Angrymals x Triple Crown AMA: Angrymals Team Answers Top Burning Questions About The Game
This is an edited transcript of an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session that the Angrymals team held on Triple Crown’s Discord community to discuss the upcoming events and the future of Angrymals development.
To hear the original audio version of the AMA, click here
Host:
- Carly
CEO of Triple Crown
2. Jacob
Co-founder of Triple Crown
Speakers:
1. Daniele Banovaz
CEO & Lead Developer at Angrymals
2. Ken Luo
COO at Angrymals
3. Hayden Huang
Project Lead at Angrymals
Introduction to Angrymals:
Cyrus: I would like to probably start off from Daniele, if you could just give a brief introduction about you guys and what we’re aiming to do with the Angrymals, then we can start.
Daniele: Yeah. Sure. So, for everybody who isn’t aware of the game, it’s [Angrymals] a mix between worms and angry birds. It’s like introducing the multiplayer features on the Angry Birds style games — where you have these physics involved, the blocks that you have to break, but this time it’s not you against the same level, again and again, it’s you against another human opponent. So you both have a couple of fortresses.
You have three animals garrisoned inside of them, and your target is to destroy the opponent’s animals before he does the same with yours [fortress]. Uh, of course, this is not just angry birds with the multiplayer on it. It has a twist. You have your own phone workshop and it’s kind of an in-game designer that you can use to build and design your own fortresses.
You can use them in the game, but you can also sell these designs in an internal marketplace. So the other players can make some gains in currency with that. And you will have special powers since you’ll have different races. Each one with a special ability, you also have different weapons. We are particularly talking about the exploding chickens, boomerangs.
So they have different behaviors. You have fire, you have electricity going through the metallic blocks, you have explosions, of course, and a lot of stuff that will make the game interesting enough. It’s pretty easy to pick up because it’s similar to angry birds. You just have to aim and try to destroy your opponent’s fortress, but the more you play and the more experienced your opponents are, it’ll become even more interesting since you will be able to use advanced strategies and tactics.
And this is just a basic game. On top of that, what we are trying to introduce now is the blockchain. So features that are becoming trending now, like NFTs and tokens with the play-to-earn model behind them are going to be released in a couple of months or so. And we expect by the end of April to have the full play2earn functionality in the game.
It means that you can play matches with these maps and matches, and the token Shards is the currency you will earn and can even take outside of the game for real money. We will have tournaments with huge prize pools. So the more skilled you are, the higher the chances you have to actually earn something by playing the game. We think that this is something that makes the game also appealing for the guilds.
So this is just a brief introduction to the game. We will have a first month of the NFTs related to the games and these will be aesthetical from the very beginning, but we’ll eventually enable the play-to-earn functionality into the game as soon as it’s ready.
Cyrus: That sounds great! As you’ve mentioned, they have a bonus as well so it’s not just playing the game. If you’re really good at building the basis, you can build those and sell them and make money that way, which is fantastic. It gives people a few different options.
Daniele: Absolutely. So you can be into a smashing, let’s say, very skilled in destroying things and you will earn that way. Or you can be like, like a Minecraft player — more into connecting blocks, putting them on top of the other, and designing very effective fortresses. That could be another way to earn quite a lot.
Cyrus: Fantastic. So that was a great introduction, thanks very much for that.
Triple Crown Guild
Zee: Maybe Carly can give a brief introduction as well on her Guild, their background, and what made them interested in partnering with us?
Carly: Okay. All right. Good evening again, everyone! Well, Triple Crown Guild is a community-driven Guild and it started, of course, with the gas seed. And then as we grew, as we expanded and had more active members in the Guild, we saw organic growth in the community.
We received partnership applications and you are one of the best of them. Honestly speaking, you know you have great features and games. Economics, SVL nodes, SolChicks, and a few games. It really impressed me that it’s the number one game in Solana, and I’m sure the other games will follow its lead.
Really great potentials and great offers with gaming guilds. Well, regarding the questions. Our members are chatting in the AMA questions text. You may just refer it to that channel if you want to read questions and we are looking forward to having great partnerships with you.
Cyrus: That sounds great! Thanks, Carly. And some of the guys in the audience who might not be familiar with guilds. What Guild brings to the blockchain space since of the games. Do you think you could give the benefits that you guys bring to like the games?
Zee: Oh, maybe I can answer that on behalf of Carly. Guilds are an essential part of P2P games since they attract most of the players. They are stable. For example, if I can give you an example of YGG, which is also a partner of Catheon, they have lots of players that are continuously playing the games they are partnered with, and hopefully, YGG will be able to do it as well.
Since I think I visited Discord and most people are interested in ROI already. So I’m looking forward to giving them an opportunity to mint our NFT.
History of Angrymals
Cyrus: That’s brilliant. Thanks very much. Unless any of the main guys have anything to add, I think we could move on to some of the questions that we’ve had for today. I think a lot of them are aimed at the main team. The first one we’ve got is a great one for Daniele.
1. What are the main reasons you decided to bring Angrymals to blockchain considering we all know it as an existing game beforehand?
Daniele: What happened is that, one year ago, we started looking at the blockchain because it looked like the future, but not for any kind of game.
I’m not totally sure that every genre will be focused on the blockchain, but especially when it goes to multiplayer games or competitive games, I think that the blockchain can really help out there. And so we started experimenting with something ourselves, and then luckily, we found Catheon Gaming, or even better, Catheon found us and we discussed how we can structure this evolution of the game through blockchain.
We quite quickly understood the benefits of that. So the reason why the game was brought to the blockchain is to leverage these matches between players to move the game towards a competitive user base. So it’s approaching eSports if you want.
The normal way the default user will approach the game is because the game will always be playable without having any token, without having any NFTs. And you can just download the game for free and play. But as you become more and more interested in the game, you can become more skilled.
You can see the chance for profit here for becoming a pro player. And this is what we want to provide to the community. So you are not just playing and wasting time, even if it’s never wasting time when you play and you’re having fun, but you can also try to leverage on that for some income.
2. Is it possible for iOS and Android players to play together?
Daniele: This is a very good question. So just to explain, because it can look confusing to some of you. The way Angrymals works is by relying on something that is called “Physics Determinism”. It means that every simulation that takes place on your device happens on theirs too but you’re not synchronizing the state between the devices.
You’re not using a lot of bandwidth and this has several advantages. So, for instance, you have the possibility to pick up a match where you left. You can have the replays at the end of a game, so you can rewatch turns and record them. And you need just a fraction of the bandwidth that you usually need.
The problem is that you will need to run on the same hardware. So the same CPU architecture should be the same on both devices in order for the game to run. This currently is not possible between two different operating systems like iOS and Android. And also, there are some minor Unity bugs (that is the engine we are using) that affect that.
This game engine that we are using to release a new version of their physical engine that is promised to deliver cross-platform compatibility. So this will allow us to play between PCs, consoles, mobile, or whatever hardware we want — just in the same match.
If it’s not, we will investigate some alternative ways that we can have to make sure that they can play together, if we see that this is a very pressing market. What are we? So until now, the more players you have, the less you care about that because you will always find a lot of players to play against.
And so you won’t care about iOS or Android. I know that sometimes you want to play with your friend, and this could be, let’s say, a blocking issue, but we will try to address that soon.
3. So when people mint the NFT, when will they actually be able to stop playing-to-earn with them?
Ken: I’ll take that question. So once you guys mint the NFTs, you will only have the NFT, but the play-to-earn functionality will be only enabled once Daniele finishes developing the game. So that is scheduled for the end of April. Once the play-to-earn version releases, you guys will be able to integrate your NFTs into the game, and then you’ll be able to play at the same time.
4. How does Angrymals blend to encourage its players to burn the tokens and not just take profit after their initial investment?
Ken: So I guess that’s a good question. There are multiple ways for people to burn tokens within the game, including by buying NFTs from other people, buying loot boxes, or by merging to upgrade the NFTs, Currently, the way the game is designed, it will make economic sense for people to get the higher level NFTs, especially since, number one, they will boost your own rates. And number two, there will be a higher value.
So we think that is a very strong incentive for people to try to sync them and use Chaos Orbs or the tokens by NFTs rather than just monetize.
Hayden: I might just quickly add to that.
I think two big things that we’re trying to implement that will help control our price and kind of users, you know, internally that respect is taken to be available on day one. So this gives users the ability to just take the tokens from launch. And the second one is actually a one-on game to align with our token release.
So you should be able to start earning and play, to earn for the game. From there, you’re going to be telling you from day one. And because of that, you can use the token within the game to buy NFTs, raise your end game with pleasure and tournament. So that would be better from day one. And hopefully, that will help control the process.
5. What’s the rationale behind having our NFTs on Solana and having our Chaos token on the Binance network?
Hayden: So the reason for that is possible. So we think that the Solana empty community is quite big and we will be able to achieve much better success on it. With NFTs, we did on Solana and with the Binance Smart Chain, we know that the game token community there is quite big. That’s why we chose Binance Smart Chain for our tokens which sit in a nutshell.
6. Will the team take out the existing tokens inside the free-to-play and replace them with their own?
Daniele: No, we won’t do that. The idea is to keep the game as it is now. So you will always have the coins. You will always have gems. And on top of that, we will have the Shards that will be new in-game currency. What are we going to do with that? Different things because of the new features that will be introduced.
So in order to join a tournament, you will have to pay some Shards. And the winner will take the grand prize that is made up of all these entry tickets, let’s say entry fees, and you will also be able to stake them, like playing a match one player against the other. We both stake our tokens and the winner takes all.
And, of course, we will use them to purchase fortresses as you can use Coins and Gems. Right now, we don’t want to remove the existing currencies because we believe that the players are very different from each other. Somebody will join just for the free-to-play as it is, some others will be more competitive and we want them to co-exist without limiting anybody.
Hayden: Yeah and that way you can not only get good on the free-to-play version but once you think you’re good enough and you can join in the play-to-earn matches.
7. How do you differentiate Angrymals from play-to-earn NFT games? Do you allow multi-accounts? If not, what is your countermeasure to make sure that you can identify multi-accounts and prevent them from getting an advantage?
Daniele: Okay. I will sit on the second part here. So, we will probably allow multi-account because based on the nature of the game itself, you won’t have any advantage in having multi-accounts. It’s just based on your skill. So you have to be good at winning, you have to be good at creating fortresses.
It’s not about farming, so having multiple accounts will not give you an advantage.
Ken: Yeah, you can’t really play against yourself. And you know, if you play against yourself and one of you wins the other count loses. So it doesn’t really work like that. That’s what I suppose the first question was.
As for the first question; how do I differentiate Angrymals from other places that are in games? I guess I think for me, what really stood out was that Angrymals by itself, is a super fun game. As Daniele mentioned before, it’s easy to pick up once you play, but there’s a lot of depth when you really get into it.
So, you know, a lot of my friends have played it. They’re all quite addicted to it now. Right now we’ve seen that the average playtime or full for this game is like an hour, which is much higher than the normal mobile games that we have out there. So you have to find what really makes us stand up.
The number two from an investment perspective is because we are designing the blockchain on top of an existing game. We have an existing traditional economy and also blockchain economy, and the advantage of having the traditional economy, which is from in-app purchase and ads and all that stuff is that we’re going to be dedicating a proportion of net revenue, 20% towards propping up the token price by measures, such as buybacks.
So I think the investors and the players would benefit a lot from having the traditional economy there as well.
Hayden: I think I might also add two more things that I already see that differentiates us against our play-to-earn competitors is that we have no pay-to-win features in our game.
And I Google a lot of the other Play-to earn games. It’s very rare. It’s very heavily dependent on, you know, buying a hybrid NFT. Being able to go around skill gaps by just purchasing a better character. But within our game that NFT whole knows in-game benefits. They have advantages in improving your own rate and giving you asked us to, since a tournament, for example. But when you actually play the game, it’s a very even playing field.
And I mean, you know, a person who has no NFTs for someone who has two legendaries, there’s no skill gaps, and are very successful players. And that kind of feeds into my second point of disability. They don’t need an NFT to play the game. You don’t even need to enjoy the blockchain features. You can just play the game without any blockchain and own coins and gems. So experiencing foreplay is really enjoyable.
And a lot of the sources respond by looking at a lot of the other games in the space and how their communities responded. The biggest thing was that a lot of them felt alienated when they played the game very hard to play the game and a lot of money you are playing as well because you need that really high initial investment.
And you need to make sure that you have a high-rarity NFT to be able to compete on a competitive level. So we really want to make it an even playing field, but all our users can enjoy the game and they don’t earn money off playing as well.
8. Would we implement a sharing or renting system in the NFTs to enable non-NFT holders to play-to-earn? If yes, how?
Ken: I think we will be implementing a renting system. That’s something on the roadmap, the way that it will be implemented. However, it’s going to be in a way that it’s on an external platform outside of the game. That’s provided by Catheon Gaming and we’ll be able to share more details around that once we have more final details.
Hayden: I think it’s slightly different for our game because all players can earn Shards and the game without actually earning an NFT. So, you know, you can compete against other partners and you can earn from tournaments as well without actually running NFT. NFTs just enable you to convert the Shards to Orbs.
Daniele: Yeah. So let’s say that there will be some limitations. You cannot just rent or purchase an NFT for one day and convert everything you’ve earned so far. There will be some kind of weekly limits that you can convert. And that will depend also on the rarity of the NFTs that you are using. But the idea is that probably it wouldn’t make so much sense to have a renting system for common NFTs, but for a higher rarity NFTs, that could be an interesting twist, both for people that hold them and for people that want to take advantage of them without the necessity of purchasing them.
9. Who are the people behind the game?
Daniele: So when you look at the development part, what happened is that the existing team, which was a company called Sionera Entertainment, is still working on the project and has grown thanks to new additions.
We have new artists and backend developers that have joined the team. So the team that is currently working on the game is the team that worked for the last eight years on that. Plus some new hires, some new people that we selected and have been hired for this purpose only. We are in touch with the SolChicks teams because of Catheon Gaming. And because we share some approaches on the marketing side… but when you look at the development of the game, it’s in-house.
Conclusion
Cyrus: Well, thank you to everyone who showed up, thanks to Sunset, thanks to the Triple Crown team and the UK team who filled the partnership. I think it’s been a great AMA and anyone who has any questions in the future that they think of always feel free to ask about our general chats and things that we haven’t been using. Moderators and stuff like that, but we’ll make sure we’ll get the answers to those questions for you guys.
And let’s get excited about this mint. Thanks, everybody for your questions about your interest in the game. And of course, whatever question you might have, please just write it down on this score.
