Interlude project update: sponsoring system, Twitter shadow ban and other news
We’ve been silent for several weeks already, but those that follow us closely and our players know we haven’t been idle! Here is where we are currently with the project, and what are our plans for the next few weeks.
Working tech
One hour ago (at time of writing) we concluded the second mini hunt, which was our 6th scavenger hunt. Even if the hunt was pretty small in terms of rewards and number of players, it actually represents a big milestone: for the first time we didn’t have any technical problem, either with the blockchain tech or the games in themselves. Everything went smoothly, and 100% of players were able to complete the hunt. Compared with the disaster of the first hunts, where more than 90% of the players were stuck, unable to finish and ended up rage quitting, this represents a huge improvement! Of course it doesn’t mean there won’t be any bugs in the future. This project is by essence very complex, with a lot of moving pieces coming from different actors (eg different games from different developers) so it will always be a challenge to maintain a good quality and user experience. But it shows we’re moving in the right direction!
Another achievement is that in the last 10 days we had 3 scavenger hunt. Compared to the first ones which took several weeks to organize, this is also a marked improvement. Now that our tech is working and allows us to organize events much more regularly, we’re turning our attention on a single goal: grow our community of players and investors.
Censored by Twitter
Talking about marketing, we made an annoying discovery. In early January we received a mail from Twitter, notifying us that we were not allowed to advertise with them anymore. This was due to our project being included in a “black list” of accounts, most likely because we’re assimilated to a gambling product. This was annoying but we didn’t pay too much attention since we did not and did not intend to advertise on Twitter.
However, while analyzing our social media statistics recently, we realized we were actually heavily suppressed, even for our normal tweets, compared to the months before. To put it simply, all our tweets impressions (basically the number of people that see a tweet) have been reduced by more than 80%! This of course translate immediately in a reduce number of likes, retweets and sharing, which means a lot less new followers. Since all these social media/viral dynamics are exponential by nature, this is a very heavy handicap for our potential growth.
We still don’t know how we’ll solve this problem. We feel it’s pretty unfair, since Interlude is before all focused on creative, indie games, and is less addictive and more intellectually stimulating than many of the mass market, highly addictive games with loot-box and other questionable mechanics. Yes, we offer money rewards, but the big e-sport tournaments also do, and they’re not considered gambling. So this remains an unsolved problem.
A team of game developers
Our goal at Interlude remains the same: create a community of game developers, that will build games with shared game mechanics. Players will have access to a network of thousands of games, while playing the same game, and using the same in-game items (eg, NFTs). As a result part of our efforts was in contacting game developers to convince them to add their game to our network.
This proves more challenging than expected, for reasons that were both technical and design-related. Overall very few games are adapted to the scavenger hunt mechanics. To make this a user-friendly experience we had to request some changes to the games, which was a problem — even if the changes were very small.
Long story short, we realized it was actually easier to build new games specifically designed for the project. We have therefore been building partnerships with game developers, some of them professionals and some of them students, where they develop new games specifically for Interlude. They keep complete creative freedom and can work on their own ideas; all they have to do is follow a number of requirements to make the game fit the scavenger hunt mechanics. This arrangement seems to be working so far. Of course our goal is still to build a community — or, rather, a DAO — of game developers, so expect more from us on this topic!
Sponsorship system
With our technology having reached a reasonable level of stability, and a sufficient supply of new games from our partner being assured, the time has now come to focus on the one big challenge: growing the community of players (and, therefore, of investors). To do this we could rely on ads, and try to slowly get new players from word-to-mouth and our meager social media followings. But that would take ages!
Rather, we have decided to let the community itself handle the recruitment of new players — and, of course, to reward it for that. We’re therefore introducing a multi level sponsoring system. How this work in practice:
- first and more importantly, this is reserved to players. We want to based our community on a score of players that really enjoy and understand our project, before focusing on crypto investors in general.
- to enter the community, a player has to be sponsored by a player already in the community
- once he is sponsored, a player can himself sponsor new players. However he only has a limited number of sponsoring slots available…
- a player earn a sponsoring slot each time he finishes a hunt
- for each hunt, a player earn his reward in the hunt, 1/r of the reward of the players he sponsored, 1/(r*r) of the reward of the players they themselves have sponsored, and so on. In practice we will certainly take r=2, so 1/2 of the players sponsored, 1/4 of the grand-children and so on.
This system is already being implemented, and we should do the testing either for the next hunt or the one after. Once it is launched we will publish a more detailed article, explaining it in details with a tutorial. Of course we will also take into account the suggestions we get from the community.
With all these improvements, we can hope to see many more players in the near future. More players, more hunts, more cool games, and a lot of green on the ISH chart!
Thanks for reading!
