Splinter Royale - Navigating from 2023 to 2024: Lessons Learned and New Horizons
Greetings fellow Splinterlands & Hive enthusiasts,
It has been a few weeks since we last made a blog post and while it might have looked like we went silent after our proposal ended, we kept working as passionate on the game as before. In that time, we primarily shared updates on our Discord server.
However, as the year 2023 comes to an end and the new year 2024 starts, we thought now would be a good time to give a look back and also talk about what we have planned for 2024.
Humble Beginnings
After our Alpha launch, we've got a lot of support and positive feedback from all kinds of Splinterlands players - new ones as well as OG veterans. For this we're incredible grateful. Our proposal however also brought around quite a bit of criticism. We filtered out the constructive points and use them as a learning lesson.
Most importantly we learned that the monetary aspects of the proposal in combination with the troublesome financial situation of the Splinterlands Company made it difficult for people to see into our truthful intentions of providing value for the whole Splinterlands & Hive ecosystem.
Great Developments
Desktop & Mobile Clients
When looking back at the roadmap we created for the proposal, quite a few things have shifted, most notably the Desktop & Mobile Clients took a lot less time than initially anticipated. Which means, Splinter Royale can already be played in the Browser as well as Natively on iOS, Android and Windows, Mac & Linux.
Website Improvements
We've also worked on the website, by adding a seamless login & signup experience into the website and account settings management. It might not look like much, but it required some fundamental development which will also be the backbone for more advanced features.
Game Features: Ready-Button, Guest-Accounts, AI-Bots, Multiple Game Modes & more
Last but not least, we've also worked a lot on the game. Smashing bugs, improving the tech, adding features. These include but are not limited to:
- Multiple Game modes: Battle, Ranked & Tutorial.
- Redesigned the Play-Planel experience for the different game modes
- AI Opponents (only in battle mode)
- Guest-account system. (1-click-login)
- And much more incl. bug fixes, etc.
A Look Ahead to early 2024
When we started working on Splinter Royale a few months ago, the primarily goal was to get out an MVP (Minimal Viable Product). Putting ideas into code and thus into something that can be played.
We also decided to integrate the game into the world of Splinterlands and using the existing card design for the game cards. Primarily because building a game is already difficult enough and why re-invent the wheel when a talented group of people already created a magical world of cards, lore and most importantly a thriving community.
Or in the Words of the Creative Wizard Nate - "Together We Rise - VONAK!".
With this said, we are now at a point where the game runs, thousands of matches have been played but the game is not yet really Web3 yet. It doesn't integrate Splinterlands tokens or assets, there are no rewards yet. And what's what we're going to talk about now.
Rebellion
Splinterlands has a lot of cards. Over 600 to be exact. When we first started, we decided to take the first 69 Beta cards. They looked great and it worked well.
However, with Rebellion out, the Splinterlands Company has made another big leap in terms of Character & Card Design. The Rebellion cards just look amazing. That's why we're currently in the process of replacing the old cards with the new Rebellion cards within Splinter Royale.
This also includes a few "new" abilities and of course different card stats, because while we take inspiration from the Splinterlands Card stats, they don't work within our gameplay, so we're designing them from scratch.
Splinterlands Assets
While we're planning to have our own unique collectible cards for the game, called Heroes, our goal is to implement as many Splinterlands assets within Splinter Royale.
We're currently in the process of coming up with a detailed plan and will talk about this more in early 2024.
Website & Backend Improvements
We're currently also in the middle of adding important updates to the websites and our tech-stack to support features such as shop sales, payments, spl asset staking and more.
First Season Rewards
Last but not least, we're going to take a snapshot of the current leaderboard (both algorithms are merged into a single leaderboard) on the 2nd of January 2PM UTC and distribute the rewards accordingly.
The next season will start without rewards as we're working on adding a longterm stable way of having rewards for ranked play.
With this said, thank you for an exciting Splinter Royale year of 2023 and we hope to contribute our part to the amazing world of Splinterlands in 2024.
Splinter Royale
Website | WebGL | iOS | Android | Win64 | Win32 | Mac | Linux | Discord | X.com
