Squad Assembly — Next Game Leaks

!boo Squad,

Thank you all for being firm believers in Oni Squad and for your continued support of the project. As we discussed on our Twitter Spaces last week, we are excited to expand the netherverse! Our team has been laboriously sowing the seeds for the next game, and we have many updates we want to share. 👻

TL;DR Summary

- Our next game, tentatively called Yomi Academy, will be a casual, mobile-first, free-to-play, and play-and-earn game

- The game genre is “Genshin Impact meets Farmville” — a farming simulation set in a magical, anime fantasy world with deep lore and collectible characters featuring relationship-building mechanics

- Team expansion: Game Designer, Writer, Backend Engineer, experienced gaming art studio to supplement our core art team

- Spirit Board: Q2 Discord P2E game → Whitepaper → Series A → Alpha launch → Q3 Governance Token IDO → NFT launch (TBD) → Q3/4 Full game launch

- Hodlers perks: Confirming specifics but will include some combination (or all) of the following: Confirmed: governance token airdrop, community voting, mintlist allocation. TBD: in-game stats buffs, merch, IRL events

Oni Mansion Recap

While we shared some of the following data in various Discord and Twitter posts, we wanted to summarize some interesting stats about Oni Mansion, and a few insights we had that will help us brew something even better.

• Player engagement and retention was higher than we expected for a game without any earning mechanics: 45% of players returned the next day, and 15% of the players played until the very end (30 days); both stats are quite high when compared to casual web2 games
• The game experienced over 80,000 on-chain transactions, averaging 225 transactions per wallet (7 transactions per wallet, per day)
• Most popular (purchased) mansion accessory was the Anime Reaper Girl

We designed Oni Mansion to be heavily on-chain to test the limits of layer-2 technology, but our conclusion is that the user experience is still a bit too spooky for our vision, even if gas fees remain low. The NFT market is also still nascent and assuming crypto fluency makes it hard to reach the player base we want.

Being huge fans of anime, the team was excited to see that our community also loved the anime-influenced art in Oni Mansion. We decided to take the squad’s lead and lean into the new artistic direction, which brings us to our next game…*drum roll*

Crypto Gaming Today and Our Mission

We will continue to push the boundaries of Web3 for our next game. As a gaming studio, our mission is to focus on building casual, social, fun games for the mass market.

Our next game will be accessible to a broad, worldwide audience as a mobile-first, casual game. By being free-to-play, we are planting an ecosystem to cultivate a continuous influx of new players who can join, participate and grow the economy. We are focused on providing a user experience where players can play the game without any knowledge of cryptocurrency or NFTs.

Currently, most crypto-native games have ponzi-like tokenomics where the winners are usually whales who entered the game early; meanwhile, regular players often receive the short end of the stick. We don’t believe this to be a sustainable model, and those games frankly aren’t fun at all. Our goal is to create a fun game that’s enjoyable to play as a standalone game, but with a vibrant and robust economy, that rewards players fairly.

We are thinking deeply about the role of the fungible game tokens and collectible NFTs. The funds generated by the game will be reinvested to create new content, attract new players, or even support monetary policy to maximize the stability of the game economy.

Our next game will heavily feature and incentivize trading as a key game mechanic. We think this is one of the major reasons to even include blockchain features in games — it maximizes liquidity for digital assets and enables non-players to still participate in and grow the overall ecosystem.

Our Next Game: Yomi Academy

Oni Squad introduced a collection of whimsical, ethereal spirits who exist in a mysterious netherworld. But the Onis are just one being in a much larger world…and their recent appearance is not without coincidence…

Do you feel it? Something’s not quite right. There is a veiled magical world just a sliver away, and that world is very sick. Later this year, you will be spirited away to attend an elite research academy…you and your new classmates will seek to uncover the truth of this mystical, ailing land.

Yomi Academy is our next game, and can be best described as “Genshin Impact meets Farmville” — a farming simulation set in a magical, anime fantasy world with deep lore and relationship leveling / light dating mechanics.

As players generate resources and optimize their farms, they will have the opportunity to collect and earn new characters as digital collectibles. New storylines will unfold and players will discover that different characters provide different bonuses to their resource generation or unlock special items. Characters you meet will possess vibrant in-game personalities and will double as profile-picture NFTs that can be accessorized or upgradable.

Players will be able to earn as they upgrade characters that can be traded to others, craft or discover rare artifacts, and earn crypto game tokens.

Our engineering team is working on a unique architecture so that all assets, including consumables, durable items, and characters, can potentially be tradable both in an in-game marketplace and externally on NFT exchanges via non-custodial wallets.

The Squad is Growing!

We hired a game Product Manager, Imm, for our game design. As a veteran game designer with product experience from multiple large game studios, he is instrumental in designing the economy and core mechanics of the next game.

We also hired a story and narrative writer, Lynn, to establish the lore, character profiles, and dialogues to expand the netherverse.

Our new backend engineer left his position at a major crypto exchange to help us build the infrastructure for the game. With a strong background in security, we want to ensure the utmost security of our custodial wallets powering the game.

We’re also partnering with an external game art studio to supplement our core art team (Andre & Nick) to further refine the vibe of the netherverse, as well as aid in the creation of marketing materials, such as trailers, post art, and animations. The studio is highly experienced and has worked on character designs for League of Legends, Hearthstone, and art for web3 projects such as Dapper Labs’ NFL All-Day, Frank Miller’s Sin City, and Genopets.

Our in-game characters will also feature voiceovers by popular anime voice actors / seiyus to further bring the Yomi Academy world to life…and likely be attached to the NFTs themselves.

We raised our seed round to weather any possible storm in the event of a crypto bear market. Our co-founders Pavan and Jason have yet to take a salary to ensure we can continue to make key hires and maximize our runway. The squad’s future is preparing to #fullmoon.

Hodler Perks

Rewards will include a combination of multiple perks. The exact perks for all Oni, Oni Mansion, and Special Collection Hodlers (1/1 James Bond/Villain/Santa Oni) are still being defined, considering the game is still being developed. Overall we envision that the Oni Squad collection will act similarly to how access passes (i.e. PROOF, Haus) work, by providing access, utility, and rewards for all future games and projects created by us.

We are building Yomi Academy for our hodlers. One of the core tenets of web3 is community ownership, and our main goal is to activate and involve the squad as much as possible so that you are an integral part of the decision-making process for the game. The squad will be able to vote upon critical decisions to help contribute to the development of this game. Including user-generated content will eventually be something we hope to enable to further deepen the community’s tie to the game.

• All hodlers will receive a token governance airdrop at the time of our IDO.
• Hodlers may receive stat boosts or some direct in-game utility in Yomi Academy, such as improved farming rate/resource generation (TBD)
• There will potentially be a mint for the upcoming game, in which a share of the supply will be allocated to bigger/more active hodlers. (TBD)
• We are also exploring community IRL events and merchandise (TBD)

Ultimately, we are still calculating the math of the game to balance the enjoyment for the rest of the new players, while also maintaining a level of fairness.

Spirit Board Leaks

Q2
Discord P2E Game
Whitepaper
Series A
Alpha launch

Q3
Governance Token IDO
NFT Launch (TBD)

Q4
Full game launch

In the meantime, instead of introducing staking, we will implement a fun discord game where you can earn points that can be used to redeem our governance token, Oni NFTs, mintlist spots (TBD), and merch. This Discord game will essentially be P2E to kick it off while we are expecting the beta launch, giving a taste of Yomi Academy!

We’re so excited to unveil more about Yomi Academy and continue this journey with the Squad! Our moon waxes onward…welcome to the conservatory.