Crypto Winter: Building Onwards

To say it’s been a harsh crypto winter to date would be an understatement — Bitcoin has now gone 393 days in a down-only momentum, just shy of the 406 day record set by the 2014/2015 bear market.

Many market participants earned their bear market wings (anchors? ..grizzly mitts?) during the 2017/2018 fallout, clocking in at a lesser, but still painful 363 days of Bitcoin trying to find a floor.

For many of you, this likely isn’t your first rodeo down to goblin town — but for those of you who have never experienced the pain train before, allow us to be the first to offer our congratulations; very few make it this deep into the markets depths, especially in knowing that there’s never any promises of a floor holding.

And of course as Bitcoin stumbles, altcoins often find themselves cliff-dwelling; a fate that was unfortunately shared by Dogira, having now faced a drop from a market cap of $66M (granted, a blow-off top), all the way down to today’s market capitalization of $750k~. That’s around an 89% drop, give-or-take. Gooeys’ $GOO token took a similarly hard hit; initially running for a +800% move mid-bear market, but eventually retracing back entirely as the market continued to capitulate — and little aid offered from the delays to our first game expansion.

It’s rare that we comment on price — Dogira Studios’ creation stemmed from the ideals of generating revenue from the products that we develop in the form of usage fees or after-market sales; not from the want, nor requirement to sell tokens.

Our team has always operated independent of price or market performance; and we intend on maintaining this stance. Bear markets have a way of cleansing the market of speculation/hype-driven tokens, and of teams that depend on internal sales of their own token. We’re happy to not be sharing that speculative camp.

However, we’re all too aware of how other market participants can feel during the despairs of any bear market — let alone one that has run for this long, and in viewing it from inside the altcoin sphere of influence.

While we can’t promise that everything will soon return to up-only — nobody can, despite what youtube personalities may tell you — we can promise that our commitment to building has not wavered. Whether $15.5k BTC was the bottom, or whether we’ll see closer to $5k BTC before the sun starts to shine again, we’ll still be here — and we’ll still be building, and releasing.

We’ve been extremely fortunate to have gotten to work with the teams at Chainlink, QuickSwap, MaticNews, ApeSwap, and DogeChain to name but a few over the past year — and whether bear nor bull, we look forward to continuing to work with our colleagues and partners across the industry who have similarly doubled down on their development-driven philosophy as the crypto winter set in.

Enough talk, what’s coming up in the near future?

Our first major update in several months will be arriving to Gooeys, which retains the mantle of our flagship product.

Currently, we’re working on the first part of our Discovery update, aimed primarily towards new player onboarding. Along with a full UX/UI overhaul, we’ll also be launching a native Mobile (Android), and Desktop (Windows) client to allow for high-performance, low-entry-barrier play across a much wider range of devices.

Coupled with this release is our own Web3->Web2 backend, slotting in for ChainSafe’s backend services. While ChainSafe’s backend tooling proved invaluable for our initial development period, moving to our own custom backend allows us to set up our own caching & downtime mitigation services — along with the higher speeds and throughput that only dedicated resources can provide. We’ll be continuing to use ChainSafe’s Unity SDK for wallet write functionality and engine callbacks, albeit again in a self-hosted environment.

Our own backend also allows for us to easily make our own API available to third party developers — further encouraging the community-driven development which we’ve seen since Gooeys first launched.

But again, let’s not focus on the talk aspect — try it out yourself! Simply slot in any Gooey ID in place of the “1234” into the following url format, and you’ll be able to get a quick draw-down of any Gooey’s stats, and currently active quest.

https://api.playgooeys.com/gooey/full/1234

Similarly, try swap out “full” for “cosmetics” to simply pull down a Gooey’s cosmetic traits !

We’re greatly looking forward to seeing more services and third-party tools developed by our community in tandem with our continued Open API development — and similarly look forward to working directly with our community developers on expanding this initiative moving forward.

In-Game Gooeys Marketplace

While OpenSea is an excellent introduction point for players looking to find Gooeys, it isn’t quite as malleable as we’d like for new players onboarding; particularly in requiring a player to look up (and understand) food store, and strength in-game. Often times, this learning curve is hit AFTER a player picks up their first Gooey — not ideal.

As such, we’ll be introducing our own in-game Gooeys Marketplace along with our first Discovery release; allowing players to browse starter Gooey packs in-game, and pick them up directly with $MATIC tokens. These Gooeys will be listed with their Strength, and recommended Quest tier — along with arriving with a small supply of food store and $GOO to get any new player started.

For our initial release, this store will be managed directly by the Gooeys/Dogira team — and is intended as a new player on-ramp, rather than as a direct replacement for OpenSea. As some of you may have already noticed, we’ve picked up a bunch of Gooeys off the open market in order to bootstrap this initiative.

Moving forward, we intend on continuing to flesh out this system in order to allow for full player listings (Gooey and Fruit inclusive) in the future, along with an automated trade-in service for players looking to quickly offload their benched Gooeys.

A Whole Goo World

Our direction from Gooeys took a large spin after our initial launch, and in observing how players were interacting with Gooeys as a whole. Coupled with this, what was intended as a short-cycle game started getting fleshed out into a far more expansive/ambitious title, as we continued to create and design around the Gooeys world as a whole.

Part of designing a Gooeys world of course, is actually designing the world — which is what both our talented artist, and lore contributor have worked on in the Discovery Development process.

Right now we’ve got quests ranging from “Common” to “Mythical” — with the Mythical barrier being torn through by our most experienced Gooey ranchers. What if there was an entire overworld however? What if these quests were just — in short, minor explorations of areas outside of the more populated Gooey habitats?

After brief scouting parties returned back with news of the outlying areas, the next step in the process is of course to really begin discovering what the world beyond those steps may harbour — and how that world may be shaped into a home.

Going it alone has never made a lot of sense, and throughout our launch period we’ve found that players made that point clear to us — Gooeys bunch up in parties, if currently to scout out the world in a more lonesome manner. Social creatures should surely be able to move in groups for their more dangerous outings — and at that, wouldn’t it make more sense for Gooeys to be able to chat with one-another at areas of interest? Or simply to hang out at the village center and watch the world go by? Communal creatures as they are, surely there’s a social side that needs to be explored?

Discovery became very true in every sense of the word — while we’re preparing for Gooeys to discover their world, we began discovering our long-term vision for what we’re building. While our players did unfortunately discover the downside of exploratory-based development cycles, it’s ultimately leading us to building a more refined, and far more expansive world for our Gooeys to take part in.

Increased Dogira Utility

Currently, the only use for holding Dogira in-game is to grab a discount on tumbling prices — and this is set to receive an overhaul as we continue onwards with our new feature development.

We’ve spoken at length as to how we’ll be implementing small gas-like fees on transactions in the future, with a small amount of $MATIC being attached to new features as they’re released. Along with setting aside a portion of this $MATIC for automated buy-and-burn mechanics against the $GOO token, we’ll additionally be rolling this feature out to include $DOGIRA in all buy-and-burn transactions.

Including these automated buy-and-burn routines against our main studio token will further allow us to cement the bridge between Gooeys and Dogira — while additionally allowing for this background bridging to remain in place on any future chains which Gooeys may find itself making any appearances on.

The Giant in the Background

A lot of our background work at Dogira is — as the name implies, often hidden behind the scenes. Our NFT Kit (which powers our Gooey Generations & Rendering) has gone from strength to strength, and has even seen itself feature as a whitelabel solution by other projects.

With the entire point of our NFT Kit to simplify otherwise complex tasks, oftentimes we find that it goes overlooked solely due to the fact that if it’s working correctly, you’ll never need to hear about it.

Our NFT Kit is one part of the puzzle that goes towards steering Dogira towards long-term sustainability, as is the time we spend working alongside our partners, and other communities in the space to work towards building up our collective abilities as a whole.

While we do understand the frustration that can be felt — particularly in a bear market when it feels like things are moving at a glacial speed, rest assured that the team are continuing to work tirelessly on ensuring that we’re building the best possible products and experiences for our community, while additionally searching out and finding new colleagues and partners to join us on that endevour.

Your Dogira builders are still very much with you — and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve got in store for the future.

Until next time, let’s rise and grind.
- Dogira Studios Team