Holo everyone! It's been quite a journey so far, I'm amazed by the support and activity of the community during this time and am glad that things aren't that far off any longer in regards to the starter sale, healer sale and an open alpha and then the open beta where people will be able to start capturing creatures and battle against each other.
While things often feel slow from my point of view, as someone with very limited to no skills when it comes to coding, artwork and generally being able to help move things faster along due to my limitations, I think we've still done quite well in terms of our team-size and our freelance artists from all over the place. Having said that, there's been a few bottlenecks I'd like to discuss, nothing worrisome but just an "it is what it is" kind of thing, some of them being things that can't be helped as well. For instance, artists. While we have many different artists on the team, we can't mix and match them together to focus the workload on certain aspects because that's just not feasible. We can't have an artist who's working on the healers start drawing up creatures cause the style is quite different and it would weaken the quality of the artwork, similarly, we can't switch those up either if we'd decide to take a break from creating new creatures to focus on finishing up the healer generation artwork. There's of course been some overlap on things where we could swap artists, for instance to create the Radiant and Holo-hue effect on creatures we've had our healer artist step up who's done a wonderful job in that regard.
Our process has generally from the beginning been to
- Come up with an idea for creatures, usually to combine something from the animal world with a type that could fit them, as example, a whale usually lives in the ocean so he'll have some water moves and abilities, at the same time they are massive so it would make sense that they are the "tank" of the starter creatures, able to take a lot of damage while deflecting some through high defense and high health points giving room for heals not to have to be cast too often. At the same time, though, we can't also give the whale great attack and agility either, even though it would technically make sense that a whale would cause a lot of damage due to their size, it would in terms of balance make it difficult to empower the other starters if the whale had 3 out of 4 increased stats. Once the idea of the creature is determined, we look for what looks we'd like it to have. This is important because there's a lot of games and characters out there, it's not much about trying to copy others but more about making sure the creature is unique enough to not accidentally look too alike other creatures of existing IP's. We've experimented with Midjourney here to come up with unique looks for the body, eyes, and style on top of being in contact with our chosen artist to see his preferences after we feed him certain references from generated artwork for specific body parts he has not let us down on the end result mixed in with his own style and ideas.
- The generation process of the 2d creature. This has gone quite well with our method above and most of the creatures haven't required a lot of revisions which is surprising considering we're creating something brand new from an idea with a few references to becoming something that's going to live on forever and the community has embraced beautifully with their support and fan artwork. Another thing that's been important here is that the "pose" stance isn't the only thing we require from the 2d artist, we need him to also generated the artwork for different angles to make the life of the 3d artist easier, which means an angle from the front of the creature while it's standing idle, an angle from the side and one from the back (although we discontinued the one from the back unless necessary if the creature has something unique going on there that can't be guesstimated forth from the side angles).
- Inserting the pose 2d creature into our card holder artwork, I'm not going to go much into this point as I want the artwork there to be a surprise when you purchase our "packs" (which won't be packs but let's say packs for simplicities sake right now).
- 3d work. We were lucky to find an award-winning 3d artist who loved the idea of our project and agreed to work with us and our limited funding to bring these creatures to life. This also takes time, though, usually it's been 1-2 weeks per creature so the whole process from 1 to 4 could easily take up to a month to be generated, but of course they've all been working in tandem, i.e. if the 2d creature artist is working on a new creature idea, the 3d artist is working on a creature we created a month ago already.
The nice thing about our project is that it won't require too many creatures to be finished up to 3d for it to get going, in worst case scenario where we don't get a lot of funding generated from our starter sale we can always continue the way we have been doing now and introduce new creatures as they come and implement them into the game-roster to be captured, leveled up and evolved, etc. Even in the absolute worst case scenario where you have to settle in on just having a temporary character you can't see yet but you know what the name and ID will represent, but we're not that in a rush to introduce new creatures yet because the game hasn't launched yet. We would like to launch the game once we have a nice roster of 30+ creatures all in 3d so it would be a pleasent user experience for players and collectors from the beginning. We will however invite people in for a closed alpha here soon with the understanding that not all creatures and healers will exist in 3d yet as long as they can help us fine-tune balance and abilities in the game.
So while the support and welcome of the Hive community has been amazing, you can probably tell that the way we generate funding has been quite limited so far, our account zingtoken isn't even able to fully power down what it earns daily yet. At the same time most of our devs and helpers from the hive side are yet to be paid for their amount of work, something I'm truly grateful for that they've trusted me with their time and effort and something I hope to rectify soon come starter sale. We believed that it's important to keep things moving forward, though, which means we've spent the funding zing has received through delegations to constantly create new assets and finish them up to be game-ready as soon as possible. It's not easy starting things fairly and funding them through locked up hive, but we believe it'll be worth it in the end knowing our contributors, everyone, big and small, has proportionally helped in creating the Holozing ecosystem. It definitely beats getting millions of funding from VC's, institutions, etc, and the owe them a lot later on or have them control majority stake in the ecosystem even if it means we'd be able to have a 5-10x bigger team and creating assets, gameplay, etc, much faster. Slow and steady!
This is also why the artwork has been important to be done well from the very beginning, re-doing artwork is never a good idea long-term, but Holozing and its assets are important to be done well because they will serve many purposes over time and they also serve the purpose of collection value. The initial game of capturing creatures, training them and battling each other is not where we'll take a break and end things, quite the opposite, we hope that it will bring in enough people to casually play and stay vested in the ecosystem, allow for a great distribution of zing to as many people as possible and of course also bring in new people to the hive ecosystem through zing.
Right now, in terms of funding, the project is about 40% art, 40% game and 20% various other developments like website, backend, etc. Eventually of course the artwork will have to take a break here and there until the next expansion comes along but as someone mentioned in the comments we're not just creating a game, we're creating a brand and with the way things have been going it seems the community loves it and can't wait to see it grow. This brand will always be interconnected with the zing token and this brand won't be sold to an entity or corporation. The way we have planned things will surely become interesting once things start to grow and value starts to be generated properly. While things are bit bottle-necky at the moment, we hope that with the release of the starters we'll be able to not just get out of debt with the project but also be able to scale it up to hire more crucial team members and remove the bottlenecks that have existed so far but couldn't be helped due to the nature of the project.
We're also looking forward to hire some help from the Hive community here in the near future so that's something to look out for, for those interested in the game and wanting to help it move along in some aspects while earning some hive for it!
There's quite a few moving parts when organizing a project of this size, I can't say it hasn't been stressful and tedious at times but at the same time I'm super excited to see what it can become, the way it was launched and built is quite unique in the space and something not many will be able to match or even want to due to their own interests. It will also be interesting to see what it can become if everything is constantly re-invested into the ecosystem.
Anyway, just some thoughts, thanks for reading.
image created with midjourney for this post.