The Path Ahead For Homeland

A Founder's Note

Feb 29, 2024

Let’s get down to business. After the last Homeland release, Trung and I have carefully gathered information to guide the path forward, working closely to the development process in a manner reminiscent of the early days at Axie.

We’ve worked with the team on readjusting development priorities to ensure the desires and pain points of the community are sufficiently addressed in Homeland’s future. We leaned on a familiar mechanism to get this done: diving deep into Discord, the buzzing center of Axie conversation around Land. This has been both nostalgic and refreshing for us, to be back in the thick of Discord, on the ground, talking to players. As it should be.

Where We’ve Been

As Sky Mavis has gone from a lean and nimble team of 10 to a sprawling organization of over 250, the way we build has changed. In some ways, this has been good. But it has also caused us to lose sight of some first principles with regards to building Axie products.

Naturally, in the early days of Axie, the community was small. The community that gave product feedback was even smaller. The Lunacians from 2018 and 2019 were pioneers here. However, it's 2024 and our community is much larger now. 180,000 players have played Axie games over the last 30 days. This is why it’s so important for the founders to be thinking critically about the mechanisms for gathering feedback. Some feedback is actionable and useful, while other feedback candidly seems to be driven more from emotion.

We need to return to the foundational Axie building principles. What are they?

How We Build Axie Games

Iterative: Axie is built like startup software, not a game

Long development timelines and periods between releases won’t cut it in web3. This is experimental technology and we need to be running a high number of experiments to gather data and feedback from users.

Community-focused: it starts and ends with you

Web3 games differ from traditional games in that community members are involved with development from a much earlier stage — and the stakes are higher. Many community members dedicate their lives and meaningful capital to these games. Builders must accept this as an unfair advantage.

Social: Axie products bring people together

Axie games thrive when they lean into social features that increase the number of connections in the network. Axie is a game that benefits from Metcalfe’s law: the more people that are connected to a network, the more valuable that network becomes.

Cross-platform: Axie is for everyone

Lunacians are everywhere — one of the few interconnected communities that binds together the already-made with people creating wealth for the first time. There are players from developed nations and emerging markets hanging out, playing, and building together. This must be reflected in the platforms we release Axie games on. This means that Axie games should be released on Mobile (Android + iOS), Desktop, and browser when possible.

Web3 native: we push the boundaries and innovate

We invented play-to-earn. We are pioneers. What we lack in game design ability we make up for in our ability to show the world things it's never seen before. Here is a list of the things we showed off to the world for the first time (or first time, at scale).

Dynamic NFTs (2023)
NFT Mint with Reveal (Origin sale) (2018)
Multi-token NFT mint (Land sale) (2019)
NFT that earns ERC-20 (2019)
NFT gaming governance token with fee switch activated (2020)
Play to Airdrop (2020)

With this comes an understanding that the founders must be unusually hands-on and close to the development process as compared to more mature industries/gaming sectors.

Fast-paced: Slow games are dead games

The world moves quickly. Adapt or die. Even baseball changed the rules for a new generation.

Horizontal interoperability: Infinite mixed and matched experiences

One of the strengths of our ecosystem, and unlocks that NFTs provide, is the ability to have an NFT collection act as a wedge into many interrelated experiences. Axie Core and the AXP system have doubled down on this. Axie players are incentivized to play a variety of axie games each day to maximize their AXP gain, for example.

Beautiful: Nostalgic Art

Axie catches the eye and makes you want to learn more. It’s familiar and inviting. The infinite combinations of Axie allow for high-quality UGC.

The Road Ahead for Homeland

We needed to get back to the core principles of Axie development.

The original vision for Homeland gameplay was a base building game where axies would be sent out towards key points on the map (e.g. resource nodes) to battle. We have spent a great deal of time on the base building element, but got our tires stuck in the mud. Base building simply cannot be a full game. It was not meant to be, but so far most of the progress we have is related to it. Pain-points that we gathered while deciding which functionalities to prioritize:

Lack of cooperative/social features
Development pace feels slow to player-base
Leaderboards were fun for most skilled players but had huge time requirements
Problems with art style/quality for the 3d Axie model
Adventurer system doesn’t play to the strengths of Axie IP—the axies
Pace, especially in the beginning of the game, is slow
Moonfall and Moonbeam both miss the mark
- Moonfall is too grindy/repetitive and arbitrary with the same players winning each day
- Moonbeam is too rng-based and the rewards should be used to incentivize higher value actions
Community feels like feedback is not taken into account
Luna land has not been distributed
Game UX / UI is inefficient and too “clicky”
Players feel like reward emissions should be higher based on total possible budget

So the first order of business was to pick a path forward for the current Homeland game. It was actually an exciting process, full of possibility. Then we were faced with the need to create elegant solutions to the aforementioned pain points and desires, without overcomplicating or leading to dead ends.

With your input, we have aligned on making sure that Homeland leans into social coordination and battle features that will allow it to become a social strategy game with both PvP and PvE elements.

Core requirements we have articulated to the Homeland team:

Homeland is fun to play and allows for social coordination/competition/war
Playing land is more than about just mindlessly harvesting rewards
Skill-based rewards are easy to understand and make sense
Releasing updates is done quickly and iteratively based on data and player feedback
It is much better to underpromise and overdeliver
The opening gameplay needs to be much faster
Reduce clicking and improve UX

Creation & Destruction

Let’s talk about war.

War games with elements of time and space are proven to balance real-money economies. Creation and destruction must be counterbalanced.

This is evident through games like Eve Online, whose founder Hilmar is a fan of Axie and told us that “everything they’re saying about Axie now, they said about Eve back in the day, when it was just a mining game without war.” This is an interesting revelation — for the first 8 years or so of its existence, Eve was actually a mining/gathering game only. There was no war and people didn’t totally understand it.

Sound familiar? Gathering and crafting are mostly important as they allow for a build up of resources towards some eventual end goal or sync. Creation and destruction.

Many of the building blocks for a war game exist in the current game, we just need to put them together in the right flow.

The path forward for Homeland involves two parallel tracks: the first and most important involves the addition of social, competitive, and war elements to Homeland. You can think of these as building a new game on top of Homeland but using some of the existing building blocks as a “map editor” of sorts.

The second track involves refining, rethinking, and removing aspects of the existing game.

Let’s dive into the first track.

Combat & Social Elements

Replacing Adventurers with Axies (ETA: July)

This is low hanging fruit. From the beginning, the adventurers were always meant to be replaced by axies. After the recent NFT axie integration, this is now possible.

The revised system, featuring axies, will open up both strategic PvE and PvP experiences. We envision players being able to “send” or target places of interest on the map. These could be resource nodes as well as other player’s plots. Then, players would be able to send their axies to attack these points. Combat will be mostly passive, but we’re exploring ways to add in some more active elements over time. Note this is very close to the original vision for land gameplay.

Plot specialization will also get a boost as we open up a new specialization path: combat.

PvP could center around disabling other player’s buildings as players build up their strength and fight for control over limited points of interests such as resource nodes. This of course, opens up pathways for guilds to take on importance in Homeland.

Social Features: Avatar Axies (ETA: June)

Many of you were enamored with the ability to walk around with your axies in 2020’s Project K demo, giving you the opportunity to meet other players and hold impromptu meetups on public land. We loved that and agree that right now, Homeland can feel like a solitary experience, which doesn’t play to our superpower - community.

First, we’ll be adding the ability for players to use their own axies for exploration. Imagine this:

Picking an axie as your controllable avatar
Using your mouse and keypad to move it around from an isometric camera view (think Diablo)
Using your avatar to visit the plots of other landowners
Visiting public areas to meet other avatar axies
Chatting with others via proximity chat
Participating in minigames such as fishing on public land

We are also exploring a user flow that would allow ANYONE to create an avatar using one of their NFT axies and join Homeland. We’ve seen the success of Pixel’s free-to-play onboarding for non landholders and believe a similar pathway for accessible play could work well in Homeland.

AXP & Axie Core (Now)

This week, AXP was released in Homeland. Your axies can now earn AXP while gathering, crafting, producing, upgrading structures, and more!

In addition, once it’s deployed, We’ll integrate AXP into the NFT axie adventure system.

We will be tinkering with the AXP earn rates based on feedback and the data produced in production. For example, if we see that AXP from certain acts are higher than anticipated or lower than what’s warranted based on the difficulty of the task relative to other actions, adjustments will be made.

Revamping Moonfall + Removing Moonbeam (ETA: May)

Trung, the team, and I understand the pain around Moonfall and Moonbeam. We believe we have an elegant solution here.

Every day, players will encounter a shuffling variety of quests. They will earn chests and tickets by completing these quests, unlocking opportunities to earn rewards.

The quests, while changing daily, will adhere to familiar guidelines. Each core aspect of the game, such as Gathering, Production, Crafting, and Adventure, will boast its own set of challenges. Within these sets, players will encounter three tiers of quests: Low Effort, achievable through standard gameplay; High Effort, demanding more time and dedication; and Luck-Based quests, where outcomes hinge on chance. Each tier will present a varying number of chests as a reward.

We will also be bringing back leaderboards which were well-received during alpha despite their grindy and intense nature. To mitigate their intensity and allow Homeland players to sleep, these leaderboards will focus on specific actions and have time constraints.

Closing Thoughts

This article has outlined the short-term path for Homeland. Based on the feedback and response from these releases, we will double down on what’s working and cut things that aren’t.

We’ve dramatically expedited the timeline and prioritization of social features and axie-based battles based on what we’ve heard from you.

We believe that the mechanics outlined today lean into Homeland’s unique strengths and the building blocks that have been created so far. This will allow us to quickly test and adjust.

In the meantime, please continue to give us feedback through the land forum in Discord + Artic’s Homeland Thread in the contributor forum.

Jeff, Trung, and the Founders