Hello 1-UP family!
Recently, a number of the community expressed several concerns in the official Telegram chat to the team. Many of these focused on transparency, time to delivery, development updates, and additional features currently in development. We asked for some of these questions to be collected and sent to us to discuss the issues as a team and faithfully answer them for you here. What follows are the questions that we received from you. Some have been combined or edited for clarity. We want you to know that we hear you and take your comments, constructive criticism, and concerns seriously. As always, the team thanks you for your continued support as we develop the best and most innovative game platform out there, and we are so glad you are there beside us as we grow together.
What is the explanation for the delays we’ve had?
Other than the effort required to create a solid gaming experience as we press for a full release, most of the delays came from designing an effective way to raise funds for the project since most of the funds raised after the TGE went towards liquidity for the trading pair.
The initial plan was for a hybrid NFT raise, where there would be investment tiers modeled after typical funding rounds, with private and public contributions making up the raise. After working on these methods for a month and a half, the results were mixed. While we secured some private funding from dedicated groups, we reviewed the structure and changed our priority to offer the mint as a more fair, fully public offering.
This change to our strategy reduces the fear that a single wallet or group of wallets could potentially control too many of the NFT supply and eliminates the worry of affecting the price floor post-mint. We feel that through collaboration with like-minded projects, NFT groups, and game guilds, we will better reach the audience that 1-UP is targeting, create a much stronger community overall and incentivize the community to stay active and involved with growing the project.
Could we get a fortnightly dev/project update from the team?
The short answer is — YES! At the current rate of development and progress, two weeks is an excellent goal for community updates. We will also schedule a community call over Discord in the future as we lead up to the mint date. Post-mint, the development pace should ramp up to deliver updates more often for everyone.
Would you consider using Twitter and the game dev community to help grow interest in the project? Will the NFTs be the main form of marketing by using partnerships with other NFT projects?
We understand the need for marketing throughout the development cycle. As game dev takes a while longer than your typical DeFi project to get its legs, our concern was focusing too early on marketing when we did not have enough in place to justify it. Under our current strategy, we will use a combination of grassroots and promoted marketing with our partnerships and collaborations (tournaments, co-AMA’s, Twitter raids, etc.) to build our initial buzz and create interest for the mint. In addition, our partners can also help introduce us to opinion leaders and other devs to help grow 1-UP’s internal network. As we develop new features and roll them out, we will be able to create more focused marketing campaigns using the funds raised by the mint.
What stops the team from doing a 5–10% marketing push that will take us out of stealth mode without emptying the bank entirely? For Example, AMA’s, Tournaments, etc.
Again, this revolves around the project being ready to promote things geared towards engagement with our targeted audience. Most of the budget that we currently have has gone towards funding additional developers for the team, contract creation, and paying for our current business development. Now that we can get components we have planned out of conceptual stages and into active development, it will make more sense to begin creating strategic campaigns based on these features.
Will the content creation tools be the first thing on the 1-Up platform that will allow people to start earning, even before playing and wagering to earn?
Yes. Build to Earn is the path to making this platform viable and one of the core economic and ecosystem foundations. Games need content to be a success, and the shortest route to providing a content-rich environment is to allow for the custom content tools and marketplace to be one of the first features we roll out with our full launch of the platform. Ensuring the marketplace and custom character tools are in place will enable the creators to come in, share their designs, and begin earning from royalties and secondary sales. In addition to this, the fees that 1-UP collects from this process will go towards building our treasury, which in the future we can use for in-game rewards as we bring in the tokenization and monetization features for P2E. Not only this, but we will also be able to start funding the staking pools for pNFT (via token buyback and reward or other novel methods) earlier from getting our marketplace going as soon as possible.
Creating a solid P2E system is a complex feat that takes time, testing, and experience to create a sound model. The team will seek a competent, experienced developer to help us design our P2E structure, using funds received from the Gen 1 mint. Our system will not have a secondary rewards token created, EVER, so finding ways to properly tokenize our P2E structure is paramount. We are working on being innovators within this space, and creating a better way to reward players by building a complex and rich ecosystem to fund rewards pools.
As for the wagering modes, 1-UP will seek out all the necessary licenses and legal requirements to satisfy all applicable gaming laws. This includes proper KYC, AML, and geo-fencing compliance with international regulations. To prevent the possibility of creators who may be underage from accessing the wager modes, this part of the platform will be deployed through a separate domain and seek out popular L2 solutions to deploy these features on. Splitting the different modes between the wager/E-sports and the P2E will allow us to design our marketing efforts to focus on demographics more accurately between the different play modes and features we are building.
Being listed on a low gas fee dex has been discussed many times in the chat but never happened; why is this so?
Before choosing a low fee DEX, we also need to consider what we can build as a project to go along with it. Several considerations need to be made from the economic standpoint, as the 1-UP token is fully diluted. Choosing a suitable L2 to partner with is essential. If we spread the liquidity around too thinly, we open up potential issues for the project token, such as supply shock, botted wash trading, and impermanent loss for LP providers.
How far away are we from a mainnet launch? What items are left on the checklist before this is possible?
This is, of course, the most challenging question to answer. We’d love to give you a firm timeline, but we’re still not quite close enough to be able to state this w/ confidence. That said, things on the development end are rapidly coming together, and features that were once just an idea are now in the nascent stages of being real, working components. Primarily, the team is working towards the NFT mint. Closely following that will be the implementation of NFTs into the game itself, the character creation and import tools (also crucial for our partners, so we can offer projects without a game the chance to bring their PFPs into a gamified setting), and the marketplace. The social metaverse, Meme Arena environment, and more will follow. We can’t wait to start previewing these things as we go along and build out the future of blockchain-enabled gaming with you!
Next Steps
Next Steps
- migrate to discord
- begin hybrid marketing campaign through collabs/partnerships and promoted content
- put out sneak peeks leading up to mint throughout May
- release video trailer
- audit NFT sale/reveal contracts
- conduct successful mint
- start paid marketing campaigns with targeted demographics
- integrate NFTs into MVP
- begin building 1-UP internal marketplace
- release custom character creator
- release level editor
LIVE LAUNCH STATE
- enter production mode for F2P and P2E
- secure licensing/compliance and audit wager mode contracts
- keep building and introducing more features and components…
Working Together
As we enter into this next exciting phase of the project, we also need to ask for your help. We are strongest when we are all aligned with the same goals and purpose as a community. Bringing news to the masses and turning new people onto 1-UP is something we can all do together. What does this mean?
You’ve been with us from the start, and we appreciate that more than you know. Welcoming new community members, being active by re-tweeting official announcements, participating in Twitter raids, and sharing new ideas are all ways you can help make a difference. Stay tuned because the next weeks and months will firmly set the foundation we need to take this platform to the next level!
Sincerely,
The 1-UP Team
https://1-UP.fun
https://game1up.medium.com
https://t.me/game1up
https://discord.gg/QwQUFEzcnm
