The Red Village Alpha: the success story of 2022 blockchain gaming
The Red Village has just smashed its alpha launch out of the arena. Next on the roadmap: beta.
The storms clouds gather and thunder rages,
War a’brewin’ o’er mountain ranges,
A hidden village left long alone,
Where Blooded Queen hath made her throne.
On the 28th March The Red Village (TRV), the first and only dark-fantasy play-and-earn blockchain game, launched its highly anticipated alpha. To a market used to unfulfilled promises, abandoned roadmaps, and rug-pulls, a 3D playable blockchain game with immersive graphics, stable infrastructure, and active community has been a lifesaver.
Let’s explore how the alpha has run so far, the achievements, the wins, and what comes next for the TRV team and supporters. Hint — after alpha, comes beta.
The TRV Philosophy
The Red Village was born from a belief that the true catalyst for the mass adoption of blockchain games is not reinventing the wheel, but rather bringing the proven and successful elements of web2 gaming across to web3. At TRV, we adopted the play-and-earn moniker early, recognising that to be truly successful, blockchain games must first and foremost be good. They must be fun. People come to gaming to relax, to socialise, to create a second life outside their daily existence. For so many of us, the communities that games foster are friends, confidants, and support networks. And if gamers can earn at the same time as playing, great. Building on this is thesis is what will create the unicorns of tomorrow.
The Red Village Alpha
The Red Village alpha has been a wild success, far beyond what we could have imagined when we launched. For the TRV team, launching the alpha was about testing infrastructure, class systems, gameplay, and getting community feedback. It’s done all this, and more. The success of the TRV alpha has not only proven the game and the concept, but proven the team from both a technical and strategic perspective. Hitting targets, achieving goals, and making markers is everything in this space. Already we are five times further along the journey than almost any other blockchain gaming project…and we’ve barely begun.
We couldn’t be more thankful for the support of our community these last several months, and during the entire alpha period. Thanks for playing, for liking, for trusting, and for being all-round legends.
The Red Village Alpha: in numbers
Since launching five weeks ago, we have run over 7,700 8-player Tournaments. That’s a total of 3650+ Champions fought, from 820+ unique wallets. In total over 127ETH ($350k+ USD) has been won, with the largest ROI being 460% and the best total individual return being about 3.9ETH on a Champion. We’ve seen individual Tournaments pay out up to $5k USD at a time. On the basis of Tournament results alone, we’ve seen sales of individual Champions of over 6ETH. It has been action-packed, fast, and exciting. Some edge-of-your seat Tournaments have been truly wild to watch and it’s been amazing to see how much the community is enjoying it.
In total, downtime has been almost non-existent (as in, like 0), and less than 5% of Tournaments have ever been cancelled for any reason. While there were some early struggles around running enough Tournaments to meet demand, we have eased up on restrictions over alpha as we became fully confident in the system and now are catering to almost 100% of the community’s requirements.
All in all, a phenomenal result for a blockchain game at any stage. In alpha, it’s almost unheard of.
Upgrades During Alpha
We’ve been working hard to upgrade as much as possible on the Tournaments during alpha, from both the gameplay and animations, to the user experience, and even the all-important back-end which drives our admin capabilities and lets our COO Matan steer the ship. To give you some idea, during the alpha, we have pushed
- Rolling Tournaments, fixed the (crowd-favourite) ‘backwards bear’ and other animation glitches, added simultaneous Tournament capabilities, added fight replays, added the Snowfields and Marshlands maps, fixed Champion search capabilities, resolved faults in the ‘results’ section and plenty more.
We have also actively addressed our community suggestions channel, tracking every single suggestion, prioritising, ranking and addressing them as capacity allows. The community engagement, involvement, and level of play has been phenomenal. And it will only get better.
An alpha is a chance to test infrastructure, and anyone that has ever built games on the blockchain before (not many have, mind you) will know that the complexity of building these systems is impossible to over-exaggerate. The intricate details and immutability of the blockchain make every single decision and action harder by an order of magnitude. We have proven beyond doubt that our custom-built tech stack is up for the job, and that our tech and game development teams are truly top tier.
Now that’s out of the way, we are ready for the next level; The Red Village beta.
The Red Village Beta: what to expect
As part of the eagerly awaited TRV beta we have a host of improvements to make that will make Tournaments look and feel way better, but also drastically improve the quality-of-life for players. Now that we have proven our capacity and ability to host a thriving community, it’s time to grow. And grow big.
On the gameplay, animations and SFX side we will be focusing on the following during beta: Improving animations, including rolling out Inverse Kinetic (IK) animations for far more natural looking fighting, limb removal and more blood, new soundtracks and sound effects, a bunch of new maps (locations), developing facial animations, developing an in-game chat system, and a host of other visual elements to make Tournaments look way cooler.
On the UI/UX and data side we will be focusing on: New data visualisations and analytics for players, 1v1 To-the-Death Tournaments (you choose what you are playing for…), on-demand Tournaments (so you’ll be able join scheduled Tournaments or Tournaments that fight when full), scaling the UI properly for all devices, implementing a fullscreen mode, Class systems, adding user-customisable Barracks names and Champion lore, redesigning the logo, webpage and overall brand of TRV, and a bunch of other things to help make joining Tournaments easier, tracking your Champion’s results and your winnings more simple, and the entire eco-system more user-friendly for both new and existing players.
On the business side, we are now shifting our focus to: Growing our own community, content creation (both through our Content Creators Fund, and existing content creators/streamers), partnerships with other projects and influential projects and communities, PR and media relations, and growing our reputation in the space. More eyes on the project will mean more players, more demand. This takes time — it won’t happen overnight — but is crucial to our long term vision to be the Runescape of the blockchain. And let’s just say we’ve got an ace up our sleeve around this…(More on that next week).
We’ll also be rolling out a new ‘product update’ feature, which will replace our roadmap and let our entire community see what we are working on in each of our two week ‘sprints’ (dev speak for ‘periods of work’) and where our dev focus is at any given time for Tournaments.
The Ace Up Our Sleeve
Oh, and one final piece of the TRV puzzle….The Red Village was always born to be bigger, better, and more badass than anything else on the blockchain. There’s only one way for that to happen; growing to accommodate not just blockchain native audiences, but traditional gamers too. At TRV we are one of the ONLY 3D games on the blockchain, but the fun has only just begun. Follow along over the next couple of weeks to see why we are so, so, very convinced that we are about to change what web3 gaming is, and can, be.
We were at the forefront of play-and-earn. Now watch us change the game again.
Blood is coming.
