In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to MetaKing Studios CEO David Johansson about the conception of fully onchain idle RPG Dynasty, its problem with bots, and the long-term vision for deeper medieval strategy game Blocklords, including the permadeath of NFT heroes and the ability to create long term metagame with family lineage.

Jon Jordan: How would you explain Dynasty? What was the vision?

David Johansson: Dynasty is a companion game, or side game. It’s our first foray into a mobile version of Blocklords, which is eventually planned. But Blocklords is still the main game. 

The idea with Dynasty was always to remove as much friction as possible from the game experience as we didn’t want users to get bogged down with wallet creation or blockchain transaction times. In terms of the onboarding process, I think we’ve achieved that. At the same time, we are maximalists, and we do believe in onchain gaming. Our first conversation about Blocklords was back in 2019 or 2020, so we’ve really gone full circle in that we started as a fully onchain game before there was any infrastructure in place. 

Then we kind of went the opposite route, and wanted to remove the friction completely and add the onchain elements as a side note. But a lot of feedback we were getting early on in the year from a variety of partners, especially as we were bracing for the token launch, was that we didn’t have that many actual NFT transactions. 

We were like, that’s the point. It’s optional, right? We got a lot of users. They don’t all have to be onchain. But we keep getting this feedback that we need more onchain transactions, because that’s how people measure traction in this space. That’s definitely not the only factor, but it was one factor behind Dynasty.

We had two choices, either put the main game fully onchain or partially onchain, although we believed that would make the experience slower and hurt the experience of the main game. 

We also had another issue, which was that our NFT heroes had a lot of in-game utility, but not enough. We are planning a lot of features for heroes in the main game, but those are very related to battles, and the battle system is still in development. We didn’t want to rush out the battle systems just to add hero utility.

So how do we do a side game that’s fully onchain with as little friction as possible, that puts the hero and hero utility at the core? That’s where Dynasty came from.

Of course we still wanted the onboarding to be as easy as possible so we ended up going with Base for its low transaction costs and fast transaction times. 

We also started partnering with Privy, so if you play the game, you notice that users don’t have to worry about seed phrases, they just use their email for logins. And because Base has a new product called Paymaster we are able to sponsor users’ gas fees and that’s really a game changer. I think a big reason for the growth we had is that a new user in Dynasty doesn’t have to pay its own gas as we sponsor five transactions and give them a free NFT. 

What do you think about bots?

It’s definitely challenging, and for us, bots are a cost stride because we’d have to pay for their gas, at least partially. Essentially, bots are a problem in this industry. At the same time, the industry values user numbers and transaction numbers. It’s hard to exactly say the ratio. We have been fighting against it. I believe we blocked 25,000 accounts so far that had either bought too much or abused the systems. As a web3 game dev, you’re always at war with a certain part of your player base, which does make it difficult. 

But overall we wanted to show that it’s possible to make onchain games that can scale. And I think we proved that.

It was interesting because the point system was on right away but the user acquisition wasn’t instant. It was definitely a growth phase. In the beginning, it was only a couple of thousand users daily. What kicked things off was when we launched the Orb system a couple weeks in. That’s when NFT token rewards came in, where your NFT hero fights against other heroes. 

The problem with that is that you’re playing against the OGs, the best heroes, so it’s extremely cutthroat. There’s an element where only the best players are going to win, which obviously a lot of players don’t like, but I think that’s important to have these kinds of systems. 

Some systems are developed for mass appeal, where everybody has a chance. Some are more skill-based or asset-based, where you need the right hero and the right strategy to win. And actually it’s funny, because some of the players who got to the higher ranks, didn’t have the best heroes, but they were tenacious or played the right way. 

When the users really started popping up was when we gave out the referral system. Also, we saw a lot of user acquisition success with partnerships. Moccaverse for example, and a token airdrop to their community, I believe we got 90,000 users just from that. Our friends at Carv also brought in 30,000 users or so. 

Currently around 30,000 DAUWs are playing Dynasty for the game, and not the airdrop

Correct, 30,000 has been around our stable DAUs since May. Last time we spoke, I think we were at 1,000 daily actives, so it’s definitely grown. What is interesting is that there’s really not a lot of rewards other than Renown in the game, but we are working on season two for Dynasty, which is coming in the next few months. 

We are working with Paymaster – which is the Coinbase-led team that handles gas payments for users – on ERC20 payments for gas, so users will be able to pay for gas in Dynasty using the LRDS token. That’s going to add a lot of utility to your token and also increase our ability to give rewards. 

It’s hard to give rewards when you know they’re going to be sold. It’s a different thing to give rewards when they’re going to be given back to the community via gas payments. 

Now that the token is live, we’re working on token utility, different ways you can use the tokens to accelerate your progression, and of course a few surprises as well for the second season.

What’s your reaction to the LRDS token launch?

We’re quite happy. I mean, for how the market is, it’s kind of strange because had we launched in January, it probably would have worked out five times more, but it’s hard to predict these things. 

Obviously being on Coinbase has been an amazing experience. We feel that’s a seal of approval that we think the project deserves. Not sure how familiar you are with the listing process across all the exchanges. It’s extremely long and unclear. But overall, it’s been an amazing launch in terms of token excitement, and in terms of users and influencers that covered us. 

I think the volume was over $40 million, which is insane for a one day volume. It’s a huge weight off our shoulders to have it live now.

Obviously the market’s not the best. Gaming especially has been quite bearish with a lot of the retail traders and the web3 community in general. At the same time, we’re seeing a lot of excitement for Telegram games, and the potential of web3 to bring in users. 

I think it’s all about just getting to work and keep creating a good game.

How frustrated are you that the fact you’ve been running a game for a year isn’t reflected in the token price?

At the end of the day, the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent. So obviously we’re solvent. Our focus is on building a strong team and keeping creating really cool products. 

Valuations are extremely tricky in this business. I think we’re all trying to figure it out together and it does get frustrating at times, but you just have to embrace it. This is a great market.

Why did you want to build your own L3?

I want the main game to be onchain and for users to be able to verify, because when you send an NFT to the game, we actually burn it. We transfer the metadata into the game. 

We looked at doing it with Base, but at the end of the day, the gas costs get expensive, and it is too slow for us. What we’ve been looking at with Lordchain is how do we create something that we have a bit more control over, that’s secure, and open-source? 

That’s why we’re working with Optimism on this, and we’re also working closely with the Base team. Lordchain is going to be a Base layer-3.

Essentially, the ideological reason behind launching Lordchain is that we want to be able to verify quickly, easily, cheaply what’s going on inside of the game. And having our own infrastructure adds a ton of utility to the token on top of the game. 

What about permadeath of NFTs?

It’s always been the core concept and was very popular with VCs when we first started pitching Blocklords. Obviously asset inflation is something a lot of users care about. I’m saying that we just minted 1 million NFTs on Base, so the key is it’s important to get a lot of users free assets. But it’s equally important to have ways for those assets to disappear over time. Otherwise you end up with this thing where anybody can get one, or, why would I get one? 

The idea has always been that every hero is going to die. So I’m just warning you, that is going to happen. 

For now, Dynasty launched, that was a test, and that’s where dynasty comes from. You start with a hero, and you build out a family legacy.

The next step will be family lineage. You’ll be able to marry your heroes, have kids, pass down your skills. Obviously that becomes a lot of fun. I don’t know if you remember CryptoKitties, when you were trying to get the perfect cat. We’re going to play a lot with that. There’ll be negative and positive traits. 

Over time, we want to make it matter. Your heroes are important and they’re valuable and you got to be careful with them. Long term, there’s a lot of cool utility we can add to that hero. 

We’re also going to be exploring things like where the more dead heroes you have, the more powerful your legacy and our dynasty is. 

So what’s next?

We’ve always wanted the game to be a hybrid of grand strategy games like Crusader Kings, Civilization, and RTS games like Age of Empires and Total War. I’d say we’re still in the experimentation phase. This is a very rough alpha. Over the last six months, we’ve been extremely focused on Dynasty, on the token launch, and the web3 part of things.

Now with Lordchain, we finally have the bandwidth to be able to really go deep into the battle system. We’re going to be showing it to the press and a few selected investors. 

It won’t be the full features, but we’re trying to ship something this year. And definitely next year is when you’ll start seeing a lot more battle features coming into the game.

Find out more at the Blocklords website.