A Year of Immortal Creed

Wow. One year after the launch of the 5th game I’ve worked on to release but the first of its kind. I’m amazed at what a Blazor WASM client hooked up to a .NET/Linux backend backed by PostgreSQL can do. The Blazor front end was mostly intended to just hold us over until a real front end developer could do it in React 😄. But I’m loving C# in the browser for now.

I know so much of the code I have in place is holding back the full potential of this tech stack but I can see multiple obvious areas to improve when the time comes. Having said that I’m proud of what we launched with on December 10, 2023 and insanely more so of where we stand today. I’ll probably always be a tiny bit ashamed of little mistakes that led to big issues, but I’m happy to have the performance and stability improvements that came from working through stressful and embarrassing at the time server issues.

Did I mention this game has crypto and NFTs? ~~What the hell was I thinking?!~~ Working with blockchain is exciting and fun! Hive and Hive Engine are very cool. Polygon, ERC-20, and ERC-721 are very cool. Chris (@dekimasu) introduced me to how the Web3 world was tying into games and it’s awesome to see and be a part of melding blockchain with having fun.

You can see one side of our journey over the last year in the official and server-updates channels in the Discord, but we’ve had plenty keeping us busy that we haven’t talked about, too. Getting everything together for filing taxes stands out as something that took a LOT more time than expected. We’ll be quicker next year from what was learned, but I’m still going to hate doing it instead of spending every minute possible adding more fun to the game.

I would love to take a deep dive into what I like and don’t like about where we are with the game’s mechanics and features one year in, but I think that would take enough space it needs to be its own post 😁. I do want to say there is a type of strategy here that I’m really interested in exploring further in a more competitive setting. Winning against a higher card power opponent using effective counters and debuffs, well placed damage exploiting gaps in your opponent’s attacks, and especially strategic use of card speed feels amazing!

Oh, and I’m sorry for the Tavern Brawl (the most hated location in the game). That was me having fun seeing how far I could take multiple overlaid card restrictions, to the point that at the highest ranks you know exactly what cards your opponent will play since it’s exactly what you’re playing! I loved how these specific restrictions take card power out of the equation and bring card speed within a single damage type and card placement above everything else strategy-wise, but the backlash of hatred and profanity made it clear my love for this location wasn’t universally shared 😛.

I pulled a few stats I thought may be interesting from the first 26 seasons of Immortal Creed:

313,508 game transactions were recorded on the Hive, Hive Engine, and Polygon blockchains.
58,260 Origins card packs were opened.
9,946,082 VALOR was awarded for ranked match wins.
327,090 VALOR, 890 card packs, and 11,255 cards were awarded in season reward chests.
5,480 gold foil Equipment cards and 624 gold foil Immortal cards were received from packs or season rewards.
181,758 Equipment cards were burned for CRAFT or destroyed by combining.
23,363 Immortal cards were burned for CREED or destroyed by combining.

Thank you to everyone involved with developing and supporting Hive, Hive Engine, and Polygon, the NFTMart team (@nftmart), the Keychain team (@keychain), everyone who has posted or made a video about Immortal Creed, and everyone who has ever joined and played a match or two or more. Extra huge thanks to every player who joined and saw enough potential to support us with a purchase. We wouldn’t be here without you! Sorry to everyone whose ears I blew out with an insane default audio volume. It’s much more reasonable now, I promise (I do still crank it up and have a solo one man mosh every time the battle music plays 🤘).