The Red Village: Alpha Launch
‘The Red Village’ Tournament mode is scheduled for alpha launch in March, 2022.
Blood upon the rose and thorns,
That twist across the village lawns,
Black the earth from which they spawn,
and black the sky, at the dawn.
Key dates (in Eastern Time [ET])
- 7th Mar: Game development deadline
- 8th Mar: Internal testing commences
- 10th Mar: Internal testing ends — if no issues found, continue
- 13th Mar: Game launch (provided no issues found during internal testing)
The Red Village Tournament mode is due for a long awaited alpha launch. On the back of a meteoric rise into the big leagues of blockchain gaming, The Red Village is bringing blood to the blockchain with its dark-fantasy inspired world. Tournaments are 8 player and are brutal, bloody, and intense to watch.
If all goes well with the final round of internal testing, scheduled to wrap up on the 10th March, the alpha Tournament mode will launch on Sunday, 13th of March, 2022. Of course, launching a game with this degree of technical complexity and this degree of demand comes with significant challenges, and it is incredibly important that we build in failsafes and ample room to correct any issues in real time. Putting games live is a hugely difficult process at the best of times, but doing so with the unforgiving nature of the blockchain makes it even harder!
As such, we are phasing in the frequency of Tournaments slowly, to allow our tech and game teams plenty of time to adjust on the go, put out fires, and make the experience as smooth as possible whilst delivering a quality experience.
Producing a quality product will always be of paramount importance for our team, and while we are one of only a handful of 3D games on the blockchain at the moment, we still want to push boundaries of what is possible — and will constantly update and innovate to ensure that we do. We will be (and already are) developing constantly over the coming months and years to make things look better, and run smoother!
I hate queues; should I fight in the first week?
What this means for Battlemasters is two-fold. Firstly, it means that the first week or so of Tournaments will be crowded, and we expect there to be huge demand for only limited places for your Champions. Secondly, it means that you may not get to fight all of your Champions as many times as you’d like in the first week or two — and we strongly advise you to expect delays as the game launches. If you don’t like don’t like waiting, or rushing for spots, or have zero tolerance for technical hiccups, we would strongly advise you to wait a week or so before joining in the action.
How often are Tournaments scheduled?
In the first 24 hours, there will be a Tournament held every 30 minutes. Provided that goes smoothly, day two should see Tournaments held every 20 minutes, and then days 3–7 will see the frequency increased to Tournaments every 10 minutes. In week two, provided testing is clear, we will enable simultaneous Tournaments, meaning that we will run 12 an hour (one every five minutes, but overlapping). Weeks three and four, we have the capacity to scale to a much greater frequency, but will be responsive to demand and schedule Tournaments to match.
In terms of actual numbers of Champions fighting, this means that there are some limitations on how many of the 11,000 Champions that currently exist in The Red Village ecosystem will be able to fight straight away. On the first day, 384 Champions will be able to fight across 48 Tournaments. By the end of the first week, approximately 6,720 Champions will have had the opportunity to fight across about 840 Tournaments.
To ensure that as many Battlemasters have the opportunity to fight as possible, we will be limiting how many times each wallet can enter a Champion into Tournaments during this first week to seven (7) fights per wallet. Please note that this is only a temporary limitation designed to ensure that everyone that might want to fight, has a good chance to be able to do so in the first week, but still factoring in that there may be players who prefer to wait until the madness dies down a little bit before they launch into gameplay.
Noting that we have to write these wallet limits into the smart contract itself, which can’t be changed once it’s live, it’s a bit of a guessing game to begin with. It’s really, really, difficult to estimate the demand for Tournaments at this stage, and to balance that demand with the technical complexity that underpins them, so bear with us while we get things right! The most important thing to note is that we have future proofed our capacity and have the infrastructure to scale rapidly as demand increases and player load increases.
How long will the Alpha launch run for?
The alpha of The Red Village Tournament Mode will remain live for a month or so, at which point we may take it offline for a week or two to gain community feedback, assess suggestions and input, and address any concerns that players have about gameplay or from a technical standpoint.
This is a strategic decision in the best long-term interest of the game. It will allow us to upgrade gameplay, introduce new environments, and make sure that all the elements of The Red Village are working in harmony for the best experience possible in the long term. This is certainly not uncommon from a blockchain gaming experience; huge projects such as The Sandbox do similar. The alpha launch is a really important chance to test concepts out. It is a great way to ensure that community feedback is incorporated, bugs can be tested and ironed out, and there is big opportunity to improve and make things better for the beta release.
We’ll be releasing feedback forms for everyone who tests the game in this period, and trying to act on as many suggestions as possible, as quickly as possible for the next release (which will be very shortly afterwards)!
Are you still sending me free MATIC?
Every time your Champion enters a Tournament, there is a tiny gas fee payable on the Polygon network (and we mean, tiny). As part of our thanks to everyone for their helping testing out the alpha, we are going to send enough Matic to every wallet holding a Champion to cover roughly your first 1,000 Tournaments. You still have to pay your own buy-in, of course, but the gas component is covered!
Is a Tournament a random simulation? No!
This is important. The Red Village plays out an exact replication of the fighting algorithm, as it actually happens. There is not a pre-determined winner, with the gameplay then working backwards to visualise how that result was arrived at in a random manner; it is the actual real representation of how the fight played out, and who won. This means that The Red Village is effectively turn-based, and Tournament mode could be somewhat compared to an auto-battler.
This means that every hit has purpose, every attack means something, and every defensive move is actually effective, and actually impactful on the end result. Understanding this is critical to understanding how The Red Village Tournaments play out and what they look like.
Champions in the village are also an actual representation of the NFTs that players own; using complicated modelling technology, each Champion is animated in such a way that whether Battlemasters have an Orcish Barbarian in golden armour, or an Elvish Wizard in black robes, they will see their actual Champion enter the arena and spill blood. This is an exceptionally time-consuming and complicated thing to do.
What about the tech that TRV is built on?
The Red Village is a browser based WebGL game, built in the game engine Unity. Of course, there are significant differences between the capacity of indie game studios and traditional AAA game studio titles which are built by hundreds of full time devs, and designed to be played on high-spec custom gaming rigs, or game-specific consoles such as Playstation or Xbox. That being said, with the right team and enough time, anything is certainly possible.
The tech is there to create amazing quality games, an end to which our game devs are continually striving. The Red Village is being built from the ground up — from scratch — on a platform that not many games have ventured to build on before. Building Tournaments around NFTs adds an extra layer of complexity. Tech is improving all the time, and gameplay too; but not everyone upgrades their computer every six months, so in the meantime we are seeking to optimise as much as possible to make the gameplay experience as smooth and as enjoyable for as many Battlemasters as we can.
That being said, The Red Village looks and feels exactly like it should; taking a similar camera angle to Diablo III (though players are able to adjust their own camera angle inside the arena — not something that happens a lot on the blockchain…) and we are really happy with initial alpha prototype. It will only improve from here.
On the blockchain tech side, because The Red Village interacts with the blockchain, and is built using smart contracts that do things like store Champion metadata, distribute game winnings, and govern who can and can’t enter particular Tournaments, there is also a degree of technical complexity which is difficult to fathom. Balancing this, with gameplay, is extremely hard.
But we are certainly confident that if anyone’s team can do it, it’s ours.
Final words
The Red Village team is eager to get an initial product out so that people can begin testing en-masse, getting a feel for their Champions, and enjoying the bloodiness as it unfolds. It is, however, important to remember that it is an alpha Tournament mode and we will be working continuously, around the clock, to improve the game experience for all Battlemasters.
Don’t forget, we have as strategic advisors on our team some of the best-credentialed, and most successful, blockchain, NFT, tech, and gaming experts in the world. From Sebastien Borget, co-founder of The Sandbox, Justin Edwards, COO of Decentraland, and Rob Salha and Chris Laurent, co-founders of VHS and ZED RUN, to name but a few.
With a team like ours, well…
