December Report 2022 — Spring Game Mobile Game
Hello everyone, I hope you are well. As I mentioned in the chat, I had planned to do a video update but many of you asked me to do the recap in written form instead since there is so much information to cover.
At the end of each month, I’ll make a review of the past month, our progress, and especially our future actions. I hope that this will help you all feel more informed about our progress. We know that we need to do a better job of communicating with you and this is a big step in that direction. Thank you for your patience!
The Spring Game team is working very hard on the development of the mobile game and I hope that the information I’m sharing today will help you get as excited as we are about our future together! 🙂
I. Summary (for all you ;TLDR folks out there)
Development
- The design of the mobile game is 85% finished.
- The technical part (coding, stress testing, dealing with Android and iOS requirements, etc) only at 20% because of a series of delays, most of which have been resolved now so you will see this number increase steadily in future reports.
- Team recruitment is almost finished. Some of you will be surprised at how many of us are working to build the game. Hopefully introducing them in this report will help give you a sense of the scale of our task.
Problems encountered
- The community didn’t like the “humanoid” tree designs, so we decided to change to classic trees with eyes to make them feel more alive.
- Apple changed its rules about NFTs, so we had to take quite a bit of time to make our models Apple Compliant
- We didn’t communicate enough with the community. This is mainly due to the drop in activity and the bad news of the crypto market. We realize now that it is in those kinds of situations that you need to hear from us the most and we have some announcements about what we are doing to improve this in the next section.
Planned for January 2023
- Begin unity development of the game (by mid-January)
- Release the new mobile game whitepaper and start communicating more publicly about the coming mobile game
- Communicate more regularly with our community and start to be more active on Twitter. We hope this will help all of you get as excited as we are about what is coming.
- Complete the mobile game tokenomics
II. The Spring Game Team
Hash — CEO & Marketing
Tresh — Strategy & Tech
Darkshipolata — CTO: Darkshipolata has more than 6 years of experience in Solidity and has managed a number of projects in the past.
Ryan RTP — Community Lead: The newest member of our team, Ryan, led non-profit organizations / NGOs for 13 years before leaving the traditional workforce to make his living as an alternative asset class investor. He also has a history as a lecturer, an actor, and a philanthropist so we know he’s not shy and that he’ll do a great job keeping the lines of communication open between the team and the community.
Medhi — Backend Developer: Mehdi has more than 9 years of experience and has worked on many GameFi and mobile projects.
Malomé — Unity Developer: 12 years of experience in the development of android and IOS applications.
David — Product Manager: David has over 10 years of experience. He has worked on the development of several mobile applications for major fashion brands and for NFT mobile games. He has his own mobile game development agency.
Romain — Game Mechanism Designer: Romain is a game designer and a former employee of Ubisoft who worked on the game play for “Les Lapins Crétin” (The Raving Rabbids)
Animation Designers: We also have 3 designers working on the game designs. All are graduates from a graphic design school with a focus in video game design. They take care of the designs and models of the mobile application.
Nicolas — Tokenomics: A graduate of Politecnico di Milano, Nicolas has more than 10 years of experience as an advisor and tokenomics expert for blockchain projects.
Maxime — Music: Employed at Ubisoft as a Data Analyst, Maxime is also an artist and is in charge of the music for Spring Game.
Community Council: The Council has intervened from time to time to give advice, but this structure has not led to any concrete solutions. It’s been tough to figure out how to move from discussion to action, however, Ryan RTP was recruited from the Council to serve as a point of contact. My hope is that this will give both members of the council and members of the broader community a clear path for working with and providing feedback to the team.
Progress: 95/100
III. Development
A. Design
- Trees: We were late with the designs. As you may have seen initially, we were going for a human tree look, however, we got a lot of negative feedback on this direction from the community. Moreover, these human versions posed many problems when we wanted to integrate them technically into the application. Overall we were not satisfied with this version.
We decided to start over again and went for a version closer to the original NFTs — trees, adapted to mobile rendering and with eyes to give them a more lively look so I’m happy to announce that the tree collection will be definitively finished by mid-January. I can’t wait for you to see them all !
Progress: 85/100
- In-Game Assets: As we’ve mentioned several times, in the mobile version of Spring Game we’ll be adding many design elements including more decorative features. A well-decorated pad will allow you to increase your rewards, complete missions, expand your collection, or even participate in contests to win game rewards! Our main decorative assets are now finished, here you can find a few of them! (We will released them step by step) !
Progress: 100/100
- Plot & Maquette:
We still have a few details to adapt, especially the rendering with the trees and decorations, but otherwise the design is finished as well as the models. We had a big problem with the iOS update for NFTs on the platform. The biggest constraint is Apple’s complicated listing rules for NFTs and we had to consult several lawyers to figure out how we could be Apple Compliant. We didn’t want to give up our spot in the Apple Store and close 50% of the market, but it was very complicated to find a loophole and this was responsible for much of the delay on the technical side.
The front-end project manager and his developer will list the app feature by feature without making it public at first so that the iOS review process is initiated. If Apple blocks some parts that will give us the chance to adapt them before we go live. On Android, there will be no problem and the app will be fully released from the start.
On iOS, the tree marketplace will probably only be on the website and not integrated in the app. Next we need to finish all the last details of in-game assets and app navigation.
Prograss 75/100
B. Tokenomics, Business Plan, and Advantages First and Second Generation Players
- Tokenomics: We have been working on this specifically for several weeks! We have finalized the tokenomic structure and the economic model. We just need to add the NFTs price. The way rewards will work has been completely redesigned. We will present it to you very soon.
Progress: 80/100
- Business Plan: The business plan consists in knowing exactly what our objectives are in terms of turnover, profits, etc. Having a business plan would potentially allow us to move forward with ICOs or other fundraising.
Progress: 20/100
- Advantages for First and Second Generation Players: We will give benefits to all first and second generation players of the original web-based game based on their ownership of NFTs — not accumulated SPR tokens. The NFTs taken into account will be the NFTs purchased before the SPR price dropped (before October 7).
For the benefits this will take 3 possible forms (still under discussion):
- Airdrop of tokens
- Airdrop of rare decorations resellable on the marketplace
- Airdrop of NFT trees from the new game rares
Progress : 50/100
C. Game Mechanism
The game mechanics are fully developed. For this we called on Romain, a game design expert and former Ubisoft employee. However, when the tokenomic of the project were finalized, they had to be redesigned to be sure that the economic model was compatible with the game mechanics.
Globally the game will be based on 4 main mechanics:
- The development of your tree from its seed state to its adult state (tamagotchi style). There will be the seed phase, child, teenager and adult.
- The pursuit of quests to complete. Regularly you will have quests/missions to complete to earn points and become top players of the week or month and earn rewards.
- Breeding to level up. Each tree will have several stages of advancement from basic to legendary level.
- Decorations & Exchanges: Decorate your tree as much as possible or make it grow tall and healthy to be able to exchange it on the marketplace!
Progress : 80/100
D. Technical
Solidity & Architecture: Spring Game will include more features and game mechanics than ever and we have needed to engineer solutions in order to support them. If you’re familiar with the previous versions of the game, every interaction used to be done directly through the Binance Smart Chain (BSC for short, sometimes called the BNB Chain). It’s usually good enough for simple read/write operations but it still has lots of technical limitations, narrowing the boundaries of what is possible. That’s why we’re building our own hybrid Web3/off-chain infrastructure that will allow us to keep essential safety and auditability features of smart contracts that are core to our values, while enabling an enhanced game experience and broadening technical possibilities.
All of the ownership and rewards mechanics will remain managed through smart contracts on the BSC. This part of the development has taken most of our time in order to make sure we’re extensively testing the software. That’s also where we’re constantly challenging new ideas as a part of our development processes, so we can be confident in the features we’re shipping out. In parallel, we’re building off-chain infrastructure in order to enable fast and efficient indexing of the smart contract data, which is, in our opinion, essential in order to guarantee a fast and rich user experience. For example, non-reward features like social interactions in the game will be interacting with that part of the infrastructure and not the BSC — so iit shouldn’t cost you anything in order to drop a like on a friend’s plot!
Also, reading historical data and keeping track of stuff like your reward balance as time goes on is difficult, slow, or even practically impossible depending on what you want to track with smart contracts and the BSC alone. Having our own infrastructure replicating the state of our smart contracts allows us to easily keep track of anything happening on the network, and therefore we will be able to serve the game with even more insights and useful data.
IV. FAQ
When is the release date?
For the moment — and considering the state of the market — we prefer to wait for more stable conditions to be sure that we will have a successful game launch.
Is there any point in continuing to accumulate SPR tokens?
If you want to continue playing the current version, yes, but the SPR tokens you accumulate will not be valid in the mobile game.
Is there any point in continuing to take care of our trees?
If you want to continue playing this version, yes, but for airdrops or other transition mechanics, we will take into account the tree NFTs regardless of their state.
Why haven’t I seen any marketing?
For the moment — and considering the state of the market — we prefer to wait until crypto is growing again and the development of the game is more advanced, but a full marketing campaign will occur before the game is released.