May Medium Update

Seems like the Medium has gotten a bit dusty, eh? Well, the good news is we’re back to monthly updates (with a surprise you’ll find later in this one).

We hope that everyone has been thoroughly enjoying the Gooeys questing! We’ve heard a number of tales ranging from nigh impossible successes (and plenty of Gooey timeouts because of consistent failures). Either way, the daily transaction rates for the Gooeys game are quite impressive and once tumbling is the mix — we may be primed for an explosion.

We’ve got a bit of ground to cover in this Medium update, so let’s get to it.

The Long Road

We’ve frequently reflected both internally and publicly about what it took to get Gooeys from concept to v1.1 — or the product you have available today. However, we know much of our community is unable to attend every speaking event and read every message sent in our Dogira Token and Gooeys Telegram channels.

So in this section we’re going to do a flyby on some of the context around where our game is in its current state, while providing a little outlook at where we are going.

• Gooeys v1.1 featured a slew of bug fixes and adjustments that were intended to set the game up to serve as a stronger foundation for the future. While squashing these bugs meant we had to do a full contract redeploy, every Gooeys holder was airdropped identical Gooeys to the ones they purchased from the v1.0 contract — because of this we were able to free up a lot of space to add a stack of new features and future proofing.
• The $GOO token has performed quite well in the face of the broader (very) red crypto market. Players have been successfully questing for a few weeks now, and the currency has managed to stay deflationary, something that trends indicate should continue as tumbling is introduced and a new token sink is fully integrated into the game. That said, $GOO is inflationary and we very well could see periods of inflation over time.
• Tumbling is coming soon. The code for tumbling is already in the contract and much of the work that needs to be done before switching the feature on falls under UI creation. This is the teams #1 priority for the near future.
• Additionally, $GOO related staking functionality on our staking site is set to go live on Wednesday, June 1st. Stakers will be able to single stake their $GOO tokens to earn more $GOO. They will also be able to provide LP for the $GOO token, and if you are unfamiliar with impermanent loss, we recommend you watch this video to learn more!
• We will also be launching new single staking and LP $HANZO pools!

In terms of what we have coming in the short term; tumbling, staking, and a quality-of-life patch will all come before our first expansion, Discovery. With this first expansion the team has finalized the features that will be coming with it and we have development timelines planned out — however we expect this expansion to still arrive in Q3.

What we can say is that our intention is to use Discovery to expand the options of play available to the community. This includes some systems that are designed to allow for longer-term play.

Finally, we also have sketched out several other features we would like to have added to Gooeys post-Discovery and we will be able to talk more about those in due time. The road to a feature-complete Gooeys game is a long one, and we are quite glad to have you all along for the ride.

Bear Market(ing)

With the support we’ve received thus far from Gooeys we’ve been able to line up a series of ad campaigns that (we hope) will draw in a number of new players.

The first set of ads we have going live are on Polygonscan. You may see both banner and text ads as you browse the site and are confident that we’ll reach more of the Polygon enthusiasts this way!

Also, we have a bundle of ads going live on DappRadar — dates for when these go live are currently being finalized with their team.

We are confident that both sites we are advertising on will serve to grow the community. The way modern advertising works is through measuring click-through-rates (or the data metric that is tracked when a person clicks an ad link), and it’s important to know that strong CTRs are not guaranteed. Therefore adspend can have a negative return on investment, however there is still a useful upside even if the ads don’t perform as planned:

We will be able to glean more clues about the types of people who are interested in Gooeys, and who aren’t.

Moving beyond adspend, we have another marketing avenue that we hope pays dividends over time. Any strong game has a compelling world and story, that’s why we are proud to announce that creation of a Gooeys lore series is currently underway.

We currently have 7 lore books planned to roll out over Q3, with another stack of books planned to roll out during Q4.

To give a little insight into the books, each one is 4 chapters long, and each chapter is a maximum of two pages in length. Each serves as a vignette to fill out the world, provide context to some of the characters we know (Mushroomhead, Lavly, and Spike), and some characters we haven’t officially met yet such as Princess Amelie (the fairy from the cover art) and a bunch of other characters in the world.

The best part? You can read an excerpt of the first chapter right now (the full chapter will be going up as a Medium post tomorrow).

Chapter 1 | Onward and Upward

“Once upon a time, the Great Elder Goo sneezed and we all ka-thoomed out of his mask holes!” A squeaky-voiced, yellow orblet with a leaf crown wiggled madly atop a rock barely taller than her mess of equally wiggly friends.

The young Gooeys had spent the better part of the twilight imitating their mysterious village leader, Mushroomhead. As the oldest in the village, Mushroomhead often shared stories with the young ones about the age before their sacred lands were overflowing with Gooey civilization.

Watching from afar, a large green Gooey covered in mushrooms and grasping a tall, slender wooden staff, chuckled to himself and stroked one of his gnarled tree horns. Looking past the young ones, the sun hung low in the sky casting its reddened glow across the lush Stickweave Forest.

How long will fortune smile upon us? He thought to himself.

Heaving a contented sigh, he turned back toward his humble hut, draped with glowing moss and covered in masses of fungal overgrowth. As he lulled into his doorway, a slight twitch ran up his squishy arms.

We hope you enjoyed the excerpt! Be sure to check back tomorrow for the full chapter.

What You May Have Missed…

We’ve had quite a lot happen in the stretch of time that our Medium updates have been MIA. Here’s a short list of events and links that you’ll want to check out:

• BGA Demo Day: Watch Eoghan chat about Gooeys development and some of the challenges he faced with integrating our NFTs into Unity!
• CGC X Panel: Eoghan also appeared on a panel called “NFTs and Gaming — A Love/Hate Relationship, where he got the chance to talk at length with other gaming project leads.
• May AMA/Dev Diary Twitter Spaces: The team went live on Twitter Spaces to record a Dev Diary on Gooeys, where we took a deeper look at development and where the game is headed.
• DYGYCON 9: We went to DYGYCON last week to tell everyone there about Gooeys, and you can watch the stream on Twitch! Thanks to all the community members who showed up to support us.
• New Gooeys Art: Mary has been hard at work creating some new Gooeys art and we showed off one of those new pieces last week. Check it out:

And with that, it’s time to call it on May’s Medium update! We’ll be back at the end of June, but until then, please look forward to our weekly lore drops.

-The Dogira Team