The Road to Beta

Etherborn... the road before you is arduous and fraught with many challenges... but with great strength and fortitude I can see that you will overcome. Do not let difficulties overwhelm you... but press forward. Everything of great value must be obtained at a great cost...

Preparing for Beta ⬆️

Time flies Etherborn! It feels like yesterday that Etherscape was a hopeful prototype with the goal of understanding how blockchain technology could open up engaging new opportunities for players. Even now I am shocked to browse the Release Notes and see that the first developer update was in October of 2022! It seems impossible that we have been building for that long. For me (this is Sam writing), the journey so far has been unforgettable and filled with daunting challenges, amazing accomplishments, and new friends all along the way. With that said, we have finally come to an outstanding milestone where we are ready to make the leap from Alpha to Beta.

What is the difference between Alpha and Beta anyways? For me, Alpha has meant that the fundamental architecture of the game could still change. Such changes can be jarring to the existing players and as a result, it is best for the player base to be relatively small. Moving to Beta means that we have much more confidence in what we have built and that it is ready to scale for the future. With that in mind, these are the things we feel need to be improved before we can officially move to Beta...

• New players must start having fun extremely fast

• New players need to have a well-crafted way of learning the core game dynamics

• The rough edges need to be polished removing as much annoyance as possible

• More social tools need to be ready to help build community

• The game needs to be stable and have a means to scale to 10x players

• There must be a highly engaging trailer and marketing materials

For the rest of this post, we will discuss the changes we plan to make to ensure that these requirements are met and taken advantage of!

Minimum Time to Fun ⏱️

It is critical that the time from "interested" to "enjoying" for new players is as short as absolutely possible. To realize this, we need to make the time to start playing as short as it can be. We envision the process to be the following...

• A player finds out about Etherscape

• They download the game from Epic Game Store

• They create an account (this could possibly be removed)

• They pick a name

• They play a very short tutorial

• They are having fun!

One thing to notice is that there is nothing about web3 or blockchain in this process. Those parts of Etherscape are critical, but they are far too complicated to insert into the new player onboarding process. So, we will need to move them to a later time after players are already engaged.

In order to realize this faster flow, we will need to make the following changes...

• Players cannot be bothered with validating their email address when they first create an account. To solve this, we will give them 1 week of time to validate their email and block specific blockchain features until validation is completed.

• Players should not need to understand wallets or link a wallet to start playing.

• The tutorial should teach the core mechanics very quickly.

• There should be another mechanism to guide the player towards becoming an expert.

• Extra credit: Player should not need to create an account. If we really want to solve this, we could add support for Epic accounts.

With these changes, we believe players can start enjoying Etherscape as fast as possible. Once they start, they will love it, and we can 10x the current active player count.

Better Wallet Linking 🔗

Wallet linking is a foundational piece of any blockchain game. However, for new players that are not familiar with crypto, it can cause confusion and make getting started difficult. Etherscape already has support for Managed Wallets in which the game creates the wallet on the players behalf to hide complexity. However, we want to make this process even more seamless by completely hiding the wallet until the player is ready for it.

To solve this, we will make the following changes in the wallet experience...

• All accounts will have a provisioned managed wallet.

• During account creation, wallet linking will not be mentioned.

• Support will be added to link new self-custody wallets in game at any time.

• Support will be added to have multiple linked wallets simultaneously.

New Multi Wallet Window

This will make new players experience as quick as possible while allowing them to transition to a self-custody wallet whenever they are ready. It will also enable power users to link many wallets if they prefer. By default, all players can have 1 managed and 1 self-custody wallet linked, but by holding Imperial Sovereigns the max linked wallet count can be raised.

View your ENJ staked to pools in game

Engaging Tutorial ✨

Of course, a well-crafted tutorial to teach players the game is critically important. We will be refactoring our tutorial to explain the core mechanics faster and to go further in the player's journey to becoming an expert. We will use two separate mechanisms to handle this.

1. The initial tutorial will become very brief in its own instanced experience. It will teach the basics of combat, using items and finally death.

2. The Journey Achievements will be updated to capture a larger part of the process to becoming a truly proficient player. Furthermore, many of the steps will include a short help popup that can teach the player what to do if necessary.

   
   

We believe these changes will allow us to take brand new players all the way to having optimized legendary gear that can clear level 17+ quests.

Social Tools 💬

We also plan to make sure our social tools have what players expect of them. Our goal is to add the following features, though we will have to see how much we have time for...

• Global chat across all servers

• Inspecting players to view their gear

• Linking items into chat to share them

• The ability to seamlessly change servers and characters

Being able to quickly connect with and learn from other players will be a key factor in growing our community effectively.

Bring in the Players 🧝🧙‍♂️

Once these changes are in place, we believe we are ready to start focusing on player growth. That means we will start a marketing effort to invest in getting Etherscape in front of more players. As part of this, we will be reworking our marketing materials including our trailer to make sure we present the best that Etherscape has to offer. We are confident that there are a large number of players that will be excited to join in once they see what we are building!

Stronger Together 🤝

The journey of building Etherscape has been amazing and we could not have made it this far without such dedicated players. We are truly grateful for all of you that have chosen to join with us and be a part of realizing our vision. Together we will continue to grow Etherscape both in breadth, depth and community!