Guild Saga: Year in Review 2022 & Outlook for 2023
A brief look at what we've accomplished this year, and a look at some of the exciting things we have planned ahead for 2023.
Foreword
Guildies,
One year ago today, we announced Guild Saga to the Solana community and were immediately met with resounding enthusiasm and interest in our game. We minted out our Guild Saga Heroes collection shortly thereafter. Since then, a lot has happened.
As I hope will be impressed in this article, the Guild Saga team has been hard at work all year and much has been accomplished. World Mode was launched and introduced the ability to stake your Hero NFTs for GGEM, GGLD, and Loot. It was bare bones and buggy at first; now, it performs smoothly with minimal issues. New features have been and will soon be added to the app (item SFTs, NFT crafting, cooking, profession quests, marketplace, etc) to flesh out the World Mode idle game and further complement the core game.
With respect to the core game, we now have a polished alpha web build that many community members are playing. This build demonstrates the core gameplay loop but, clocking in at roughly one hour of play time, admittedly falls short in terms of content. We definitely would have liked to have the initial vision of the Tales of Respite demo (4 hours of gameplay) shipped this year. However, feedback has been very positive, and we are not far off at all from showcasing a more substantive and lengthy demo as well as a brand new mode which we are very excited about.
Hundreds of item SFTs, an accompanying item database, and a lore wiki also shipped in 2022. We were consistent in our community management, holding bi-weekly AMAs and weekly updates all year without interruption.
Meanwhile, the world and markets have been on fire. We are in the depths of a crypto bear market amid a broader economic recession, with SOL and the Solana ecosystem having been hit the worst. It is not lost on the team that many of our community members have been greatly affected and, understandably, have taken a break from NFTs.
I would like to take this moment to express my profound gratitude to everyone who is still with us, those who helped out during our mint (especially all the OG mods!), and all those who at one point last year supported our game.
Reflecting honestly on Guild Saga’s 2022, we are happy with what we achieved but not satisfied with our output. Developing World Mode in tandem with the game while continuing to manage the community has been a challenging balance. Some things, like specific World Mode programs and polishing our increasingly-complex tactics battle system, simply took more time than anticipated.
Looking forward to 2023, I am confident that, while patience will still be needed for the vision laid out in the whitepaper to be realized, new updates and features will begin to be pushed at a greater frequency. Not only is the team simply improving, there are many major features where significant progress was made in 2022 but that have not yet shipped.
Finally, I just wanted to touch on the future of Guild Saga and its connection to Solana. Guild Saga is an IP independent of any one specific network/ecosystem (as evidenced by the upcoming Steam release) but the team remains confident in Solana and has no plan to migrate to another blockchain. The thesis for why we chose Solana back in 2021 remains the same today and the community continues to be in a league of its own. In my view, the future of Solana is promising and we want to be a part of it.
Happy New Year!
VultM
1. Game Announcement & Pre-Mint
Guild Saga became an instant hit following the announcement of the game on January 1st, 2022, amassing thousands of followers on the first day alone, with tens of thousands more to follow shortly after.
Our Discord community boomed with activity, with many members of the community wanting to learn more about the game, its roadmap, and plans for the collection of the 10,000 Hero NFTs that will be minted in February.
The Guild Saga Whitepaper
Though not as detailed as its current iteration, we also published what we believe to be one of the most comprehensive and in-depth whitepapers on the Solana network—containing essential information about the project, game mechanics, current and future implementations, and asset details. The whitepaper is still being revised and expanded upon even today, and can be found here. We will be releasing a major update in Q1 2023!
Our First Gameplay Trailer
Leading up to the mint, we also uploaded a 100-second gameplay and feature showcase trailer. The trailer showed off our beautifully drawn pixel art, nostalgic RPG elements including a peek into our turn-based battle system, and stunning character concept portraits by the lovely Ayaka Kato, known for her work on multiple trading card games including Magic: the Gathering. It amassed over 40,000 views.
2. AMAs & Building our Discord Community
The Guild Saga Discord
Our community grew fast—both on Discord and on Twitter—with the excitement for the impending Hero NFT mint growing. Many new faces were joining our Discord each day, and the crowds became rather challenging to manage.
We were extremely blessed at the time to have the tireless help of our volunteer mods and sages, who were crucial in helping to disseminate information, point newcomers in the right direction or answer their questions, and working with whitelists with other communities, day after day after day.
Without our mods—Stampeed, mad, R small, Cure—and all of our OG Sages, we would not have made it smoothly through the mint. And for that, you will always have our tremendous gratitude.
Ask-Me-Anything with VultM and Caruso
Longtime fans will no doubt be familiar with our fun-filled AMA sessions, which has been expanded upon from simply answering submitted queries to include discussions about food, borderline obscene and vomit inducing GIFs, inane trivia, and unreasonably difficult verification phrases for prize winners. Oh, and don’t forget the quirky AMA banners, which may become priceless 1/1 NFTs in the future (probably not though).
The first AMA occurred on the night before the mint, with hundreds of community members in attendance. We are still holding these AMA sessions every two weeks on Sunday 10:00 AM EST on the Guild Saga Discord. Be sure to join us if you want to marginally improve the quality of your weekends!
3. Hero NFT Mint on Magic Eden
Our 10,000 “Guild Saga Hero” NFT collection was minted on February 25th—and sold out during the presale phase in a flash, even with market conditions looking to take a turn for the worse due to multiple negative events (Balloonsville rug, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and crashing markets with numerous projects failing to mint out).
We took this to be a huge endorsement of our game; that our fans had confidence in the essence of the project. With that, we started building upon the plans we’ve laid out at full speed.
4. World Mode, Questing & the Item Database
In just roughly 2 months after the mint, we launched World Mode, a web-based blockchain app that allows holders to stake their Hero NFTs to earn Loot (item SFTs), GGLD, and GGEM.
The World Mode interface shows the town of Newacre and its various locations: the Bank, the Town Square, the Catacombs, etc. Each of these locations will eventually unlock and serve a different function, which you can learn more about here.
The Heroes Guild: “Difficulty Quests”
On release, the Heroes Guild was opened to allow holders to send their heroes on the first kind of quest—locking them up for 5 days while accruing the aforementioned tokens and loot, of which their quality is dependent on the rarity of the hero questing.
These tokens will be usable in game for various functions, such as crafting and learning new skills, while loot can be directly equipped on your character or companions to give you a nice headstart.
The Guild Saga Item Database
Alongside the release of World Mode, we also published a site that allows anyone to view all the items available in the game at the moment. Clicking on an item will bring up a detailed view featuring a higher-res icon, its stats and bonuses, and a description or lore snippet related to the item.
As of today, there are already over 1,000 items in the database—more than twice of what we started out with! The database is still being constantly updated with new items, additional descriptions, and balance changes to item stats.
If you’ve yet to visit it, you can find it here.
5. Concept Art & Lore Preview
Worldbuilding
Aarde, the world of Guild Saga, spans multiple continents and features an intricate web of relationships between a number of factions, characters, and races. The world is constantly being built upon, then brought to life through story, artwork, and in-game visuals.
Concept Artwork
To further evoke the imagination, we have worked with our concept artists in designing the various places you will be able to visit while playing Guild Saga. As of today, we have most of Respite Island (where the first chapter of the game takes place) drawn up and ready to be turned into in-game maps.
Character Portraits
Many characters in Guild Saga—even certain NPCs, like Usior above—come with their own detailed portraits also drawn by Ayaka. These portraits will appear during conversation, and will even feature multiple expressions.
6. Guild Events, Design Contests & Memes
In addition to what we’ve accomplished development-wise in both the game and World Mode, we also achieved these community milestones in 2022:
Posted 60 Guildhall Reports, consisting of weekly announcements and dev updates
Ran 25 AMA sessions, each spanning over an hour and oftentimes two or more!
Hosted multiple community events, such as live shopping streams, hero fashion shows, an Easter hunt on Discord, live gameplay, and more!
Received over 400 creative contest submissions
That’s a whole lot of fun! And we intend to keep that up (or surpass that) as we break into the new year — we hope you’re as excited as us for everything that’s ahead!
Community Contests
Throughout the year, we held multiple contests where our community could submit their artwork, designs, lore, and even memes for a chance to win a prize, and even have their designs adapted into the game in some way!
With so many fantastic entries submitted, it was frequently a pain for us to choose a single winner each time. Many of these designs have already made their way into the game in some shape or form, but due to the sheer number of those deserving to be showcased, we won’t add them to this post. Instead, we’ll do a showcase of our favorites on a Twitter thread sometime in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled for that!
Community Events
We had some fun last year with community events!
Take the Easter hunt for example, where guildies had a limited timeframe to work together to solve the Easter Bunny’s riddle for a prize.
Or how about the Guild Saga Fashion Shows? — where each of our 3 judges aren’t even rating with the same criteria or scale (or number of decimal places🤪)
Or perhaps you were one of the lucky few to win a prize from one of the live shopping streams—where Vult and Caruso evaluated and bought heroes off the marketplace and raffled them off to viewers?
If you weren’t able to join one or more of these community events, don’t feel down. We’ve got a whole lot more planned for 2023—some new, some old, and some with a twist (Can you say Guild Saga Horror Show?)—and we hope that you’ll be able to join us then!
7. Extended Gameplay Livestream & Video
In July, Vult streamed an early playable build of the game during one of our biweekly AMA sessions while struggling to answer the audience’s questions. We know many of you were excited to hop right in and start playing, especially after being treated to the awe-inspiring tracks composed by our man Tim, but we still had a few major bugs to iron out before releasing it to the first wave of testers.
Here’s a fun fact—he asked to lower the damage of the mobs in the final hydromancer battle so he wouldn’t die on stream. 😂😂
8. Guild Saga Lore Wiki
In September, we also released the official Lore Wiki which features the background history of the characters, locations, and factions in the world of Aarde; along with a collection of Guild Saga Stories!
The wiki is constantly being updated with new articles, so if you are a fan of lore, worldbuilding, and story in general, be sure to visit here and bookmark the page!
9. Playable Story Mode Alpha, Testing Begins
And so it begins! — Just one month or so after the gameplay stream, the first wave of testers comprised of our Sages were given access to the alpha! As wave after wave of bugs got squashed thanks to the diligent reporting of our testers, we gradually began to open access to more holders based on the number of heroes they owned.
We would like to take this time again to express our gratitude to our dedicated testers, without whom the game would not be in its current, far more polished form. Of course, there’s still a long way to go, but thanks to you the engines are oiled well enough for us to continue paving the tracks into Respite Island.
10. World Mode v2, Item Pool Refresh, Recipes & Crafting
And that brings us to our latest World Mode updates which introduced the Recipe item and Crafting at the Blacksmith, where multiple materials can be combined along with a small GGEM fee to create equipment pieces.
Many of these equipment pieces are requisites to more powerful items that will become available later, with some being blacksmith-exclusives that won’t be dropped or lootable in the game! If you have yet to explore the recipes, what it takes to craft them, and the stats of the items they produce, be sure to visit the item database!
This update was another step in our expansion of the World Mode idle game, with further updates coming soon which will add further depth to the experience.
11. What Lies Ahead in 2023
With that, we’ve hopefully covered most of what we’ve built and done in 2022. Our team is quickly gaining experience, improving our workflows, and beginning to work more efficiently with one another; so you can count on us to build bigger, better, and more quickly in 2023.
Below is a quick breakdown of what’s to come in the year ahead, minus a few things we can’t quite show you yet ;-)
Public Alpha Release (PC)
Our next major milestone—going public with a new, extended Alpha build with some additional content (and more to be added over time).
Additionally, the game will shift from a web client to a PC one, allowing for much smoother gameplay, quicker load times, and greater stability to ensure the best possible experience for many who will be trying out Guild Saga for the first time.
Oh, and we know you’ve been dying to import your Hero NFTs and torment the Rexites and Pirates on Respite Island with your Ancient/Unique gear. We’re happy to announce that we’ve just completed animating every single item that appears on Hero NFTs, and are in the midst of testing and polish to ensure that they are all well and good. The NFT import feature will also become available with the Public Alpha!
Story Mode & Steam Release “Guild Saga: Vanished Worlds”
While continuing to build the game, we will also be releasing an off-chain, modified version of the game’s Story and Arena modes on Steam, a traditional RPG experience to attract new fans to the Guild Saga world.
Guild Saga: Vanished Worlds will be a standalone title and not feature assets from or crossplayability with the Guild Saga game and World Mode app. We will market the game on a separate Twitter page (and through other avenues) and would greatly appreciate your support through following and retweeting then 🙏
We are set to announce Guild Saga: Vanished Worlds with a new trailer in Q1 2023.
Arena Mode (previously known as the PVE Gauntlet)
What was once planned to be a minor feature at an in-game location is now becoming its own full-fledged game mode.
The Arena will provide a thrilling endgame survival experience where you assemble a team of up to 10 comprised of heroes and mercenaries to take on an endless “roguelike-style” labyrinth featuring waves of pseudorandomly-generated teams of enemies.
To reach the highest level possible, you must properly balance your team for the possible dangers ahead; allocate and ration your resources (some of which will persist through levels); acquire gauntlet perks and temporary powerups/equipment; and of course, properly strategize your turns in combat.
These mechanics and more will be delved in detail in the Guild Saga Whitepaper in the coming months.
World Mode: Dismantling & Cooking
The Witch’s Hut and Blacksmith’s Furnace are almost ready for use! Coming in the next update are both Dismantling which allows you to break down some unwanted items into crafting materials, and Cooking which will produce food items that can be consumed in-game for recovery benefits, used to gain access to certain profession quests, or even in certain Keep functions later in the future!
World Mode: Profession Quests
Coming in the update right after is Profession Quests! The programs for Mining, Fishing, and Woodcutting are already in place—subject to a few more waves of testing, balancing, and new item assets (tools!).
Profession Quests are a new way to guarantee a steady, predictable path towards crafting the best items in the game, and more importantly, offer holders more choice when thinking about what to do with their Heroes.
World Mode: Town Square & In-House Marketplace
Due to popular demand, we have prioritized the development of our own in-house marketplace for Guild Saga assets—of which we are well underway into the development phase! This marketplace, housed in the Town Square, will allow for quick and easy trading between guildies, earning of exclusive marketplace rewards, and generation of transaction fees.
In addition to the traditional NFT marketplace, we plan to allow for users to be able to interact with one another in more meaningful ways within a multiplayer instance of the core game. There, you’ll be able to equip and show off your hard-earned loot, chat, barter, and trade with other holders!
World Mode: Catacombs & Mercenary NFT Summoning
The program for summoning Mercenaries using Heroes is nearly complete—all that’s left is to finish it, design more mercenaries (and the items needed to summon them) and lots and lots of testing.
This update will come after cooking, profession quests, and the in-house marketplace, and will be introduced alongside a new type of quest which will require one or more mercenaries of various classes to complete.
PVP Mode
And of course, we haven’t forgotten about PVP mode, one of the pillars of the Guild Saga endgame. We are currently still in early stages of planning with PVP, which will see players battle it out in ranked or casual matches using their teams of 4 hero NFTs/playthrough characters.
We will be leveraging the upcoming Arena alpha as a data-gathering platform for balance and tweaking mechanics.
Closing
We hope you’re as excited as us for what’s to come in 2023! On behalf of the team, I would like to thank each one of you lovely guildies for sticking with us in the past year. None of what we’ve done would be possible without your constant support and engagement, and we’re constantly amazed by the love you’ve shown us.
Since you’ve read all the way to the end, here’s something special for you. Type the quoted phrase (in italics below) into the #wilderness channel in our Discord. The first few who do will receive something in their wallets sometime later.
In 2023, the White Whistle finally Feets the Christmas Fish
Happy New Year!!
Goulai