I think it's no news to people who may read my posts that I've been pretty much all in hive in forever, this does come with some consequences from time to time.
For instance, my life kind of pretty much revolves around it. Gotta travel somewhere? Better make sure that happens when there's not much happening with any of my projects and where I'm not "needed" as much, so plan it around that. Waking up? First thing you do is check your notifications and alerts to catch up on what you may have missed while sleeping.
Gotta admit though that the way things went this year with zing it was one of the most demanding projects I've experienced and I'll be happy to share that workload in the near future, hopefully it'll be someone from here who's just as enthusiastic about it and hopefully already knows a lot about the project who'll wanna take over and can do the work better than I have.
At first I thought it'd be quite easy, it started off easy, the price of Hive was also looking quite well at $1 or so, but of course, nothing good comes easy in this life. Similar to other times where I thought, oh well, it dropped by x%, there's no way it can drop further, right? It somehow always finds a way to do so and I find myself not being able to predict the unpredictable, if that sentence even makes any sense.
Over time there were also a lot of obstacles where I found myself powerless to do anything about it, I just had to wait around for things to get done so I could continue telling people what to do next. This is something that kind of happened a lot, either cause we don't have more people working on parts of the game or cause funding was low to allow us to hire more people. I assume other projects in this space usually acquire funding to make sure they have a 1-2year+ runway and can hire as many team members as they'd need to keep the timeline's in check. That funding usually comes at a cost later on, however, that many people here may not realize or care about. Those investors always look to lock down profits and they will most likely have a big sway on price action later once the token/project is released and able to be exchanged in more places. Imagine if we had sold x million or x% of the total supply to a group of investors for a certain price and only another part of it had gone to regular users crowdfunding it, some times they don't even allow regular people to aid in crowdfunding, they can only buy in much later at a much higher price than those early investors did. Regular users are part of their exit liquidity for that certain profit.
Things are quite different here with zing, though, you can check who got how much and for what, the chain keeps a nice record for everything. For instance it's kind cool that with zing there's someone unrelated to the project who has earned more zing than the people directly involved with its development. This user has been delegating since day one quite consistently and probably forfeited something around 25k hive by now in terms of his delegation to the project and held most of it. There's no user that I can see that owns more than 15% of the total token supply which is quite cool as well, reminds me a little of Hive. Similar to Hive everyone has also had a chance to participate freely, without censorship or pick and choosing from the team or founder, even if some people I personally don't like were to participate I wouldn't be able to stop them. It's this whole free-market kind of thing from the very beginning til now and in the future.
The cost has also not been "great" to get involved, in other places you'd have to get rid of a large sum of money and then be tense about if you'll ever get to see it back without knowing what the team are doing or what the founders are doing. Here you can easily see for instance that I personally haven't sold any zing that I've earned myself and that I've constantly been around to answer questions or clear things up and keep talking about my plans and current workload with the project.
For instance, recently we updated our XP bar for creatures, implemented how much XP creatures earn in a battle and to include it in the combat log. From the 3d team, we received our first creature with the new team, they're currently working on animations and the cool thing is that since they're a team they work on more things at once which we didn't have the luxury of before. They've now also started working on the first Holozing 3d healer model which is very excited, especially since after that the only thing we'll need to generate will be the environment and we will have at least 1 healer, environment and creatures to showcase the game to people without feeling that we're diminishing first impressions with borrowed temporary assets that don't fit in!
Anyway, this weekend I've been chilling a bit more, usually during times where I had nothing to do and just had to wait around I kept working on future things for when there'll be time to get to them. Things like professions, in-game materials for those professions, different things like creature passive talents and healer talents that won't be implemented in alpha but definitely later as we roll things out one at a time while already having a working product going.
A bit ambitious here but I've even started working on a different game where I'd want the holozing assets to be used in and believe they'll work quite well but with different level progressions, achievements and of course zing earnings.
Being able to plan all these things that we'll get to "eventually" has helped pass the time and not stress about what isn't being done right now that needs to be done or when the project was looking very thin in terms of funding and we had to focus most of it on the crucial parts of development, it helped to not think about all that and just keep moving forward in terms of how I envision it all and what we'll hopefully get to implement later on. I may have planned out the next year if our team stays this size, or just the next few months if we can manage to grow the team after most 3d work which will take a lot of funding from here on out gets finished.
What I'm the most excited about, however, is the future where not only we have excessive funding, but are also generating revenue through other streams, non-web3 streams for instance. Who knows, maybe at some point we may see ourselves doing so well we may have to close or drastically reduce the token issuance we give out to delegators if we feel we'll be okay in terms of paying the team in the near future with revenue we may be getting from other places. It'll leave a lot of room to use it in creative ways to value the community, players and holders and marketing-wise without having to think what we owe some big entity that made the game possible who invested early and owns a big share of the ecosystem.
Anyway, this weekend I chilled out a little bit more than usual, watched some football (lol man city, rekt), started cleaning the house a little bit, have some plans for moving my PC to a different location which may be better for my physical health and played around with Miu a little who's started copying me and getting a bit fatter too lately. :D
The price action of Hive has also caused for some anxiety to drop I feel like, I'm hoping it'll continue/not go back down at least as it'll make a lot of things we have planned possible which of course many of you delegating and supporting the project also have made possible. I hope 2025 will be a great year for zing and that we can start pushing updates and new features out at a much faster pace and them having more impact than "just artwork and random soulbound achievements" as most of the releases this year has been so far. :P
Anyway, thanks for reading. How's your weekend been?
