Massive update: What we’ve been up to!

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since we published one of these long Medium articles!

For those of you who’ve stuck around since our early days, we truly appreciate it. Many protocols that started around the same time as us have died off, but we want to assure you that we’re here to stay.

Going on stealth mode has been very helpful for us — it’s given us the focused time we need and today, we’re lifting the hood to share with you our journey.

How it started

In November last year, we decided to embark on Timeleap Industries — an action RPG that would bring some much needed improvements to the GameFi / P2E blockchain gaming scene.

Our market research had revealed many common problems that plague P2E games, and it led us to the key features that we wanted for Timeleap Industries:

• A sustainable game economy built on a robust ecosystem
• Liquidity assurance for NFTs
• Guaranteed exit liquidity for investors
• A game that people will actually enjoy playing. This is something close to heart — we wanted to build something that we ourselves would enjoy, and unfortunately, there aren’t many of such games in the GameFi space.

Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch has said it well:

We didn’t want to create a crappy game just to jump on the P2E game bandwagon. That’s not us.

Coming from the DeFi space, we were used to seeing protocols going to public launchpads raising anywhere from 100k~250k. We chose not to, because going straight to a public launch would mean insufficient funds for long term game development.

We started looking for early seed investors who believed in the potential of what we were building. Market conditions were and continue to be rough. The Russia-Ukraine war (which happened as we were exiting the pandemic), and rising inflation meant that purse strings had tightened.

However, we’re happy to share that we obtained a sufficient amount in early investments, thanks to our early investors who believe in us. That led us to the next part of our journey.

Setting up the infrastructure

Legalities and regulations are complex for a crypto company. After consulting with our lawyers and doing plenty of research, we set forth on a reorganisation of our corporate structure (cue lots of paperwork!).

Next up was to get more talented and skilled people. As the old timers know, we’re a small team, and a lot of work goes into building a good game.

From February to March, we spoke to a ton of people in the gaming industry and did our first batch of production tests. It was a rigorous process, but we wanted to find people that could produce quality work, and that we could work with on a long term basis.

We’re happy to share that we’ve brought on board the following roles!

• Kia, Art Director
• Nikki and Karen, both Illustrators
• Sergio, Technical Artist
• Toni, 3D Artist & Animator
• Jilianne, Video Editor

With our current focus on game development, we expect to add more gaming-related roles as we continue to progress and scale.

Game building

Some of the people we spoke to gave us pretty interesting insight on other crypto gaming projects that had approached them.

For instance, projects expecting a game to be built within an unrealistic timeline of a month. Or projects with absolutely no material / direction telling them that they just wanted a game built.

It wasn’t surprising given the hype of the P2E game bandwagon and the condensed sense of time that the crypto space operates in. But it did create a sense of skepticism for crypto gaming projects that we had to work through — to show that this was not how we operated.

We’ve always maintained that we’re here for the long run, and this continues to remain true even as other protocols come and go.

While the infrastructure set up was ongoing, here’s what else we were busy working on:

Lore & narrative

We’ve always been attracted to games with an actual plot, a story that drives the game forward. There aren’t many of such games in the crypto space.

We intend for the entire Timeleap game universe to span over a trilogy, and each series comprises of multiple game seasons. We’ve completed the narrative for the first series and it’s something that we’re really excited about, but no spoilers because we want to take you for a ride!

Character development

A large part of a good story to us is character development. This means all main characters have their own unique back stories, personalities, combat styles, weapons, and interaction preferences with each other.

Here’s a sneak peek of a character we were working on during our production tests. Same brief but different interpretations and work quality.

None of these are the final concept we decided on — that will be kept a secret for the time being 😜

Apart from this character, we’ve been working on several other key characters which we look forward to revealing in due time.

Gameplay mechanics

We’ve also been working on our Game Design Document (GDD), and for those unfamiliar with the term, the GDD is a living document that functions as a blueprint for a game.

Our GDD is hosted on GitBook, and we think of it as an organized brain dump. Thus far, we’ve worked on:

• Stat system: Base stats, combat stats, survival stats. This includes rules that govern each stat and calculations such as attack speed, critical damage multipliers, damage bonuses, as well as health & stamina regeneration rates.
• Item & equipment system: Equipment types & classes, character equipment slots, ways to obtain items, as well as usage & durability
• Hero defense game mode: Mission objectives, combat skills, enemy spawn rate & difficulty calculations, rewards, and level ending sequences
• Controls: Keyboard / mouse controls for a fast-paced hack-and-slash gameplay

Trailer

We know that many of you are eager to see more visuals, and it’s something we’re working on. What we can say is that our trailer will be rather different from many other P2E game trailers (think: bare content that’s strung together with epic music).

The truth is, we could have taken that approach and it’d be cheaper and faster. But if you’ve been a part of our community for a while, you’ll know that we’ve always done things differently.

No spoilers, but here’s a sneak peak — a rough storyboard for a few scenes done by our Technical Artist:

We’ll continue to share more visuals as we progress, so stay tuned for further updates!

Onward & forward!

We started this journey because of a few reasons:

• We want to improve on the current offerings in the GameFi market
• We want to use our DeFi background to create a game ecosystem that up to this point, has not existed
• And on a more personal note — as fiction lovers, we’ve always wanted to write our own narrative

It’s been a challenging but rewarding journey, and we’re really excited for what’s to come.

We may not be able to share some of the more confidential stuff we’ve been working on — but soon, we’ll start sharing more of what happens behind the scenes.

Thank you for staying with us thus far. Before we end off, we want to leave you with…

Some in-game environments we’ve been working on — it’s a vast world out here!

…and this note 😉

Take care and keep following us for more updates!

About Timeleap Industries

Timeleap Industries is a multiplayer action RPG where Survivors work to rebuild a fallen Earth. Besides an immersive lore, players can expect a different playthrough each time with classless characters, a rogue-like skills roulette and randomly generated enemy AI strategies.

Other key gameplay features include land ownership which allows players to harvest raw materials from the land they own, and a robust crafting system which promotes the unlocking of crafting recipes as a community.

Timeleap Industries is also supported by a DeFi-powered ecosystem: Collateralized NFTs with real value, a gamer-centric DEX, and an in-game economy analytics & monitoring system.

Join the Timeleap Industries community: Website | Twitter | Telegram | Medium