Seem some chatter on the chain the last few days as I have certain keywords tagged on the FRIDAY bot to alert me when certain accounts are mentioned. There's been talks about Holozing for instance "milking hive", "not having anything to show for", "crying over more funding", etc, so I just figured I'd make a post to check what some of you who may be more reserved concerning delving into the project may be concerned about.
This isn't a "judgement post", while we're all human and question certain activities or lack thereof, I feel like I've been trying to run this project as transparent and close to the heart as I can. I recently "paid" myself some hive from the project and it felt odd, partly cause most of it ended back in as purchase of vials but I get that to outsiders it'd look weird so I made a post mentioning that zing is meant to be ran as a DAO where contributors get an equal amount of rewards back for their time/contributions. Not everyone that's gotten paid from zing for helping it along has for instance bought vials or is holding zing - and that's all fine and their decision, similar to how for every other stakeholder it is their decision if they want to participate in the crowdfunding of the project or not.
Generally the vibes have been quite positive surrounding zing which I am grateful of, but with practically anything that grows beyond a certain amount of users there will always be outliers. For instance I'm sure there's many who are against splinterlands, their proposal or general lack of "going up" which may have driven a lot of players to spend time/energy/money into their ecosystem. Simiarly there may be a lot of people upset about Leo underperforming, also having received DHF funding and a similar sized delegation last I checked as zingtoken. This post isn't meant to go into any of the other projects in detail, simply mentioning some similar projects in this space and how many of them may be in "survival mode" or barely making ends meet with funding I presume.
One thing I need to mention, which I have been a little "unfair" towards the general crowd with, is that there are quite a few developed parts of zing that have yet to see the light of day. I do try to make it clear in my posts rambling about random details of game logic or ideas that "yes, there definitely is a game" and I have cheated with this unfairness to show a few "key" players in the hive space that this isn't a rug or me throwing my reputation down the line to scam people out of their delegations and now hive/hbd for buying vials. Thus I do understand some concerns regarding the lack of us showing what we have so far and how "close" things are to coming together - which I have also often mentioned that due to the game only partially being holo-3d ready with certain assets that can't really be "hidden" if I were to show sneak peeks such as environment or the temporary healer models we are using - it would kind of ruin first impressions of the game and project which we have wanted to maintain in quality until things are presentable.
Another thing is that for an "alpha" version this game is generally quite complex under the hood and I am very much at fault in that case. I could tell you about certain random details we've implemented to make sure it is "web3"-ready to avoid people taking shortcuts/cheating other players, for instance it took us a while to implement a system where "creature-swapping" in-game would result in the previous creature not receiving xp nor a "typevstype" count and how the next creature would only receive partial xp based on the damage output they did towards the enemy creature to prevent players from what some of you may remember from other similar games called "xp sharing".
Thing is, holozing is a very ambitious project, there's a lot of angles either being developed in unison or in periods, let's go into some of them:
Unique creatures created from scratch, have to fit in with the general vibe of the project, have to differ from other games, projects, brands, need names, need evolutions, need a type, need revisions on the looks, need references to make sure certain parts of them end up the way we want them to from the illustrator, need polishing cause illustrator probably does a lot of commission work and for that price won't polish them 100%, need a "radiant" skin, need a "holo-max" skin version, need to be placed on banners for reveals, need to be added towards capture cards both as png's/stills and animated/3d effects. Then we need the same illustrator to create different angles of that creature to make the work of the 3d team possible, one from the front in idle position, one from the side, back and partial top. Then the 3d team starts their work in sculpting the model, revisions back and forth, animations, adding it into the game, assigning 2d pic to its profile, giving it stats, assigning how much stats it can earn per level and per "typevstype" count based on if that creature leveled through easy, medium or difficult battles. We've yet to start balancing which will be quite some work in the private alpha I hope the community will be happy to help with! Now the creature needs a passive talent, something to set it aside further from similar creatures in the future of the same type + balanced stats (is it a tanky electric type or is it a damage dealer type or is it a hybrid) what passive talent should it get that fits with the animal-type, why does Miu get "more resistant to being poisoned" when he's just a random cat? (kind of personal this one I admit) Passive talents are important because it gets players to need to learn the game somewhat to know about it in important pvp battles.
Either way, this is kind of the process for 1 creature, now let's look at some of the other things we've developed so far.
2d healers of 3 different classes and 2 genders, the 2d versions will be generative starting out, i.e. a nature class male healer can look very different from another same class and gender healer based on accessories, colors, backgrounds, rarities, etc. This will of course be way too much to expect us to implement as 3d starting out - we may make exceptions for the rare holo-looking ones but even I know that here I have to draw the line on "okay this is not going to make it into the alpha and beta and I shouldn't even try". Generative nft's have been quite popular over the years on ETH, SOL, BSC, etc, aside from it just being artsy our healers will of course also have a use-case in the game, they will have healing abilities to aid their creatures in PVE and PVP battles. In generative nft's (think Runi of splinterlands if you aren't familiar with other projects) you need assets/accessories to set the base outlines apart, each healer should be unique and we have 6 different outlines due to 6 different characters. You want a "holo hat" well you gotta make it in 6 different versions so it'll fit that healer outline while accounting for other layers and assets to not go over/cross certain lines, not fit well with that particular assets, many if/then rules, if this asset gets picked then all assets a-f can't get picked since it'd look weird/wouldn't fit in.
That's mostly just going over the 2d versions of the healers, I'm not even going to go into their roles and items that'll provide them with completely different stats compared to the creatures and I didn't even go into those earlier when discussing creatures either.
My point with this half-rambling post is that while there are very few people against holozing that I know of, I'm sure there's others who also don't expect much from it given their lack of support over the years - and that's fine. What does annoy me a little now and then is a few people who've quite literally not done close to anything on hive or have anything to show for keep throwing our name in the mud because it may not fit their expectations or they don't like the way we are crowdfunding quite a massive project on hive. I've heard things like "they're centralizing stake" even though - aside from the zingtober (inktober) event, we pretty much burn most of our voting power on hbd.funder as to not "overreward" content posted about our project with delegated stake by crowdfunders. I.e. we don't just throw hive votes around to anyone who supports us or we think they may re-invest it into the project - something I know some other projects very well do to the point where they differentiate voting strength based on if they pay for certain services of theirs or not. We take our curation quite seriously with curators who've had experience curating in OCD for a long time and constantly keep checking for abuse factors from content creators.
Anyway, before the vial sale went live our delegations were earning us somewhere between 600-700$ in rewards weekly - that's it, that was our funding. We were quite behind on a couple devs here on hive in backpay, our gamedev had a big tab, our previous 3d artist, many other freelancers somehow gave me the benefit of the doubt that I'll make up for the lack of funding at the time because I tried to show them we're a legitimate project but with handicapped funding while often trying to explain what powerdowns are. Even though we are striving to create things as cheaply but retain a good quality as we can in different ways through freelance work that amount of funding at these hive prices is still very, very little for a project this size. Sure you can say it's my fault I didn't expect Hive price to sink this low or that I maybe should've pushed for the vial sale to launch earlier because I wanted to make sure our game had a future and will definitely be a thing before directly taking people's hive/hbd in the form of in-game asset purchases.
I could talk about other people/bigger stakeholders I've been in contact with over the years who for some reason or another have refused to support the project, even though I wouldn't have asked for much from them and most of them would've turned a profit if they had literally traded the zing instantly back for hive as the delegation APR has been over 8.5% for literally the whole year it's been running. I could tell you how some of them quite literally play similar types of games on their free time yet don't give it a second thought that maybe this project could go somewhere - but hey, to each their own. The times when it does get annoying - even though I have quite often attempted to ignore it - is when some try to undermine holozing and what we're trying to build here even though we're quite open about close to everything we can be.
Anyway, in general I'm quite grateful to many of you who've supported the project in one way or another - this isn't a post meant to "nudge" you into supporting the project now. We are quite frankly doing a lot better and looking forward to actually release something soon.
But, if there is something you're still concerned about, I'd be interested in what that might be and maybe I can answer it.
Obviously, you don't need to comment if you aren't into these kinds of games/projects in general and don't see the appeal, that's totally understandable.
Maybe I should've titled this "AMAZING" as in Ask me Anything Zing, but I'll save that for another time when I can be more open about certain things I may not be able to at this time to protect the project/people working on it, maybe I'll title it AMAAZING in that case. (ask me almost anything for you non-redditors).
Oh well, quite a rant here but maybe a good change from the usual "all sunshine and rainbows" posts and comments surrounding the project. :P
