Aggroed (Co-Founder) | Yabapmatt (Chief Product Officer) | Hardpoint (Chief Technology Officer)
Kbux (VP of Engineering) | Homesteadhacker (Community Moderator Lead) |
Chatter (Director Of Growth) | Nateaguila (Creative Director)
Aggroed (Co-Founder)
: Hey everybody my name is Aggroed and today were going back a little bit in terms of the way that we're streaming so we're going a little bit older school but glad to have everybody here and even though they're not on the stream with me they are enjoy and chat with me doing here so like I said this is the voice of Aggroed I’m joined by the one of the other founders Matt it’s just like he and I are the two co-founders Matt do you want to say hi to everybody
Yabapmatt (Chief Product Officer)
: Hey everybody happy Friday morning evening midday whatever time it is for you
Aggroed: We recently have announced a big change for you do you want to go kick us off and just sort of talk through that real quick
Yabapmatt: Yeah sure so those of you who saw the post I am going to be moving into a new role officially which is Chief Product Officer and our very own Hardpoint is going to be taking over for me as CTO which is a Technical Officer we kind of mentioned in the post but I’ll also mention here that like it's a very natural change that kind of makes sense for what each of our strengths is and how we can best contribute to the organization it doesn't mean I’m leaving the organization it doesn't mean I’m reducing my involvement or my commitment to this if anything my commitment to Splinderlands has only increased over the past three and a half years and that's continuing it's just that my main skill set really is more around the game design the feature design economy design and all that stuff and Hardpoint and some of the other people in the organization are actually much better suited than I am to run our
Technical aspects of the game keeping servers running allowing them to scale better and all those things so rather me having to just run around and try to figure all this stuff out as best I can which has kind of been the case especially over the summer and I wasn't able to focus on anything else I wasn't able to design any new features or any of that stuff so now I’m able to focus more on that and we have people who are much more experienced and much better at you know getting our technology and our servers our scaling up and running and I think players should be able to see that gone much better now since when I was kind of in charge of that over the summer and then also I’ll still be contributing to development especially the blockchain integration pieces of it and specifically my main development focus has been on the sps governance system and node validator node software so we can talk about that a little bit more later in the town hall but overall it's just I think a really good some really good changes for the organization and it's just gonna help everyone contribute in the most the best way possible to just achieve all of our goals and I hope that everyone in the community will be that manifest going forward
Aggroed: Awesome just maybe I should have started with a super high level just like very high level roles assuming that people aren't used to technology companies can you tell me the difference just not specific to Splinterlands but general to the technology business what's the difference between a chief technology officer and a chief product officer
Yabapmatt: Yeah so actually product officer I guess is a less common thing and we just kind of tried to figure out the best title we could come up with for what I’m doing but generally a chief technology officer is the highest level technology role in the company and it's a lot more management focused than necessarily and it depends from company to but generally it's a lot more management focused than actually going in and building things so chief technology officer will be hiring building out the organization figuring out what roles we need who should be in those roles making sure they have the tools and resources that they need and at a higher level kind of overseeing like how everything is being built and kind of taking different departments different products different services and making sure it all fits together well under how we want to run the technology for the organization so the chief product officer which is going to be my new role is it really it's kind of separate from the technology organization other than the fact that the products are built by the people under the CTO the developers and all that stuff so I’m going to be focusing on feature design in the game for the product like the Splinterlands is our product how should it work what features should we have how should they work how does the economy work what are the taken next all that stuff and then it's different than product there's product design of like what it is and what we should be building and then obviously Nate’s team it actually designs how it looks the interactions the user interface the user experience for those features so that's separate you definitely don't want me working on any of that stuff and then there's another really important role that we mentioned in the post which is that Kbux is going to be the VP of Development which is under the CTO and that's more of a day-to-day hands-on role for the entire for the tech team so that's actually managing the servers actually doing the development making sure things get done properly when there are issues handling them so it's more of like a hands-on role versus the CTO which is more of a management role but obviously we're still a relatively small organization and kind of everyone that just helps out with everything whenever we can in all different parts of the business so that's just kind of over an overview of the general ideas of the different roles but know that doesn't mean that Hardpoint's not going to be getting involved and help dealing with issues or doing development and it doesn't mean that kbox is not going to be also taking on management services and then also people just get involved in all different sorts of all different parts of the business we all kind of work together with Nate on helping with ui and ux and vice versa and marketing and support the whole idea of this company is that everyone's super passionate about what we're doing and just wants to do anything they can to help this succeed and it's fun a lot of the times we a lot of people like to get involved in the stories and the lore and it doesn't matter if you're on the development team or the support team if you want to be involved in different parts of the business that's awesome I just want to be clear on that while we have like we're trying to define what roles are for and what their purpose is everyone's very flexible yeah
Aggroed: Yeah I think I think that those are great descriptions a product is sort of like
what should we build CTO is sort of like let's build the system that lets us build it and the VP of Development seems to be hey I will actually construct it but yeah that all makes sense to me I’m really excited for this I think it gets you out of some of the parts of this that you don't like and that you feel a little bit awkward about I’m glad that you've done them it's amazing how far you were able to get us as an organization as basically like a one-man dev shop cryptomancer came along and has helped us extraordinarily with being able to do even more feature development but like as we grow I’m actually really excited to get like there were so
much on Matt's plate I can’t tell you guys this or like express this enough but I could see the stress that was on him and I could see having to do all these things that like he wasn't naturally gifted at he could get them done and he certainly helped us but they weren't that didn't come as if it's like his great joy and passion sorry like what is it Marie Kondo being like does it bring you happiness and joy it didn't and but what did is all the product design and
the economy design and so it’s actually really fun to see Matt like one as more of that gets lifted off his shoulders it's been fun to see him be more excited more passionate more
enthusiastic and less beaten down by like all the burden that he was carrying of basically doing all of the development and all of like the deep product details on his own and as we've been able to grow it's been awesome to see my friend just kind of like pop back to life and get some of that burden off of them and Hardpoint in particular has been pretty critical in that process so I can detail working through what are the next things that we have to work on oftentimes Matt would just be so burdened with what we are currently doing that it's hard to
think about the next and what's fun about being able to work with Hardpoint and with Matt is that Hardpoint helps us kind of figure out the next direction of the company what are we building next what is the future what is the product road map not just for this one game Splinterlands but for the entire vision and the entire project what is it that we need to build what is it that we want to do and Hardpoint's been exceptional at working with me on that and then as we get into like more details of all right well let's now that we've chunked out
the things that we want what give us a particular piece and let's really dive into the details on that and Matt's extraordinary there I mean obviously I couldn't ask for a better partner so
I feel like we have we have really nailed it in terms of the team and the key people that are here that are building what I think of as a world-class organization with a with a purpose and a mission to change this world to be better than the one that we found to spread peace prosperity and freedom to bring people into crypto and and help those people that interact
with our ecosystem to enjoy a better life than they would have had without it so let's see Hardpoint do you want to go introduce yourself again and I’m sorry that we always do these introductions for the people that might get bored doing it but can you give us a quick introduction and maybe share a little bit about what you were what you've been working on
Hardpoint (Chief Technology Officer)
: Absolutely thanks Aggie yeah so hardpoint I’ve been around this is I guess just crossed three months this week with the team been pretty excited when I came in me
and Matt were first talking about my role like came in as VP of Engineering and day one Matt
was like I really want you to do CTO see how you do over the next three months I was like okay boss I’ll figure this out so we were back three months ago if you've heard some of you've been around for a little bit you'll remember our servers kind of were on fire we were struggling with the growth that we had we had that amazing growth growing from 22 000 active daily players during the summer up to over half a million active daily players so we were
Aggroed: I want to add yesterday we were number one on dab radar again
Hardpoint: Yeah so the growth has just been exceptional and we are looking forward over the next couple of months of even more growth especially as we start to March toward
the general sale in mid January on the so like seeing that growth come in coming into the organization my background I’m a veteran of technology I’ve been doing this over 20
years I’ve done everything from developing and being an architect all the way up that ladder I’ve also done managing for quite a bit of years so I have a lot of combination of skills when
it comes to not only management but also deeply programming I’m a coder at heart and a manager second so I definitely can't go too far away from code but I it is a passion of mine
one of the things that is a little weird about me is that I was coding in my teenage years but when I went to college I actually went after a business degree because I’ve always believed that the best use of technology is a way to provide meaningful value and technology is not an end of itself it's a tool for accomplishing really cool things and so that's something that I’ve believed my entire career and coming here to Splinterlands and actually seeing my entire career starting to make sense and fit into the organization where I can combine both of those pieces that I’ve built up over these last couple of decades be able to take that and apply it to something that I’ve come to really love and I’m passionate about
which is the game in the community is like a dream job for me and so just coming in and helping Matt and Aggie do that kind of organizing the company over the last little bit it's a lot and I know a lot of people as they the last couple weeks they've seen me kind of shift because I haven't been as more in the weeds I’ve been dealing with more of strategic things looking out the next couple months like what are we building how are we doing that trying
to work really hard on hiring speaking of hiring we have crossed over 70 team members
on the team actively working with us in some capacity whether it be part-time full-time directly on the team but we count over 70 people a part of this huge organization that's starting to develop Splinterlands and take it to the next level that is there's a lot of logistical
logistical support behind making sure 70 people are paid we have all the right documents legally we're getting people on boarded I mean every single week we're going on we're on boarding one or two people for the last several weeks there's a lot of things going on and we've slowly built building up a staff to help do that speaking of onboarding some of the things people asked me in the community is hey like you're growing I have a certain particular set of skills I would love to have an opportunity to be a part of the team and I’m like okay well were definitely hiring and the good news is we’ll drop a link into the chat here we have a site that we have our job postings up not all of them are up there and part of that's due to just the tremendous amount of work that we're doing to get all this done but a lot of our roles are up there so if you are interested in working with us the best thing you can do is go to that site at splinterlands.breezy.hr and check out the sites that are out there and put in your application and we'll take a look now I just want to say guys this is just everybody's excited about the game people are like hey I can do this right now we are being very
picky about how we hire and there is no offense meant to be anyone that's applying we love you all but we are trying to absolutely make sure there's a very good alignment with the people that we bring in and with the skills and talents that we need so guys just keep that in mind that we're being picky but if you are interested and you have those skills we definitely encourage you to apply we are looking for some fabulous people for this team and this is one of the most fun teams I’ve had to work with and some of the best people I’ve worked with in the industry are actually working with us right now which is such a wonderful experience to work with so much talent in one shop and the one thing about it that you can really see is that over the last couple of months as things have gotten better and we've got more people in here is that things are just starting to work and we have a bump every now and then whereas we're starting to do it but for the bose point right we are actively growing the team is growing and the processes in place that we're building and putting in place for the development process the creative process the product design process the technical support of the products is just we're taking that and we're moving the maturity level up on every single area so there's a lot to speak here I have even more updates but I really want to talk I want to I want Kevin to kind of come in and get a chance to say hi and also give us a quick dev update because I think that would be really interesting for you guys to hear more on the tactical level what's going on so Kevin
Aggroed: Kevin please do please an introduction first and say who you are a quick background and then tell us what you're working on and kind of the philosophy of the work that you're doing and how you're doing it
Kbux (VP of Engineering)
: Okay thanks guys thanks Aggie and Hardpoint this is Kbux or Kevin I’ve been at Splinterlands for about two and a half months I’ve been coding professionally for about 17 years I came into Splinterland because it's an amazing company the stuff we're doing with blockchain the stuff we're doing the purposes and values that Aggie's been talking about have been huge I dove in with Hardpoint immediately on the server fires and all that stuff that we're doing trying to get things organized trying to get things stable the big focus now is around how we scale and how we organize and making sure we can deliver value to our players and community every day so we've gotten to a point where we're delivering releases of the game one once or twice a week I want to get that up to many times per week we want to be able to deliver both bigger projects like land like modern and wild but also
all the small bug fixes and all the small requests that people have coming in from feedback from our support team and we're developing processes and ways to get that value out to our players that's my background so kind of interweaving both of the ideas I’ve been doing devops previously I was doing financial derivatives previously it really feels like my career was kind of like trying to prepare me for this role and I’m so excited that I can kind of use all chose previous skills and apply it here so we have a release coming on Monday of a lot of chose small fixes stuff from the feedback from the community small fixes that we hear about in tech support so keep those requests and ideas coming and that's the real big focus is we want to deliver value consistently to the community not just on those big new features but
every little thing that makes the game more fun to play
Aggroed: What do you see as your highest priority so we have the launch on Monday after
that what is the dev team's kind of like main objective right now what are you steering people towards
Kbux:. Yeah the big thing is we want we want to be able to both be very stable see consistent everyday updates the idea that if we can deliver value to our players every kind of like every week or multiple times per week that becomes cumulative so we have I have I’m staring at our list of changes coming we're going to be doing a release on Monday we have like 10 individual small changes going in for that release to fix small issues we're trying to do that at the same time where cryptomancer and the team can build out modern and wild and also prepare for general sale so another part of our team is really focused on that trying to make sure kind of the same thing we did for chaos legion to make sure we could handle the scale we have the same kind of approach for general sale to make sure those things are stable things work well people can open their packs difficult to start battling so there's not one kind of big feature I guess the big feature is we want to be able to deliver value every day and we're the whole team is kind of working to that model
Aggroed: So it always struck me at like we say things like we want to do this general sale and we're going to get more cards and like it's not just like you know map building cards and it's not even just building the interface to do it it's like oh well we're 10xing the total supply of cards in the game I guess that's going to take some infrastructure that we have to edit it's amazing how much underneath it's the tip of the iceberg is what you see and then it's all this work underneath it that allows it to just sort of function smoothly that players don't see which is like a giant piece of what we do
Kbux:.Yeah my favorite kind of little microcosm of that is when you go into the market and you see
how many cards are listed of a particular card type you see maybe up to 10 000 up to you
know 8 000 right now what if there were 150 000 of a particular card listed in the market how does it handle that does it handle it well does it fast can you search it well can you find the
specific card id that you're looking for all those little things we're really going through every page and saying what if there are 20 million cards in the system how does this page act does it work right what if there are 5 million daily users does this page work right and it is really a meticulous page by page feature by feature approach that we're taking
Aggroed: Awesome well I’m stoked to have you here are there other things that you want to share I like what anything else did we cover it or what else is on your brain
Kbux: I’d love to just plug the feedback voting system that Hardpoint put in and the team put in whenever I would love for all of our community members to when you have ideas push them there vote on everything that you want done we really care about what the community is looking for even when we have ideas internally that says where someone says I heard this in tech support or I heard this in general chat or from the generally our response is like let's throw it to feedback let's see what the community really thinks that weighs heavily on our priorities and we really want to be paying attention to that and making that really help drive where we're going
Aggroed: Yeah it's been fun and hopefully as players are seeing these kinds of updates and quality of life features get added one of the things that's been awesome is that we not only have we added we basically 7xed the entire dev squad in terms of people that are building features now where there's more than that and more than Homestead but it's also like we have people that are also working on the platform and also working on the scaling and the Amazon servers it's we literally get to do every single part of this whereas before it was Matt and Homestead trying to figure out everything now it's little squads that are working on each different part does that sound accurate to you
Aggroed: Fair enough
again kind of runs under the radar but he's been around yeah I’ve been around since the very beginning this is
Aggroed: That's entirely fair sorry that I did not acknowledge that is my bad
no I usually refer to him as the great and powerful mellow man I remember telling my son when I met him and got to talk to him about the battle screen it was my son was pretty psyched
Aggroed: Yeah I mean he did that in like a weekend to get us to get this whole thing started it was awesome it's incredible okay well yeah feedback.splinterlands.com I think it's been making nice improvements and I’m sure people forget about them the minute that they're there and what it used to be back in our day when we had to scroll the entire thing by hand to go find the one card we wanted and click it 15 times because it didn't work every time and now it's just like smooth like butter so it is a nice quality of life improvement thank you for your work and thanks for being here and thanks for taking on this dev team it's a lot of people that are super talented I mean that it's got to be a little bit daunting because like all that we've hired so far are people that have 15 to 30 years experience so it's not okay here's a couple kids fresh out of college and it's obvious that you are the like you know the guy that's leading this but it's like you are surrounded by talent and I’m grateful that the team is
is functioning as smoothly as it appears to be
That's great yeah you said it well
Aggroed: All right
Now let me jump in here too so again it's not the only kind of role changes that are happening right now in the org I wanted to highlight something else that's going on which probably affects some of the discord community and some of our other communities pretty highly is Homestead hacker came on I would say a couple weeks ago and was working with us actually probably a month and a half ago started helping us get everything tidied up on discord and has done such a great job with that we're actually pulling him out of that role and we're actually having him starting to work on a team that we're forming around product design and just so excited to have him there have been working closely with myself and
Matt and the rest of the team but I just really wanted to give him a chance to say hi and just to let you guys know we are going to be backfilling him and starting to look for a another
community mod lead but let me let him say it homestead you there you able to get on here and say hi real quick
Homestead (Community Moderator Lead)
: Yeah hello can you hear me
Yeah that sounds Great
Aggroed: We can hear you great can you do a quick introduction and then tell us about your previous role and tell us about what you're working on
Homestead:
Absolutely so hey I’m Homestead John Brantley Homestead Hacker these are these are the
names I’ve gone by with some controversy but anyway my career is a lot like hard points and that I’ve done like about every job in tech from the support test development project
management both in big corporations doing software and hardware development stuff
and later getting more into I.T. in all kinds of industries embedded systems like voice
recognitions and cars and automobiles retail medical just all kinds of stuff anyway my people said I think from all that and through the years is that I’m pretty good at looking at complex systems really from a kind of a user perspective and breaking them down into simple components that people can understand and so the right parties know the pieces that they need to work on and at the end of the day so that we build a cohesive product that is fully fleshed out from everything from support to the development team knowing exactly
what they need to develop and design anyway I’m just really excited about moving into this product design role and I think it's a great match of my skills and I’m looking forward to the
challenge
Aggroed: And what were you doing for community moderation and what do you what do you think will be coming in behind you what's the goal of community moderation and what skill set are we looking for there
Homestead: Yeah absolutely so I’ve been wearing two hats here for a bit I’ve been doing this other this product design stuff kind of in addition to the mod lead stuff while trying to keep the modley stuff going and I want to talk about that after this but to answer your question I’ve really enjoyed this community model as well I was able to dive in kind of quickly and short some things up and so we are gonna the goal there is really to improve the discord experience and make it safe so we've got a pretty good handle on that and we're going to be opening up a job posting for to backfill the community modeling position now most of you probably think you see that role manifest itself here on discord doing mod leading the mod team putting policy but there's a lot more to that to this role it’s also working with other teams to enable content distribution and digital engagement and really brand presence and trust in all of our communities we have discord is the biggest is the biggest kind of I guess the biggest part of that for our community but we have other we have social we have telegram we have other things coming so this role will be at the end of the day it's relies it's the relies between Splinterlands and its customers but this person that comes in to backfill this is going to need to immediately hit the ground running on you need to really know discord well you know having have moderated some communities in the past understand security understands discipline in kind of the hippocratic oath of doing no harm and keeping it running smoothly so look for a job posting on that soon that's kind of some of the stuff we're looking for and I do have I do have some updates on the stuff we have been working on so I don't know if you want me to move into that manual but that's kind of an answer to your question about what we're looking for
Aggroed: Let's save that for another week or two
Homestead: Sure not everything is out yet well that's sort of like some 2022 stuff to go set the tone for next year but right now we're still focused just like entirely on modern and wild getting that out and finishing all parts of the release of chaos legion so let’s do that for now Chatter are you there I’d like to I’d like to hear from marketing I know everybody is wondering what we are doing how are we growing like what partnerships are we making and I’m hoping you can give us an update to one again everybody's got to introduce themselves and two just sort of walk us through like what's the vision what's the direction and what are we actually working on
Chatter (Director Of Growth)
: Yeah absolutely so from the marketing side and for those who don't know me I’m Chatter I’m the kind of Director of Marketing over at Splinterlands here lots of stuff going on for those who kind of tuned in last week you guys got kind of the long spiel about it all but on our side right now kind of working on exchanges we're getting kicked off on a whole bunch of different ad platforms right now we're looking at kind of brave coin gecko coin market cap for the crypto side of things and then looking at kind of like
Aggroed: Hold on so the coin market cap one is a little bit different than what everybody might expect it's not just ads there's a different section or something can you explain that because I actually think it's cool enough that we should not just glance over that but that's freaking awesome let's go talk about it
Chatter: Absolutely yeah so what they're doing actually is running a kind of new alpha ways of listing different platforms on their website and kind of advertising them so thankfully they actually kind of reached out and we were hand-picked as one of the kind of like 20 or so companies that are engaging in that alpha of kind of all their different listings that they have on their site right now but essentially that's going to be broken down into what is two different
sections one of them is going to be almost like a twitter feed on the different token listing ages on the website so that will just be in the kind of bottom right hand corner we'll be able to essentially contribute to what is almost like a live feed of kind of small little updates and then the other side of things is more towards what you'd see kind of on medi.com or like yahoo finance or any of those kind of bigger listing companies where it's more long form
articles they'll have that kind of bottom of the page on coin listing pages and I believe
they're discovery pages so we'll be able to also kind of feed in like any of our chaos legion updates or any of those kind of peak or splinter talk posts that we're launching right now we'll be able to feed that directly into their site as well so really cool opportunity
Aggroed: Tell me the benefit like why I’m really excited about what about it and I guess I could share some of why but I'd like to hear from you because you're the marketing guy why is this cool why does that matter why would that help us
Chatter: Yeah absolutely I mean it's another way of essentially promoting kind of organic brand exposure across what is going to be millions and millions of kind of monthly sessions of traffic and to be kind of clear here it's not just going to be on our token list our token listing page it's going to be across kind of multiple different token listing pages and because we're
actually going to be the very first company to kick off this alpha test which is going to be I believe next Tuesday on December 21st is when it's going to be going live so kind of look
for articles to be posted probably in the next day or two following that it's super cool it's
gonna be millions and millions of eyes on it gonna be great brand exposure for us and then as we kick off kind of all of our other ads as well it's gonna help us really develop this entire kind of marketing funnel for us so as kind of new users are seeing us and getting some brand exposure we can then kind of start doing other marketing plays towards that whether it's kind of hitting them some more ads and just saying hey like your Splinderlands here's our game come check it out kind of thing or whether it's really engaging in more kind of
partnerships or other opportunities there
Aggroed: Yeah okay so thanks for going into that I think it's game changing for us cmc is literally one of the most popular websites in the world not just for crypto but just like free for the freaking world so to get kind of featured on there and be one of the first companies in this kind of cool spot which is it basically feels crypto meets yahoo finance I mean this is
it's awesome to be to be featured as one of the first companies and I think that some of us being able to flex we're like yesterday we were the number one dap on dapp radar so when cmc needs to figure out well who should we talk to first and who we get this going with like you pick Splinterlands because we're the number one dap on dap radar so pretty excited I think this is part of what is going to open up more possibilities for us more players and freaking awesome all right well other than that I know that there's more like but wait there's more what else is going on here
Chatter: Absolutely all right opening door number two so other things going on right now we're kind of starting to plant Splinterfest I know a lot of the community has been talking about it and there's been a lot of demand for it so believe me when I say we read almost every single comment that comes through in the town halls and all of the kind of other discord channels and all of our socials so and so forth the Splinterfest is likely going to
be in either Q2 or Q3 in 2022 still tbd right now we're discussing if we want to do one if we want to do maybe an east coast or west coast and do kind of two next year a lot more details to come on that who is working kind of on the marketing team as well one of our newer hires has been doing an amazing job kind of starting to organize all of that so as we figure out more details I’ll make sure everyone's kind of looped in on that side and then kind of more opportunities on marketing we're looking into doing a lot more trade shows and conventions
just again speaking to kind of a lot more partners a lot more of investors and everything else to bring people into the game and help brand exposure there we’re working with partnerships I think the next one to be coming out is actually going to be with like an a-list rapper so kind of look out for what that dual utility nft is going to be there's going to be
both utility kind of within Splinterland as well as kind of when you hold the nft kind of outside your wallet as well so really cool stuff that we're doing on the marketing team really trying to get kind of everything across the line but as January and February kind of come around there's going to be a whole slew of updates coming from us and then of course the tournaments right now so we're going to be working with zen sports to do actually two different tournaments one is going to be a one-off tournament which is going to be likely kind of end of January that's going to be probably a smaller prize pool only chaos legion cards still trying to figure out kind of entries and restrictions for that but would like to keep that pretty open-ended for everyone to kind of join if they can and then the second side of things is going to be a year-long tournament so that's going to be comprised of monthly qualifiers that leads into a monthly tournament what those prize pools are going to look like is probably
kind of five to ten thousand dollars every single month in both tokens via and kind of other prizes there and then with the results for every single one of those monthly tournaments it's going to work as a ladder system that's going to work towards an end of year tournament in
which there's going to be a 50 000 plus supplies pool for that very last tournament that's going to be happening in December of 2022 so look out for that zen sports has been awesome to work out with and then we're going to be announcing kind of more things regarding that I think early January is when we're planning to kind of fully have that fleshed out and announced so lots of things coming down the pipe here guys we’re definitely hearing your comments if there's anything else like anything else that you guys want to kind of see done on the marketing side of things or any events that you want to see happen please feel free to reach out to me directly other than that before I kind of end off here I want to kind of
plug two different things one we held the twitter contest the other day I’ll be announcing the inners of that probably this afternoon I’ll be putting all the winners in the town hall channel
here if anyone wants to kind of see who won and then secondly we are also working with one of our community members to run a fun little song contest for everyone so our one of our community members kind of re-mocked the lyrics to winter wonderland so if anyone wants to go in check out those lyrics and submit a video of you guys singing or rocking
out to that new song please feel free to I’ll drop a link in the town hall and all of our socials shortly
Aggroed: Walking into splinter wonderland I can see it all right is Nate here with us this morning I haven't been able to check Nate you there
Nateaguila: I’m here
Aggroed: All right yeah I can hear you great and actually if there's anybody else from the company that wants to come on I probably need to go back to Matt I try to save him a little bit for the for the end here but other if there's other Splinterlands guys that want to come on
please just put a one into the town hall chat so I know to plan to bring you on if there's other devs that want to talk or other creatives that we haven't heard from that would be great but
Nate I’m glad that you're here do you want to go tell us some of what you're working on maybe you even have a little eye candy maybe you could tell us some about the stories that have been that have been coming out and they're just awesome you're muted sir Mr. Nate comes on back
Nateaguila (Creative Director)
: Sorry about that okay yeah just to hop on some of the stuff that was discussed previously Hardpoint mentioned how a lot of our player base has submitted applications for some of the job listings and I’m going to continue to add more jobs listings to the board there's a lot more that needs to be added there but when we get applications just keep in mind we're looking at really top-tier experience with either in the gaming industry or at least on the creative side we got a lot going on and there's a little fierce competition and our standards are pretty high but don’t let that deter you please continue to continue to add more and more submissions and applications because we still do look at those and we will try to fit you in if we can particularly if you're a player of the game and part of the community we want to do our best to make room as we can just it just may not happen right now but you know as spots become available for that for other stuff I would say that let me think what else was discussed the feedback great we are fleshing out and creating a larger ux ui team that will hopefully be able to address all of those things and the feedback effectively and polish things up even more than more than ever so there's that and we're pretty excited about that case in point let me see if I can find something related to that one sec.
Aggroed: Oh Nate’s gonna leave us all in just a little bit of a little
Nateaguila: Here we go so here's something I still have to hand it off to the devs but this is kind of a recent submission by one of the ui guys and at the same time it was a little bit delayed creating this enhanced ui because we wanted some background art which I’ll share it with you as well so this is what I think this is the buy sps screen and what's cool is it opened up some cool opportunity to create some cool concept art which I think we have another Matt on the team he’s in Poland not not yabba but he created this really awesome background art displaying a battle mage holding sps shard and it's a little clearer easier to see when not covered up with all that ui but I saw that and I was like that's right on because that really going to emphasize you'll notice the little battle mage teeth on her arm it really emphasizes the fact that once and I bring this up now and then you the players the closer we get to the land expansion the the closer we get to other updates in the game it's going to become more and more apparent that you have a role to play within the Splinterlands you’re
not just sitting back playing a card game were gonna you are a battle mage and you're gonna feel like that more and more as updates are made to the game let's see what else can I share well here before I started that let's see since we're on since I shared a wallpaper I got a couple more some of you guys have seen these images already but not in a wallpaper format so if you like seeing these images on the game or elsewhere then take a look at this is a battle mage it could be the same lady you see in the wallpaper I just shared but she's overlooking the arena and preparing maybe the spells in her head that she's gonna cast
before the battle commences and just to show the effect that chaos legion has had upon the world as they conquer the world one kingdom at a time starting from Pretoria and working their way outwards to the other continents you're going to find that what they do is they subjugate the population and they kind of just like they do with the elements and just like they do with everything else that comes in contact with them they twist and warp what was
good and wonderful and turn it into something that is I guess the best word for it would be
oppressive and so when this wallpaper was conceptualized when it had that oppressive
theme in mind so here is a new and for those of you who haven't seen it yet on the page right now for the card packs you can click on the story button and you'll see some of this artwork on there
Aggroed: It's dark that's grittier I like it
Nateaguila: All right and then let's see here's a sometimes I’ll throw an animation at you guys just to give you the progress of what's happening and this is one of my favorite new chaos legion characters is the death element vision nineteen seen on our home page
Aggroed: Nice, nice
Nateaguila: So here he is in attack mode and he attacks he is a magic attack but we thought that based upon the nature of who he is it might be cool if he attacked with his fist almost like he's punching but this raw death-like magic emanates from his fist and kind of comes let's take a look at this guy
Aggroed: Nice nice
Nate do have like a folder that people are always asking us for like backgrounds and stuff do we have a folder that we share with the public that they can just go where we have all
these piled in there they can just download because I know I’m one of those people that just constantly tries to download all of these things and put it into something for my backgrounds do we have anything we can share with them
Nateaguila: Yeah definitely don't know if someone has a grade if they don't then I will find it momentarily and share it in the chat but
Just before the end of the stream if you don't mind if you have that it'd be awesome I know a lot of people would love that
Nateaguila: Okay
Aggroed: So many tell me has a nice idea I would love to see some twitch overlays for Splinterlands I come with a sales background and that sales background tells me if we
ever want people to do things we should make it as easy for them as possible to do so if we can make stream overlays that are ridiculously professional and free to use for our players to go look professional on their first day we should be doing that to make it as easy as possible because we ultimately want them to stream
all right yeah for sure I would say that I know just the person to tap for that on the creative side so you guys can expect to start seeing some resources made available I’ll we'll create a kit to kind of help influencers and streamers and people to kind of you know get a jump start on celebrating us the Splinterlands ecosystem and community and game so no that's a great
idea okay so here let's do this I’m gonna end it with this cool actually I got a little bit of concept art so maybe I should have done that first before showing the polish stuff but what the concept art is pretty freaking cool even at the concept stage as we conceptualize what should we do here we have such talented artists that it's hard not to look at the concept art and say man that already looks cool I can't imagine what it's going to evolve into so I know that Yabba has talked alittle bit about the governance and the infrastructure there and the kind of like the nodes and validator oracle stuff and just keep in mind in parallel while that that is being conceptualized and figured out and the developers are kind of going let's see how we're going to do this the credo side is kind of looking at possibilities how do we explain this and bring it into the Splinterlands world because ideally that's what we would do is there
was some be some kind of lore based reasoning not just to provide a backdrop for the documentation page that we provide for people who want to download the client software and stuff or the shop pages and that kind of stuff but just really dig our teeth into it so here is a little bit of the concept art that we do when we try to figure out stuff like that and how we would bring that explanation into the fantasy genre so here is a little bit of concept art that we
have been working on for that I’m not going to explain a lot about that in fact some of this concept art has already been been finalized and gone through the entire steps through colorization and the final lines and brush strokes and it's all done but I figured we'll share a little bit little by little and I think it's cool to see the concept art can't
Aggroed:I want to know what that says I want to know what the roon mean do
I’ll share that little by little we the narrative team in fact the concept artist and the narrative team are both working on a like I think I mentioned this in a previous town hall on a system a roon system where we don't just throw up stuff that looks cool but there's meaning behind it and there's a cool Easter eggs for people who are observing and really dig into our lore I want to start if not in marketing type giveaways in some way who make it prove beneficial for all you guys out there to become three Splinterlands geeks and really if you go to a comic con or something you have all these people speaking klingon and dothraki and all this stuff and I I’d love us to get to the point where people are speaking Splinterland languages and understanding what runes mean that that would be so cool so and we're trying to strive to
to make it so that people can do that so we'll get there and I’ll share as the work on that
progresses and then what I’m going to finally end with I’m pretty excited about this and I have to give hats off to you I think this is a Hardpoint idea it was like let’s take the team
and give them artwork fantasy type profiles maybe with digital business cards or physical business cards so I had we were starting off with the leadership team the first person to submit his face was Chatter was Liam
Chatter: So man I’m so about seeing this
Aggroed: I want to know if he has a beard or not
Chatter: Yes
I was given this yesterday and I was like oh this looks so cool I’m jealous because
in d and d I always I always play a rogue or thief like character and that's what he had asked for his fantasy thing so here it is Chatter marketing guru in all his glory
Chatter: Yeah he hasn't even seen them no not oh my gosh that is so cool
Aggroed: I don't know guys
you noticed we didn't go beard but I think its right we gave him a little bit of rogue-ish
Aggroed: Honestly I can't believe that's not just a character in our game but that looks awesome needs to be a character in the
Chatter: Game Nate that just looks too cool now that is so sick hey congratulations guys
the creative team here can I just say this every time I see what the creative team produces here it just blows me away I have all these backdrops when I’m on video calls just showing off for art and everybody that's outside of the company that doesn't know us they're always like wow like that's just beautiful I gotta show it off it's so cool
Aggroed: Yeah that thing for sure and
I’m really pleased in fact this concept art was created by a new hire I asked him yesterday what's your player name or discord it's http but his name is Tyler and when I was interviewing him we were going through his portfolio what really popped out at me was some a self-portrait he did and it was so polished and so amazingly cool I was like what that right there is enough for me to say let's get you on board I got an entire team
Aggroed: And we got 70 nice work that was great now make 69 more please
Yeah I can I just say that that was when we were talking about it about being on the Splinterlands team where the idea really came from back we’ve talked about this back in September when I first got hired because I saw Matt's cart so this Nate actually was just your I or whoever came up with that card art I don't know how many years ago it was just I saw that and I was being part of the team is more about more than just doing a job it's more
than just making a money it's more than we want it to be something cool like this is a gaming company first and foremost we’re trying to have something cool that shines that's we're something different in the industry and these cards are one of that small little way that we show off that way so I just want you guys to know that's one of the things we think is so
good
Aggroed: Chatter the beardless is kind of like a reference to chat I’m telling you I love this company I love these people and when I pull out my card and people look at it they will like stare at it slack jawed it'll take them a second to even register what it is and then when
they get what it is they're like oh crap that's cool and like not just us but I’ve shown gaming companies this and their executives are like what have we been doing our whole lives?
it's like an existential moment and all I can think is we are cooler than you I know that
that's shallow I don't care we meant millionaires and we have the coolest business cards we are just awesome dudes and we make the best games and we turn people like we change lives and there aren't a lot of gaming companies that can say that and we're one of the biggest ones in the world so I’m so freaking pumped I love what we're doing and I love that card it makes Chatter look awesome and that’s our team our team we got like he’s a rogue he works tirelessly and he's got he comes off as like the nicest man on the planet but he's got just a little bit of deviousness to him it's amazing and I just want to be able to go showcase that who we are and not just have it be hello I am Dr. Blair Jesse I am here as a chief executive officer no dude we're freaking wizards and we're out here like making something absolutely phenomenal and it’s such a pleasure and it's such a joy to be part of thisother things that you want to share Nate is that is that the glorious end of Chatter the beard
Nate: Yeah I saved him for the finale there I thought that was that was that was pretty cool
Aggroed: Chatter I we can definitely give you something better than chat with the beardless but for now it's awesome for now it's awesome that's just like the card is just so cool I mean that like I’ve looked at I’ve looked at a hundred different and books and that like that character easily could have its place in any lore book anywhere in any of the d and d realm of characters so that's awesome we can we can do the fearless you know Chatter the fearless it has just a little bit of that beer fear whatever but awesome dude so proud so grateful that you're here and just like this team is freaking killing it now I want to go back to Matt and
actually if there's any other Splinterlands folks that want to come on air I’m happy to have you just put a one in the chat but if you guys can Matt I want to go turn this back over to you for a bit because I know that there's a little bit more that you want to talk about so walk us through it
Yabapmatt: I was thinking we might just get into questions I want to me don't have a ton of time and I do want to try to answer as many questions as possible it's all there's not there are not really any new updates as far as modern wild format as far as the sps validator nodes and as far as land those though if you're interested in hearing more about those
I’d say listen to the so some of the previous town hall recordings they're still in progress so if everyone's kind of cool with that we can jump right into questions
Part 2 - Q&A
https://peakd.com/splinterlands/@hanv/splinterlands-town-hall-full-text-december-18th-2021-part-1-news-and-update