#3 Ogami Developer Update
Greetings!
In the past two weeks, we have made great progress behind the scenes. We have onboarded new team members, updated our whitepaper, worked on artwork for our new upcoming website design, completely re-structured the game demo, and took a new approach towards Founder’s Gem NFTs.
Table Of Contents
Artwork Showcase
Founder’s Gem
Ogami Conquest Demo
Technical Progress
Balancing
Artwork Showcase
Here are some of the progress we have made with the artwork for our new website design which is scheduled to go live in April 2022.
Ogami Mage in neutral colors
Ogami Soldier in neutral colors
Founder’s Gem
Originally, we planned to fund Ogami Conquest through an NFT sale of so-called “Founder’s Gems”. These Founder’s Gems would come in 3 tiers and differ in rarity and price. Holders of Founder’s Gems would benefit from an ‘Exclusive Early Access’, an Axie skin related to the tier they held, and additional features such as a whitelist for a 10K Ogami Avatar NFT collection, Founder’s Avatar, profile borders for the game as a badge to display their ‘OG’ status. Due to recent changes in the ABP, we need to take a different approach.
Philip La recently tweeted this about the new guidelines of the Axie Builders Program:
For us, this means that we need to adjust the way we want to fund Ogami Conquest. Since we cannot have a soft launch until May (the original date of our Founder’s Gem NFT sale & gameplay demo), we need to find another solution. But first, to be clear, we will continue working on Ogami Conquest! The only thing which changes for us and for you, potential Ogami Conquest backers, is that the Founder’s Gem sale will be delayed. We cannot say when but will try to update you as soon as possible. We have some internal plans regarding the financing of Ogami Conquest and will try as hard as possible to make it happen.
TLDR; We are not going anywhere and already adjusted our project accordingly.
Ogami Conquest Demo
Regarding the demo we have had planned for May, there are some major changes as well. Originally, we planned for the demo these features:
Ogami Minion AI
Axie AI
Tower AI
Single-Lane Map without Jungle
Basic Death/Respawn System
This results in a very basic match mechanic, where you can win a match through the destruction of enemy Sinsa without the depth of a gold system alongside Items and complex Statuses such as critical strike, cooldown reduction, magic/physical/true damage, etc.
We decided that the demo needs to improve by a lot. It should feel as much of a finished game as possible. Therefore, we will aim to have these features in our new Ogami Conquest demo approach:
Ogami Minion AI
Jungle Monster AI
Axie AI
Tower AI
Single-Lane Map (up to 3v3) with Jungle
5 Different Types of Jungle Monsters (including a boss type)
Complex Statuses System (Critical damage, armor, magic resistance, mana, health, cooldown reduction, etc.)
Item-System (we aim for 20-25 “end-game” items with full item trees)
Gold-System (get gold when killing Ogamis, Axies, Jungle Monsters)
Levelling-System (get EXP when killing Ogamis, Axies, Jungle Monsters)
This results in a way more dynamic and complex game mechanic utilizing a gold-, item- & status system, and even a jungle, alongside buffs you can get from certain jungle monsters which can help you to win a match. It will feel much more like a finished product than the originally planned demo. This results in more time to develop it of course and our new aim to release the demo for selected people to test it out is June-July 2022. The demo will still be offline, meaning you will be able to select from 3-5 predesigned Axies to play with. It will be available for Android devices as a .apk file.
Do you want to help us improve Ogami Conquest or share your ideas and support? Join our Discord server to get in touch with us! ❤️
Technical Progress
Strong buildings need stronger foundations. So, in this direction, we are working dedicatedly on the architectural aspect of the game for better scalability and modularity with loosely coupled design. It will enable us to provide you with seamless, challenging, and fair-competitive gameplay. Better and quicker updates as we scale up the game with more freedom to experimentation which we both as developers and users love.
In the coming week, we are working on modular templates of creatures and defense structures. This modularity is going to help in the uniqueness of Ogami Conquest, which is Sandbox.
Balancing
We also wanted to discuss a topic that we haven’t addressed in our whitepaper yet but will update accordingly. The balancing of a MOBA game is one of the hardest things to accomplish. If a character is too strong, it will be abused and played as often as possible, and the meta will suffer. This is a common issue in competitive games. We take balancing very seriously and are aware that the ‘Sandbox’ concept of Ogami Conquest, meaning the fact that players can build an Axie through breeding to accomplish their own desired playstyle, can result in certain body parts/abilities to be OP. We have some solutions for this problem:
Balancing of individual Abilities (the most obvious one)
Balancing of certain Items
Queue Restrictions
We think that although the first and second points are very important, they are not enough to balance Ogami Conquest in our opinion. Therefore, we came up with the idea of ‘Queue Restrictions’. This means that certain body parts and combinations of body parts are restricted per team. For instance, a restriction could be that no more than two players can have the body part “Risky Fish” in the same team. Or we can restrict certain body part combinations e.g., a maximum of two pumpkin body parts per team is allowed, but only one combination of pumpkin and carrot. Meaning, you can have two Axies within a team who have the body part Pumpkin but only one with Pumpkin AND Carrot. This will of course result in longer queue times, but the key is to balance the restrictions as well. We cannot use the Queue Restriction for every “overpowered” ability. It will be used for combinations of body parts mostly and only in an amount where it doesn’t affect the queuing times that much. This can be achieved by players picking their Axie before they are joining the queue, unlike most MOBA games. Queue Restrictions can and will most likely change dynamically with the meta of Ogami Conquest.
That’s it for today’s Ogami Developer Update. See you on the next one!
On behalf of the team,
Yevme — Yunus Emre Ünal