ONE37pm: Give us a brief overview of Guild of Guardians and how the player response has been thus far.
Derek Lau: Guild Of Guardians is a mobile RPG that will allow players to turn their gaming passions into assets. It will be a multiplayer, fantasy, action RPG where players build their dream team of ‘Guardians’ and compete in a guild to earn epic rewards. We firmly believe that blockchain games should be both fun, and rewarding and that neither of those two realms should come at the expense of the other. Guild Of Guardians is built to tick both of those boxes, satisfying gamers and players of all different motivations and desires.
The Player Response Thus Far - In a single word? Awesome! We’re currently sitting at 116,000 pre-registrations for the game, and we’ve got a Discord community of more than 5,400 people (which is growing rapidly). We’ve got 34,000 Twitter followers, and thousands of people have filled out an ‘intent-to-buy’ survey for our pre-sale which goes live in Q2, 2021.
ONE37pm: How should a prospective blockchain game developer proceed if they're looking to get their project off the ground?
Lau: There are many things that a developer can do, depending on where they are at and the size of the team.
First is getting the right talent and knowledge base. There are a lot of differences between blockchain games and normal games - the most obvious one being that ‘normal’ games are built to have closed economies while blockchain games by definition must have open-world economies. It’s critical to learn as much as possible from existing projects and also understand how the blockchain interacts with the various parts of the game - from UX to marketplace to in-game interactions.
Second, they should develop a strategy for the game - Who is the target player? What type of game? Why does blockchain make sense? How are they going to compete? This of course comes together with the usual design and pre-production phase.
Next, they will need funding - this may be straightforward for existing studios or may require some creativity for smaller teams. Luckily the NFT space is hot right now, and a lot of gaming projects will run a “presale” in order to help fund further development by selling exclusive NFTs in the game before it launches.
Finally, they’ll need to execute. The blockchain gaming space evolves quickly, so being able to iterate and experiment will be key to being successful.
ONE37pm: Why is Guild of Guardians building on Immutable X?
Lau: Our goal is to build a quality, mainstream mobile game. This means having the best technology that can scale to millions of players. The most obvious blockchain choice was Ethereum, as it’s the second biggest blockchain and has enormous network effects. Using a sidechain or a different blockchain would be taking a big gamble that ultimately Ethereum will fail - and we don’t want to bet against Ethereum!
Immutable X is an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution, meaning it retains the decentralized security of Ethereum while allowing for instant transactions and no fees. We’re also excited by the plethora of other projects building on Immutable X - as it means the overall ecosystem and marketplace will be much more vibrant!