone who bought before because we could do the mini-game and private space by three people instead of five.

While designing the project, I always make sure that in the worst case I could do everything by myself just like when I was alone the first time, so this situation was not that bad. In fact, it gave me a more clear picture of how we are gonna reach our roadmap's goal. For the mini-game, I planned to make it an on-chain battle game where you can set up some character's parameter to decide the result of the battle, and there could be a system where anyone can guess the result and wedge their ETH. But after learning about Unity, I found a more suitable solution for our long-term plan. I proposed my offer to replace the co-founder position of the left Dragonis with my old friend who was running a board game shop and working as a professional board game designer. He accepted the offer and designed the battle arena card game for us. The concept was a quick-paced board game that can play without the need to hide anything from your opponent, so we could make it on-chain later. Our new Dragonis(temp name) decided to use dice as a mechanic to make it hard to predict the game result while still using skill to decide the victory.

While we were developing the card game and private space, Optimism got a lot of traffic by the governance token drop, we increased the gladiator's mint from 10s to 30s. It was a good sign that there are still people who share the same beliefs and values as us.

We think when the mini-game and the private space are ready for the public, we could create more activity for our community and grow organically. There is a mechanic that we are designed to get more engagement and attract more real people to the community.

Finally, thank you to everyone who supports us.