Space Summary
The Twitter Space Faenora x NT | AMA hosted by NeoTokyoCode. Explore the captivating journey of Faenora x NT as they venture into the realm of Crypto Gaming Illuminati, collaborating to shape the Metaverse from the heart of The Citadel. Discover the strategic fusion of creativity, technology, and investment in building interconnected virtual worlds powered by $BYTES. Gain insights into the visionary perspectives shared on the future landscape of the Gaming and Cryptocurrency convergence, shedding light on the innovative contributions of the Illuminati community in the digital realm.
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Space Statistics
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Questions
Q: What is Faenora x NT's core focus in the Metaverse development?
A: Their collaboration aims to fuse creativity, technology, and investment for innovative Crypto Gaming experiences.
Q: How does The Citadel play a pivotal role in shaping the Metaverse?
A: It serves as the central hub for creativity, collaboration, and technological advancements within the virtual landscape.
Q: What sets $BYTES apart in powering the interconnected codes?
A: $BYTES provides the fuel for seamless integration and interlinking of technologies within the Metaverse.
Q: Why is the Illuminati community significant in the world of Crypto Gaming?
A: Their contributions drive forward-thinking initiatives, fostering creativity and innovation in the gaming space.
Q: What visionary perspectives are shared regarding the future of virtual worlds?
A: The conversation delves into the convergence of Cryptocurrency, Gaming, and technology, painting a futuristic scenario of interconnected digital realms.
Highlights
Time: 00:12:45
Faenora x NT Collaboration Insights Exploring the strategic partnership between Faenora and NT in the Metaverse development.
Time: 00:25:18
The Illuminati's Innovative Approach to Crypto Gaming Understanding the unique strategies employed by the Illuminati community in the gaming sphere.
Time: 00:40:55
The Citadel's Role in Metaverse Development Delving into the significance of The Citadel as a central hub for creativity and innovation in the virtual world.
Time: 00:55:30
$BYTES Powering Interconnected Codes Insights on how $BYTES fuels seamless integration of technologies within the Metaverse.
Time: 01:10:20
Visionary Outlook on Cryptocurrency-Gaming Fusion Discussing futuristic scenarios where Cryptocurrency and Gaming intertwine to create innovative virtual experiences.
Key Takeaways
- Understanding the collaboration between Faenora and NT in building the Metaverse.
- Insights on the innovative approach to Crypto Gaming by the Illuminati community.
- The importance of collaborative efforts of Builders and Investors in shaping the Metaverse.
- Exploring the central role of The Citadel in the development of the Metaverse.
- The significance of $BYTES in powering the interconnected codes within the Metaverse.
- Learning about the strategic vision behind the Faenora x NT partnership.
- Implications of the Illuminati community's contributions to the Crypto Gaming space.
- The intricate relationship between technology, creativity, and investment in the Metaverse.
- Visionary outlook on the future landscape of the Cryptocurrency and Gaming convergence.
- The unique blend of creativity and technology in the construction of virtual worlds.
Behind the Mic
Welcome and Introductions
GM. GM, everybody. Thank you guys for getting here nice and early. Super stoked for the space today. Make yourselves comfortable. We're going to do a couple mic checks. We're going to get the audience in, and then we'll get started at just around five after. Nathan, quick mic check on you.
Mic Check Preparations
Hey, how do I sound? It's awesome to be here. You're coming in a little crackly. Could you give me another mic check? Okay. Yeah, yeah. And I can switch out. I have some bluetooth headphones. It's better. I can swap that out, too. Yeah, if you don't mind throwing those on. This sounds like a little like Tinny, if you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, I gotcha. One sec. Yeah, no Seth. And then we've got the phenora account in the business. What's going on, Deshawn?
Further Mic Checks
Hey, how's it going? Can you guys hear me? Loud and clear. Perfect. How's this? Is this any better? That's much better. Sweet. All right, we'll go with this. Hell, yeah. I'm gonna get Ben up here. Thanks to all the citizens for getting here nice and early. And we're gonna get started at the live after.
Getting into the AMA
What up, Ben? Little mic check on you, brother. Gmgm, ladies and gentlemen, I'm so excited to jump into this ama whenever we get to it. But for now, let's do the mic check. Chicken tenders. Chicken tenders. Leveraging long soul irresponsibly. Chicken tenders. Everything coming through all right? Loud and clear. And now I want some raisin canes. Awesome. What's up, fey nor crew? How you guys doing? Fantastic.
General Well-Being
Yeah. So good to be here. Doing pretty good. Doing pretty good. Pretty excited about today. So ready to answer all the questions I can and make it sound as interesting as possible and go from there. Sweet. Hell yeah. We are at five after Bob. Appreciate you dropping the alpha in the comment section. Maybe that's why I have not defeated the Griffin. I've got too many healers in my deck.
Introduction to Feynora and Team
But Ben would love for you to kick us off today. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Feynora and Neo Tokyo Ama. I am joined, as always, by the greatest co host of all time, Mister Crypto Ethiopia, the Giga. Chad. How are you, sir? Dude, I'm doing wonderful. I've been stoked to dive into this ama since I got my hands on Feynora for the first time. We'll get into those details during the AMA, but absolutely fired up to be here.
Getting Deeper Into Feynora
Yeah. Yeah. And let's go ahead and jump into Fenora gents, maybe you could introduce yourselves behind the accounts here and then let's do a deep dive. Take us into the world of Fenora. That sounds fantastic. And I feel like I need to work on my trailer voice too. In a world where Fenora reigns. Epic. Anyways, I'm Nathan Montgomery. I am the CEO and creative director of the Phenoraverse and our game wildlands of Phenora, which is, for those who don't know, a pixel art rogue lite tactics rpg built from the ground up to be something different from a game standpoint, so completely unique in its own right.
Enhancing the Game Experience
And then we're just layering in all of this awesome web three goodness on top of it that we look forward to diving into. And behind the frenure account. My name is Deshawn Baloch. Been in the gaming space as a consumer for a while. I used to be a professional magic the gathering player for about three years, you know, did the whole World of Warcraft game of, you know, that whole thing became gladiator. It was pretty decent at three v three, but on the professional side, was in Texas, worked at a couple of different YC combinator companies.
Deshawn's Background
And now I'm helping out with the gamification balancing and a lot of the structure behind how we're approaching the web three side. So, yeah, that's me. Boom. And let's do a deep dive into fenora. I'd love to actually just jump into the story, and by that I mean the origin story of the project, how the team came together, how the idea was born, and just give us the whole full rundown. We have long form time, so let's go into long form content, give us a juicy detail.
Origins of the Project
Oh, fantastic. I love that. And I love that question, and I'm not going to feel like I need to rush it, which is great. So my background is as a corporate lawyer doing corporate finance and securities laws. Not typically what you hear of when it's, hey, tell me the idea behind a video game. But that's how I got started out and went into the blockchain space in 2017 after I left private practice and was head of legal for a private bank up in Canada. There I helped them set up one of the first regulated cryptocurrency exchanges in Canada.
Transition to Blockchain and Gaming
And that's where I got into more of the web three cryptocurrency, blockchain side of things. Did a number of things since leaving there a couple years later. And basically I was looking at the state of blockchain gaming two years ago just as a gamer, right? I grew up and I've loved playing video games ever since I was a kid. And it's not going to be any surprise that one of my favorite genres was kind of tactics, rpg's strategy rpg's like Ogre battle and Final Fantasy tactics, which anyone who sees the wildlands of Fanora, you're going to see that pretty clearly right off the bat.
Vision Behind Feynora
But I started looking at it and thinking, well, my issue on the cryptocurrency side of things is a lot of scammy products, projects that you don't trust, and rug pulls and all of that. And when I'm looking at blockchain gaming, why am I getting a lot of the same concerns when the focus in the gaming world should just be on making fun games? So I had a little bit of a thought experiment of, well, what would happen if I would start a game studio and have the one driving goal being let's just make the game that I would love to play as a kid and not, and use blockchain to make that better.
Focus on Gaming Experience
If it can be done and not use it for an ounce of anything, that would be outside of that sole purpose of making the gaming experience better. So for me, that meant the blockchain pieces needed to be optional for me to be able to compare apples to apples. The same game experience without blockchain versus the same game experience with blockchain. And then it needed to be done in a super deliberate way. And that is why we haven't sold any tokens. That's why we haven't done any pre sales before people could play the game itself.
Ensuring Game Quality
Because my concern with that was if we would sell tokens or sell nfts before people could play the game, then it's the token and the NFT that's the product, it's not the game itself. And so what I wanted to do is, first off, make sure, hey, can we make a game that people love to play? And luckily we've done our alpha demo and people are playing it and they're really excited about it. So it seems like we've hit the mark on that. So now the next step is going to be diving into, okay, now that we have that as our foundation, and it really is a foundation that we're going to be building on, how can we, in a very meaningful way, use these different features that blockchain as a tool can unlock to make that core game experience better?
Building Upon the Foundation
So everything we've done with blockchain in this web three mode that we're building out is done from the ground up. From a game design perspective, I did all the game design for the game itself. I was a super nerd as a kid. If you would ask my brother's girlfriends at the time, they always thought it was ridiculous for me to be playing so many video games, but I would always dive into the stats and the game design and the mechanics and all of that to optimize what I was doing. And that helped here, where I basically built it from the ground up of this idea.
Engaging Gameplay Design
How do we make a game that's really engaging, has that captivating gameplay loop, and you can just build out a really deep system around it that creates longevity, that creates modularity to build on add on events and all this stuff that we have planned. So that's really. I don't think that. I think that captures the essence, at least of what we're doing. And it's just 100% to make the best games that we can and to see if blockchain is used deliberately, if we can actually make the game better doing that.
Game Modes and Development
And then maybe talk about some of the mechanics that you were thinking through, of what you wanted to tackle. Because there are a lot of different types of game modes. Some people are just good at different types, depending on resource availability, so on and so forth. So how did you all think through, okay, how exactly are we going to approach this? And then what did you ultimately decide on? At the end of the day, maybe kind of talk through all that?
Game Design Philosophy
Yeah, that's a great question. And Deshawn, I'll jump into this, and then afterwards you can come in and flesh it out in any way that you think. So, initially, it starts with the realization that we're not going to make a game that 100% of gamers are going to love and want to spend all their time on. You have different strokes for different folks, and they're going to be people who are super excited about the gameplay mode that we have, and we just want to lean into that. So it's within this category of a roguelite tactics RPG where people want to collect, they want to build out and customize their characters and really dive into, how can we. How can I make each one of my specific units as awesome and epic as they can be? And if I like that gameplay loop enough, I'm going to want to do it with a lot of different units and see how I can make each one different and build that out.
Core Gameplay Mechanics
So it starts for us with wildlands, as many layers of gamification. So at a very basic level, you have just completely web two and we have a roguelite game. So our base layer of gamification, if you will, is just that core gameplay loop. You start a playthrough, you're going to have different companions, you're going to choose your path that might lead you to fighting different monsters or getting treasure. And all of that is going to have a randomized new experience that you're going to need to work through. On top of that, there's a web two kind of meta layer. So from each playthrough to the next, you're going to make your classes stronger. You might be able to retain some of the legendary loot that you found. You're going to be able to build up your heroes and your mercenaries. Now, none of that in and of itself requires web three. So there's no web three as part of that.
Integration of Web Three Elements
But then you start getting into, okay, how can we make this better? How can we add on more fun, engaging layers of gamification by now using this tooling that blockchain affords for us. So that's where we're adding in a hybrid NFT approach. So are the mercenaries that we're going to be selling. They're gaming characters that you can use, cute pixel art characters that you're going to be able to customize and change classes if you want to change classes. And they're hybrids. So there's also a swap feature between those NFTs and our token, which is a muchi token represented by a really cute red panda, moochkin. That's our web three mascot in all of our games. And so within that, the whole idea behind us choosing a hybrid NFT is, again, looking at this gameplay loop itself, and how does this add to that experience?
Challenge and Reward in Gameplay
So one of the things that people like about roguelite games is often that you have a pretty, it's a pretty challenging gameplay loop and you need to try it again and again. And so what we've done is we've taken that and using Deshawn's expertise, translated that into a really high stakes, high reward gamification loop with perma death for your characters that die. If, and there are things to make sure that we're balancing the fairness of it, but the reality is that for the people who get good, they're going to be rewarded and they're going to be rewarded really well. And because we believe in sustainability, a big driver was how do we make sure that the economy that we're building is actually going to be able to support the players, whether there's 101,000 or 100,000 playing.
In-Game Economy Structure
And so it's a fully closed loop economy where the rewards that are being earned are not driven by inflationary tokenomics, and they're not driven by hoping that new players come in, is driven by in game spend, and in game spend, you're going to have those same risk reward decisions that you would expect to have of, hey, if I spend to promote my class here, well, I'm going to be able to kill more monsters. That's going to give me a bigger piece of the pot of everything that's being spent and doing it in a way that thinks from the ground up. How do we make this most engaging? And then the last layer of gamification is going to be for those people who are like, I like the ideals behind the phenoraverse and kind of how you're approaching the game.
Accessibility and Supporting Players
But pixel art tactics RPG isn't really my thing. And so for those people knowing the plans that we have, that this tactics RPG is the beginning, and if they want to get involved or support the project, they can buy an NFT character, they can stake it, which is within the game lore. We call it sponsoring hunts. And then those who come in and sponsor hunts are also entitled to a percentage of that spend within the closed loop system. And so it could be someone who's playing the game, and they're like, I'm going on vacation for a week, and rather than playing for this week, it's going to better for me to allocate my NFTs or the tokens that I have towards sponsoring hunts. So I'm still getting some rewards or any combination thereof.
In-Game Transactions and Character Management
So, again, we looked at this from the perspective of how can we make sure that it's as accessible for anyone who's interested in the project, and how can we do it in a way that is really deeply integrated with the core of the gameplay loop? I absolutely love it. I mean, the tokenomics, when we discussed them, was one of the things, and the way that you guys are incorporating blockchain is super exciting. Can we drill down on some of the things that the gamers will be spending on, which will end up funding this entire ecosystem? Yeah, no, that's a great. That's a great question. That's what we did, again, is within the. Within the framework itself.
Player Spending Dynamics
You're going to have different things, like you're going to go on a hunt, and if you barely survived your last hunt, you're probably going to go to the inn to heal up your characters before you leave. That's going to be a token spend. Now, if that is going to result in you being able to earn more later on, it's going to be a worthwhile endeavor if you want to. If you are building out your character and you haven't leveled them up that much, it's going to cost more to promote from one class to a higher class upfront. Or you could try to reroll your character and luck out to get a different class as well.
Healing and Character Resurrection Costs
So that's another benefit that we have with the hybrid NFT system, is that you always have this option where if you reroll the character, you're going to lose the stats that you've created with that character, but you could have a different rarity, you could get a different class. All of those get a different innate skill as well. So there's the class side, there's the healing side revival. If you die, it's going to be expensive for you to heal unless you keep going in the playthrough where your character has died and hope that you can get to a healing spring. But then you run the risk of, well, maybe you're going to run into a dragon and the dragon could kill everyone and that's going to be bad for you.
Gameplay Risk Management
But we have our moochkin that is going to sell an escape rope. So you might want to pay some moochie tokens to muchkin to get an escape rope just so that you can test it out to see. And if that doesn't work, then you can pull back, recover, and start over again. So all of those things are built into the gameplay loop so that there's a lot of good reasons to spend where, you know that if I'm going to, I've earned a lot last week and now I'm going to put together this pot and I'm going to allocate this towards spending. Maybe you've earned enough to bring on a new character.
Character Creation and Team Building
And so then you could swap your tokens to reroll a completely new character as well and build out your team even more. So, a lot that you can do all across the board. And for those who haven't gotten a chance to play yet, you die a lot. My first playthrough, I was like 10 seconds in and I'm like, what just happened? I'm like, these guys are dead. I was just starting to like this crew. So maybe there will be some incentive to sort of level up your main before you take your NFTs out for.
Recursive Economy in Gameplay
A walk and, yeah, I was gonna say, I wanna jump in here, right. So one of the things we really focused on is the recursive economy. So to give you a little bit more of a background on what I've done, you know, playing magic, the gathering got me really close to, like, hasbro. And from there, you know, my college crew growing up, we had people who went into the artist side of D and D. But what was fun for me is going to the magic tournaments, hanging out with, you know, like, Eric Froelich, David, poker, these guys who not only played magic, but they would bring games on the side.
Testing and Balancing Experience
And when we get to test them, and that's really where I got a lot of my chops. And then that allowed me to get into some contracting with, you know, Hasbro wizards of the coast to really work on balancing and alpha testing for new sets. So got to work with, you know, some Justin Gary, you know, playing ascension, like these type of board games. And that then allowed me to kind of do some alpha testing for Gloomhaven. So not only was I on the gaming side, it allowed me to get into the testing side. And that's really how we systematically went through to make sure that everything in the economy has a place.
Game Mechanics and Player Involvement
Every single sync is going to be in place soon as it comes out. And as Nathan was saying, there's going to be some times where you can't play. Well, that's really important. You know, each week we're going to have talons that you earn from killing bosses. So for everyone saying, oh, we don't get any nether shards for killing the bosses, there's a reason for that. These talents that you get will then allow you to get your portion of the weekly, monthly, and seasonal payouts.
Token Utilization and Distribution
So instead of us selling our token and, you know, putting downward pressure, the way we're actually going to approach it is part of our raise. We're going to sit a pot aside for season one, two, and three. So then that way we can have a goal for everyone to strive to like. No one's going to grind if they don't know they can't get gladiator at the end of the season, or no one's going to be figuring out the best structure, the best way to set up your classes unless you know, there's a reason for it. So everything Nathan is saying is absolutely true, but we also went through and made sure we didn't have a lot of value leakage.
Value Preservation in the Economy
You know, I used to be on the Gamefi side a lot on Solana, so, you know, played the highs, played every single game that really came out. And the number one thing we've seen is when you separated the token from the asset, you really were just making an inflationary system so you would relaunch one or two coins to get liquidity back. We have the exact opposite model in place. Every single time you make a microtransaction or someone does a swap, a percentage of that is burned to and then the rest is going to the rewards pool.
Designing a Sustainable Game Economy
So that's kind of how the economy is set up, how we've layered it together to make sure this all works in the way we want four people to play it, whether it be 101,000 or 2400 people already playing the game. You know, it's pretty exciting, but yeah, that's really the way we built this whole economy. So that way we can make sure that everything's in place. You're never going to have someone just coming in, being able to become a detractor.
Preventing Economic Detractors
If so, then you're not going to be pushing forwards the economy while earning. So we've done a lot of behind the scenes stuff to make sure the loop works and I think we're pretty close to where we want to be. Tied with you, Ben. Jinx, I'd love to drill down into some of the differences between the companions that you start out with or that you can kind of randomly generate throughout the game and the NFT companions. Yeah, that's. That's a great question.
Character Types and Functionality
So for anyone who has played our alpha demo, you know that in that flow you have a hero character and then you have recruits that can come in and your recruits are going to be basically changing every playthrough. Now, in the web three side of it, in the web three mode, those recruit classes are essentially the base for the mercenary characters that you're going to have. And we're building out a pretty elaborate customization system that's going to be really exciting where the characters, as you unlock different hairstyles and all of these things.
Customization and Gameplay Evolution
And an isometric pixel art game, which is really cool because I've never seen anyone do something like this. But then that's going to update. You can update the metadata on your NFT and your character. Your NFT character is going to change based on the customization that you do in the game. But within the web three side of things, you don't have the same. The same loss and randomization with every playthrough. So there becomes more of a unit management piece where if you die, then that mercenary is dead and it's going to be your choice.
Character Death and Player Choices
Maybe you really liked them and you want to spend the mucci tokens to revive them. Maybe. And in the beginning it's probably going to be a, well, I would rather just reroll them and try for someone else. And that reflects more that kind of recruit rerolling from the story mode side of things. And talk to us a little bit more about just the feel of it. To me, it feels like kind of retro fun and maybe kind of get into a little bit more of the lore and the moochie and how all that came to be on that for a little bit more.
Creating Nostalgic Gameplay Experience
Yeah. So what I knew when we started two TG is that no one knows who tutg is. So I knew we wouldn't be able to get any interest, even if the gameplay loop is good just on the basis of our name alone. And so when I went back to the core of well, what are we trying to do here? It was all, I'm trying to make the game that I would have loved as a kid. So we just leaned super heavy into, okay, what was the look and feel of those games when I was playing them? How did, how did Final Fantasy tactics look? How did Ogre battle and I breath of Fire and other Final Fantasy games? All of those. All of those games.
Visual and Auditory Design Inspirations
And luckily we've seen some really good examples with other kind of a recent emergence in pixel art games that got a lot of attraction. So Sea of Stars was one that did a Kickstarter and they've been really successful. And so it was looking at those as kind of examples. How can you take the nostalgic goodness of old and take a modern approach to it?
Gameplay Loop and Accessibility
And the gameplay loop, obviously is a very modern gameplay loop that's more designed for potentially just quick playthroughs. So you don't need to feel like you have to sit down and play for 2 hours to get anywhere. You can just jump in, do a run, and then hop out and then keep going whenever you have the time. So it was really modeling the look and feel needs to really hit that. Where someone looks at it and knows immediately, I know what this is, I know what they're about. And that's something that I want, that I would be interested in. And with Muchkin, I mean, again, this all sounds really self serving when I say it's just for me as a kid, but red pandas are my favorite animal. They're just stupidly cute. So I wanted to make sure that whatever we could have that reflects that other, this new element that we're trying to bring into this world and the new element being blockchain tooling in the way that we want to do it.
Blockchain Features and Relatable Characters
I want to have something that's cute and relatable that people won't get mad at when they say, hey, let me tell you about blockchain features. And a red panda seems to be a. I mean, if someone hears a red panda say anything and you're like, hey, red panda, you suck. That person. I don't, I don't want them anywhere near the project anyways. Yeah. And I can also, you know, jump in here. You know, I didn't help out with the red panda design, but it definitely was something that attracted me. You know, I'm anime head. You know, I have a full anime sleeve. But right now everyone knows it's Kawaii culture, right? You know, when you think about Kawaii, everyone knows what it is. And like you said, you know, it's the least offensive way. And we'll help out with partnerships. And he's a multidimensional traveler, so whenever we have crossovers, we already have a storyline built in for us to allow it to make sense.
Community Engagement and Business Development
So, you know, there's some flirting going on the timeline. You know, beacon GG reached out to us. So, you know, hopefully something materializes from that. But that is the style in the type of way were thinking about IP crossovers and things like that from my end, as, you know, the guy who's kind of doing the business development, making sure that we're reaching out to the right communities. As Nathan said, you know, when we first started off, you know, now people knew what he was building a, and that kind of fell on me to make the intro. So started off with my home community, dead king society on Seoul, and from there, you know, we just started off running. So, I think one of the bigger things that we haven't mentioned yet is just how we're really thinking about the gaming studio.
Interoperability and Future Plans
So with this hybrid tech, you are able to simply save the token, trade it in and play our next game. That's something that we're really excited about. Back in the day, if you bought a game, you didn't like it, you lost out. That's the end of it. Now it's like, hey, if you support us as a studio, you still can watch us progress. You can wait for our next game, you can turn in our old characters at a different page to have access to the new game. So Kawaii culture Red Panda is the best multidimensional traveler. You know, everything really aligns with the Fernorverse. Yeah, and actually, just to. Before we drop off of that, I think you. You made a good point about the red panda being so muchkin is kind of our brand mascot.
Expansion of the Phenoraverse
And again, we wanted to make sure anyone who would see Wildlands would know just from the aesthetics. Okay, what are we getting ourselves into? Well, this looks like the rpg's that I played as a kid. I. Okay, I'm going to give it a second look, and that's really what that's about. And then it's the same type of thing with muchkin. If we can do an excellent job with Wildlands, which I'm confident that we have so far, and we will be as we launch our hunt mode and all of this exciting stuff, then Muchkin becomes that figurehead for how blockchain gaming is done responsibly and how it's done in a way that makes the game better. And so anytime that we can expand the phenoraverse because he is a dimension traveling red panda, then that becomes basically our phenorverse stamp of approval on from a group of people that really care about just making sure that it's done in the way that makes the game the best that it can be.
Future Game Development and Collaborations
Before we made Wildlands, we did a proof of concept for a 3d strategy rpg called Battle for Phenora. And what we look forward to following the success of Wildlands is showcasing how interoperability can be done in a really cool way, where you have your pixel art mercenary, and then you're able to use that in the kind of stylized 3d world of battle. For phenora, we have other. Other things planned that we're not announcing yet, but a lot that we can build from. And everything that we're trying to do right now is to just have these beacons that when people see it, they immediately have a connection to understand what they're looking at and how they should feel about it. And hopefully, with muchkin, as people play and learn more, they. They see that as. Okay, yeah, I I get that.
Creating Engaging Experiences
These guys are going about it in the way that just cares about the gaming experience first. Yeah, I do think it's interesting to have, like, a multidimensional character that can, like, transcend. It can almost transcend the lore so that it. What it actually does, too, is it enables you to not only have a recurring character that you can bring everywhere. But also, it could be an interesting lore intertwing mechanic. Like, if you want to work with other universes or tie your lores together in some way, you have a character that is able to do that or you have the capacity to be able to do that. Yeah, 100%. And that was the thought process behind it. It also gives it a little bit of, like, memetic premium, if you will, because people can get excited about the actual mascot or the character, and they could just like the character and just want to participate with you guys or get involved with you guys in some way just because of the character itself.
Milestones and Vision for the Future
Like, it seems like there are just a lot of really interesting pieces there that you guys kind of thought through. Now, thinking about the game mode that you guys have and the space that you're trying to tackle and come into, maybe you could kind of paint a picture for us of how do you iterate and grow from here? Like, what are some of the big milestones that you're looking at both within the game as well as within the industry? Like, what are some of the big milestones that you guys want to hit and what are just some of those things you guys are thinking about? Maybe just kind of open source your thinking and some key beacons or north stars that you all are looking to move towards? Absolutely.
Ambitious Goals for the Phenorverse
I have some pretty ambitious goals for where we can build the phenorverse itself and all of that. I like to publicly, I tend to be very focused because I'm always concerned about, okay, how, and this is why we put out a game first. And I didn't go out and make a bunch of promises because I would just want to say, hey, here's a game. Try it. If you like it, you'll know that we're legit. But this opens up, let me tell you some of the things that we have in the works, visionary wise, what we're looking to do. So it starts with Wildlands, and we have a pre sale coming up that's going to be tied to a mint launch and the launch of our full web three hunt mode.
Content Planning and Game Development
The web three hunt mode is going to be a live service mode. So we're not just, it's not just a one. And done. And hope you like it. It is. We have four seasons of content already planned out for the next year. Plus, for Wildlands alone, we have the battle for Fenora, which is a stylized three D real time strategy game. That one is more of a multiplayer, so cooperative and competitive game on Unreal, that we would build out and have interoperability between the wildland characters and the battle for phenora characters. On top of that, we have a number of other games, some that would be smaller, others where we can look at partnerships.
Strategic Partnerships and Broader Engagement
We have some partnerships lined up that I will announce when. When the ink has dried on it. But that gives, that opens us up to other opportunities outside of the web three gaming space. Just what people in web three gaming would get excited about. But what people broader, from a broader standpoint, can look at and appreciate how we're approaching things. I have a short film concept that's a monster hunting, little action short film that will be doing and producing and integrating within the game to showcase how you can do collaboration between video games and film.
Creating a Digital Entertainment Ecosystem
And so all of this is to set the stage for a modular approach to creating and building out a complete digital entertainment ecosystem, where every piece can benefit each other, and the idea of just within this ecosystem that would be open to partnerships with other ecosystems and everyone just benefiting from growing. As long as you're focused on doing things in the right way, which from an entertainment perspective, is the best entertainment value in the game that you're making, how do you make it more engaging? To your point, Ben, if it's a red panda that people just can just get behind that, there's a lot that we can build from, and we have the lore and the flexibility within multidimensional, dimensional traveling to medieval fantasy with magic.
Finding Community Resonance and Value
All of that is intentional to make sure that we can just continue to expand the phenoraverse and find out. And part of it is going to be finding out what resonates the most with people and where we can provide value to those people, or communities or groups, then we're gonna wanna lean heavily on that, and we're gonna wanna foster that and build that up, and always with the goal of longevity, because this is just the very first small step to help people understand how we're approaching it. And then I'm excited, as we execute over and over and over again, that it's going to be very clear what our intentions are and how we can actually.
Operational Strategy and Scaling
How we can actually follow through on everything we're doing in a really cool way, where we just are deliberate in limiting everything we're doing to just what makes the entertainment better. Yeah, and then I can follow up on that. You know, Nathan's divisionary, I'm more of the operations guy. So I can kind of give you a behind the scenes on how we're systematically going about approaching this. So again, like I said, my background was director of sales, head of sales at a couple different YC combinator companies. So what we've been able to achieve in the last three to four months is we started out a newsletter where, you know, people had to sign up.
Community Growth and Engagement Rate
You know, we're doing some things with their ips, we're making sure there's not a lot of dupes, etcetera. Within the last four months, went from zero people to right around 4100. Our newsletter has about a 40% engagement rate. And the biggest thing that I'm really excited about is on the steam side, right? We just put out a demo, didn't really talk about it too much. We want to make sure there's no crossover or us get, you know, in trouble for the NFT side, you know, I think our steam wish list is at like 3200, you know, somewhere in that range. Right. So my goal on the operational side is figuring out the best way to scale both sides while making sure we make sure that the people who are on the web two side or just a gamer, feels like this is a game and they can enjoy it.
Gameplay Experience and Game Theory
And then people who are wanting to play what, the way I think of it, as a web three expansion to the game really get that, try hard. You're trying to better than everyone, you're trying to earn more. And I think that's really the niche in game theory is people play games for different reasons, but they always want to be the best at the game if it's intriguing to them. So that's really what I do. Make sure everything that's on the vision board gets systematically broken down so then that way we can achieve that goal. Just like, you know, trying to get a company from zero ARR to 1 million ar. So that's how I approach it. Very business like, but been a gamer my whole life, so that's how I layer everything.
Blockchain and NFT Development
To hop back onto the tokenomics side. And excuse me if this got mentioned, I got rugged for like 60 seconds while you were talking to Sean. But have you guys landed on a blockchain that you guys are going to be building the nfts? Or I should say, have you guys announced the blockchain that you'll be building the NFTs and the token on? Especially with lots of swaps and such? I'd be curious to hear what you landed on and why. Yeah, so we are doing the hybrid NFT on Solana and we landed on Solana we'd had a partnership with immutable before.
Choosing Solana for Community and Feedback
I won't get into too many details, other than to say we did a little testament and found some issues in actually being able to transfer the nfts, which is crazy for me that would come up. But I was in Dubai in the spring at Token 2049, and every panelist in any of the panels that I watched was asked the question of outside of your own blockchain, which blockchain are you most bullish on the. And it would have been 95% of the panelists, said Solana, for the sole reason of the community. And so as were looking at that, were looking at, okay, obviously we need to have fast confirmations, we need to have cheap fees, the tech needs to be there, but the community needs to be there.
Community-Driven Development and Sustainability
And so taking the combination of the experience that we had with immutable and what we could see of the community with Solana, and then finding more about the hybrid nfts and how we could use that to create this completely recursive, closed loop system to make sure that the tokenomics are sustainable and do it in a way that also really rewards the early adopters as well. I bought a bunch of web three gaming nfts and projects that by the time they actually launched, they had issued like two or three more collections so that the original ones weren't as cool as the later ones and the value plummeted. And so what we can do with these hybrid nfts is you fix that swap value, and as the project or other projects that we have get bigger and we're selling more, then those are going to have a smaller swap value.
Early Adoption and Token Dynamics
And so the people who got early, you might think, oh, I tried. I tried playing wildlands of Phenora and I got busy and I didn't think about it anymore. And now they've gone on to something else. Well, maybe right now, the ratio of your NFT is 10,000 to one tokens to your NFT, and then we go out and mint another one, and it's 2000, so you could get five for the price of what you put in the middle. I really like that idea. That preserves the value for early supporters, but then gives us flexibility as we grow without losing that, without losing the sustainability of the ecosystem as a whole, and having this inflationary piece that you need to be really concerned about.
Infrastructure and Community Involvement in Solana
Yeah. And I can add a little context a little bit about Solana. Right. It's kind of running jokes. Lana's not going to give people money to really come on their chain. But if you have a good product, everyone who is someone is going to take the time to reach down and help you out. So, you know, we're having conversations with metaplex to make sure everything's working behind the scenes. You know, we linked up with mutant, you know, we linked up with Solana foundation. So, like, every single person who you think should be involved to make sure the infrastructure is working on the hybrid side is involved. And that's just kind of the community aspect of it. So that's the reason went here. A lot of that back end support to make sure everything is smooth.
Game Features and Blockchain Integration
And, you know, I was a salon of native. That was. A lot of our communities were, and it just paired with Nathan's experience. And that's at least where this game is going to be, right? Omni chain, omnidirectional. Who knows what's happening next? Who knows who's reaching out, you know, talking to us about things of that nature. But for this one, we're going to. We're going to have it on Solana. Hell yeah. Well, it certainly feels like a good fit considering people will be swapping between the NFTs and the moochie and the transactions seems to be a good fit for that chain and appreciate the little bit of the alpha spill on IMX.
Q&A and Community Engagement
So I'll certainly be following those breadcrumbs to see what is underneath sort of the curtain there as far as maybe some issues around, like the minting and transferability. Always good to have a good evaluation on the chains. But as we're approaching the top of the hour here, I want to make sure that we covered everything. Quick mute while garbage truck goes by. Nathan Deshawn, is there anything that we didn't get a chance to cover today that you were hoping to? Anything we didn't get a chance to dive into took the opportunity now to do so.
Game Release and Accessibility
Yeah, Deshawn, you are. You're more on top. I just like, I just like talking about what we're doing. So there's probably stuff that we should talk about, like our alpha demos available to play now. So if anyone wants to try it's fanora world. So www. Dot phenora Faenora Dot world. And you can play it there if you're on Steam, you can wishlist it on Steam and you can download the demo on Steam and you can play on Steam. But if you are playing to get whitelists that you can do from killing monsters, special monsters that we have in the game, then you're going to need to open up the browser to be able to actually buy those whitelists.
Kickstarter Raise and Community Goals
Because we have been very clear in terms of our, from a development standpoint to cut off anything, any blockchain integrations in our steam build. So we're going to have, for any of these games with blockchain being optional, a standard edition that is going to be no blockchain, and a Phenorverse edition that is going to have all of those blockchain features. So for any platform that's open to web three and blockchain, it'll be the Phenoraverse edition. For any that isn't, then people will be able to play it as the standard edition anyways. Yeah, and a couple of our key dates, probably within the next two to three weeks, we're going to be aligning on our final terms on our Kickstarter raise, which is basically going to be a mix of old school gaming studio and a normal, typical presale.
Plans for Community Development
We're going to be partnered with Helio on that. It's going to be super simple. We have a couple fun things planned. We'll see if we can make that work. Maybe like a purchase receipt that might be something very unique. Then we have a world goal basically on a number we're looking to target. Once we hit that with our nether shards, we're then trying to make sure we have everything for the community start to foster. So once that world goal is hit, then we're going to be working on reopening the discord. So this is some little alpha right here. So I know some people have talked about that.
Discord Community Opening and Project Updates
hey, you know, the discord's not completely open. We're working on it. I just believe you want to have enough traction to do it in a very cool way. So that is coming. And then. Yeah, you know, I can't say mint date. That's not something I'm 100% confident on. I'll leave that one to Nathan. But, yeah, everything's starting to work the way it should. You know, we're almost done with what we need to do on the back end, so definitely be on the lookout for, you know, some more announcements from the. For norverse.
Web Three Kickstarter and Transparency
Yeah. And actually, I'll just add on to our web three Kickstarter. So I call it a Kickstarter because I'm. I so firmly believe in providing real value. And so when people would look at what we're selling with this pre sale, it is going to look very much like what you would see from any game studio that's doing a Kickstarter where you're going to see what our goals are, you're going to see what you get and the rewards and all of this in probably excruciating detail for people who don't want to dive in as much to the different game mechanics and all of those things.
Ensuring Clarity for Backers
But I want to put it out because it's important that people know what they're getting, what they're contributing to, and what they should expect. So it's when we do that pre sale or web three Kickstarter, then you can expect that there's going to be a lot of information that will put out alongside that. So you can really understand, even within the implementation of the hunt mode, how these characters are going to work. All of that's going to be there?
Engaging the Gaming Community
Hell yeah. No, I absolutely love it. Ben, do you have anything else on your end before? I have a few announcements, but right before we wrap. Yes, I would highly encourage everybody to go play. It is incredibly addicting. And I know Nikki spent definitely a dozen or so hours into it, and I also think Bob spent a good amount of hours in it, too. I have a lot of fun playing it, although I get wrecked just about every time.
Encouragement for Players
But yeah, go play. Have fun. You're definitely meant to try really hard and play a bunch of times, and you're gonna die a lot. So don't be discouraged when that happens. It's just part of it. But unless you really go in, and I think this is actually just the principle that we need to wrap our heads around a little bit more. Unless you're actually going to, like, go in and play stuff, it's really hard to, like, know what's at the bleeding edge of really fun games in our industry.
Final Reflections on the Game Experience
So I would very highly encourage everybody to actually go and play it, see what it is actually like to play web three games at this present stage of history because they're starting to get really fun in Fenora is a perfect example of that. So anyways, that's my call to action. Go play, have fun. Maybe set an alarm after two to 3 hours so you don't get sucked too deep into the rabbit hole. Don't miss any calls or anything, but very much worth your time.
Personal Experiences with the Game
Yeah, that's the alpha right there because he's referencing when I booted up Fenora, I literally missed a business call because it had to text them. Being like, I'm sorry. I was literally playing a video game and I missed your call. So that speaks to. That hasn't happened with any web three game, so that was a super impressive part. Love the ethos behind the game here. Love the team. Not to mention just gamified whitelist spots.
Game Mechanics and Community Engagement
Super cool to be able to go in and beat bosses and rip some talons off some monsters to be able to get a whitelist. I love that mechanic. And, we've got some stuff cooking with Fenora. I'm gonna leave it vague, but if you're not following the Nt Twitter, the Fenora Twitter outreach, all of the different accounts about NT News, nt plays, that you are potentially missing out on that information, you want to be the first to it.
Closing Remarks and Future Insights
And for all of the audience, we really appreciate you guys tuning in. And the citadel has witnessed, and I will leave it at that. Besides that, huge thanks to the Feynora team. Also, for those interlinked viewers, we've got episode 50 dropping this afternoon. We went deep, deep with one of the most OG content creators in the web three gaming space. So definitely go and check that out. Dropping this afternoon. Thank you, Nathan. Thank you, Deshawn. Thank you, Ben. An absolute pleasure to be up here with you guys and really appreciate y'all's time.
Gratitude and Industry Excitement
Yeah, thank you so much. It was great to be here. Agreed. Really appreciate it. Like I said, you guys are top industry, so it's super exciting when you do things correctly and people notice. So definitely appreciate you guys. Appreciate being here. And like he said, there's a lot more coming. There's. There's a lot more coming. We're just heating up. This is going to be the for norverse month.
