Dev Blog #18

As announced previously, going forward our bi-weekly updates will be delivered in a written format instead. We believe this is more effective than reading out the update on a live call, this also allow us to include more details and is more effective in getting everyone on the same page rather than having some people listen in and some reading.

This does not mean the AMAs are cancelled, rather they will be hosted on a as-needed basis going forward, this allows the team to have more flexibility in addressing the needs of the community. Our next live AMA will be hosted this coming Wednesday on the 23rd of February at 10PM EST time.

In the following development update we will split it into 3 parts, under each section are also bullet point summaries

a) Game and Web3 development

• Onboarded 2 new full time web3 and blockchain developers who were in key positions at Decentral Games and Pancakeswap
• Taking feedback from the community we have onboarded a new QA team as well as putting ex-EA/Capcom QA lead at the helm of this new team

b) Marketing

• Onboarded one new social media manager and looking to onboard another full time content creator
• Finalised partnerships with NFT gaming influencer with another one in the pipeline

c) Community

• Successful conclusion of the first 2 weeks of Fortunate Series of Events
• More events scheduled including a DJ coming in to host festivities as well as a Poker night as suggested by the community

A: Game and Web3 Development

Technical recruitment

We are happy to share that we have been able to onboard 2 deeply experienced developers in the past week, which means that the team now has more man-power on the technical side, and we can be working on more features in parallel.

Taiki — Seasoned Web3 developer with 20 years of experience in software development. Prior to joining our team, he was working with Decentral Games to build NFT marketplace and dashboards for Dencentral land. He will be helping Dave to roll out functions like Gen 2 training, as well as helping out with the website and dashboard redesign.

Khanh — Web3/Solidity developer who have spent the past couple of years developing smart contracts and dApps with multiple DEXs like MakiSwap and PancakeSwap. He will be able to help build future smart contracts and provide a second opinion on logic flows of the systems. As well as help building web3 pages and providing APIs for the game.

Game Development

Creating a stable and fun-to-play game is a top priority but we also understand that things move extremely quickly in the NFT/crypto space. As such we try to strike a balance between releasing and iterating quickly as well as releasing something stable and of good quality.

This balance is hard to get right, sometimes we may end up pushing a build that has slightly more bugs that we would like to see and sometimes we may take more time than needed to make sure things are stable before releasing.

To be fully transparent this is very different to the team’s previous experience, in running a traditional game studio where you often have years of time to refine your product before release. We are of course trying our best to adapt to this new balance that is required for this space and listening to the community’s feedback on what we can do better.

For example, we decided to improve our QA flow which allow us to release more stable and bug-free builds as we iterate towards Open Beta. To improve our QA flow we have brought on new developers to completely replace our existing QA team as well as bringing on a deeply experience ex-EA/Capcom QA lead to manage this team.

Second Unlock on Accumulated GCOIN

The second unlock for the accumulated GCOIN was released at around 1pm EST 20th of Feb. All the fighter holders got their second ⅓ of the accumulated GCOIN unlocked. Users can claim their GCOIN via our dashboard just like how they can claim their daily yield.

Reward System

We started working on the reward system last week. The system will be logging user’s match history, tracking rewards and allowing users to claim them which then turn those rewards into NFTs.

This is integrated with a fighter energy system which is TBA, where each battle drains energy from the fighter. Over time this replenishes, once used you will no longer receive reward drops but will still be able to play with this fighter. Energy is tied to fighters, and you’re able to play on another fighter and earn rewards while your other fighters are replenishing.

Rewards will be redeemable by user interaction after the validator has verified the match, which could take up to 1 hour. The energy system will also be expanded in the future to incorporate more game elements.

Weapon Forging System

The maintenance on the Weapon Forge Contract is completed, and we are planning to have the new contract go live on Monday 21st of Feb at 6am EST.

With the forge contract fixed, the OG weapon forging will be enabled very soon. To enable OG weapons in forging, it is necessary that we replace the current OG weapons on ETH mainnet with versions on Polygon.

Details of this migration process regarding OG weapons are as follow:

Snapshot taken for OG weapons on ETH: Friday 25th of Feb at 6am EST

Here is a link to the collection of OG weapons on ETH: https://opensea.io/collection/gfc-weapon

We are going to take a snapshot for the OG weapons on ETH, and will airdrop the Polygon version of the OG weapons used for forging shortly after the snapshot. This arrangement was made to allow users to have plenty of time to trade OG weapons before the snapshot.

As soon as the OG weapons are airdropped, the cost of forging will be reduced to 100 GCOIN for 24 hours. Users will be able to forge with OG weapons with a chance of the forge outcome skipping a tier.

Please note that the collection of OG weapons will be deactivated after the airdrop. It will be marked with DO NOT BUY and all the weapon images will be grayed out to indicate the collection has been deactivated.

Gen 2 Training

We have done some testing on the image generation on Gen2s and the output is looking very promising. We will be able to share some of them in a sneak peek with you guys in the coming weeks.

The logic for the training system has also been updated. After choosing the weapons and the OG fighter to train with, there will be a prompt to sign a message which proves the ownership of the OG fighter. After signing that message, there will be another transaction which mints the Gen 2 fighter.

After the mint, the unrevealed Gen 2 fighter will appear in the wallet instantly, and there will be a 7 days period (7x24 = 168 hours) until it is revealed. There will be a cool down period of 5 days on the OG fighter on training.

Genesis Keys Loot box System

Loot box page maintenance is still in progress, it is expected to be live again within the next week.

B: Marketing

Over the past 2 weeks, members of the core team especially Ado has been talking to members of the community on a 1-to-1 basis in collecting feedback and sentiments about the marketing progress of the project.

The team have heard many great suggestions we will be implementing some of those. In this development update, we would also like to first address some of the common misconceptions around our marketing approach that we have noticed through these conversations.

Marketing is ongoing and continuous, it is something we have been working on and will continue to focus on. It’s not the case that we are holding things off until everything is launched. We have reached out and talked to 100+ Twitter native influencers, Mx has been and will continue to focus on working with Youtubers and getting us on more podcasts. It is easy to overlook or forget some of our previous accomplishments just because things are not ‘mooning’ as some people expect them to be. Just to drop a few names, we have been featured multiple times on publications like Cointelegraph, Bezinga, and also influencers like CDM, Squid and others. It’s often not as simple as paying x amount of money to an influencer to get our project trending.

A lot more is going on behind the scenes re marketing but not everything can be shared yet, especially not until things are finalised. The general roadmap and focus is clear in the roadmap section of the whitepaper and we will continue to execute. Gaming projects are fundamentally different from PFP projects, most PFP projects already have an existing product to market, we do not yet. With all this said and while short term marketing and floor prices are critical, our approach has always been to take a multi-year long term approach to ensure we build a game that is fun to play. Axie infinity took multiple years before it took off, of course that was from a different time period but I still believe the current batch of P2E games will take another few years before they can be considered actual games instead of speculative assets. P2E games that can survive and still be relevant in a few years time are ones that have a strong foundation of tokenomics and game mechanics and most importantly fun to play.

Our approach is simple and it is straightforward, the key priority is to release a stable, fun to play game. Marketing without a product is hype and that isn’t sustainable, it may benefit short-term buyers but it is not in the best interest of the project. We are in a marathon and not a sprint. Once the game (product) has been released then it is much much easier to get exposure through our tournaments, through gameplay videos. We have already seen what releasing a half ready game can do in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, because of this we are careful not to make the same mistake.

The above is our general approach to marketing, since our last recap we optimized some of our marketing campaigns and took initiative on several new marketing opportunities, we are also planning to onboard a new full time content creator to specifically focus on generating content (in-game GIFs, videos, renders) as our game approaches open beta readiness.

As we previously announced, we are working with an agency called Tokensuite. They have done a great job in the past two weeks in growing our local groups on Telegram, they will be doing more for us in the coming month with the new deal we have agreed with them. You can always go ahead and check out our local groups by joining them.

Additionally, we announced our official partnership with Champ T — https://twitter.com/champtgram & his team from Champs Only.

Champ has been in the NFT space for over a year before becoming an influencer and blowing up from <1000 to over 60k followers on Twitter in 3 weeks. His alpha pass collection (floor of over 2E at times, currently around 1.3E) minted out in minutes and is the only alpha pass collection forming strategic partnerships with leaders across the space, providing their holders with additional value and utility. 🔥

Champs Only is definitely one of — if not the leading alpha pass brand in the space right now.

We had a Twitter Space with Champ on Thursday, February 17th, which had over 1200 live listeners. You can check out the recording by visiting the following link —

We are currently finalizing another partnership with a gaming influencer in the NFT space.

Furthermore, we launched a huge giveaway with a number of official crypto & NFT projects with who we are in touch behind the scenes. The prize pool for the giveaway is sitting at roughly $20k. If you haven’t participated yet, I’d recommend checking out the following Tweet.

Finally, we hired an additional social media manager (@ihaveapwner). He is helping us stay consistent across all of our social channels as well as working on some strategies to improve our presence on socials as well as attract more high-quality individuals to GFC.

We are really excited about our progress over the past 2 weeks and will keep pushing as much as we can to ensure the longevity of our project and create more momentum leading up to the launch of our open beta.

Next week, Yas (Mx) will be sharing more really exciting sneak peeks for our Battle-Pass holders, so make sure to keep an eye on our Battle-Pass Discord channel!

C: Community

The first two weekends of the Fortunate Series of Events have been a success, so far five Tier 2 Genesis Keys and five BYOPills have been handed out. People have been and are competing for Battle Points all over Discord to climb the Battle Point Leaderboard and try to win the GFC Battle Pass for first place.

We are pleased to announce that not only will the winner walk away with a prize but 2nd, 3rd (Genesis Key), 4th & 5th (BYOPills) won’t be walking away empty handed either!

Next to the three scheduled events there have been random trivia where ($150) Gcoin has been distributed, games of “tag” and Hide & Seek events have been organised with over 65 players accumulating 500+ Battle Points.
For players who have access to Beta there is an “elimination” League running to encourage 3vs3 play. Players can earn points by reaching goals and just by playing games, every round half of them will be eliminated and awarded Battle Points in the search for Glory.

The mods have organised an NFL SuperBowl Squares game where $2000 Gcoin was distributed to the four lucky winners, netting $500 Gcoin after every quarter!

On the schedule for the next two weeks:

• Weekend 3 of the Fortunate Event Series, with more random ways to earn Battle Points.
• A DJ set to celebrate the end of festivities.
• A poker night (for Holders?)
• The start of the Mystery Event (so far 50 invitations will be issued)