01/27/22 — Update: Pre-Alpha Recap | Domination Progress | $DOM Token

Stache
9 min readJan 27, 2022

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Domination Concept Image.

Dear Recruits,

It feels like it’s been forever, but believe it or not, it’s only been about a month since we completed our mint.

Let’s recap some notable events since then.

Notable Events — 12/22/21–01/27/22

  • Refunded over 450 $SOL from our treasury for those who paid over 1 $SOL to mint
  • Listed on marketplaces Magic Eden and Fractal
  • Verified our collection on Yawww.io
  • Finalized Faction Leader Elections
  • Published v0.1 Domination Docs
  • Doxxed with Civic
  • Revealed our 1/1 Admirals
  • Hosted 2 Pre-Alpha Games of Domination

Stats as of 01/27/2022:

  • Twitter: 10,214
  • Discord: 8493
  • Enlisted: 972
  • Total Volume Traded: 1867.18 $SOL

I wanted to start off by highlighting a couple of these events before providing a detailed update to provide some context as to what we’ve been working on and why.

Finalized Faction Leader Elections

Congratulations to:

Faction 1 Leader — Pilot_Drizzy | 2IC — Kayer

Faction 2 Leader — Char Aznable| 2IC — MetaMilo

Faction 3 Leader — VincentHands | 2IC — Maro

We hosted a Discord event for community members to organize amongst themselves and elect leaders for their factions.

We had some great candidates participate and the elected leaders earned their positions democratically by campaigning for their positions.

These leaders were important for us to elect because during our initial games of Domination they were the focal point in terms of organizing their factions, rallying their teams, and managing the coordination to input their moves for the games.

We have a lot more in store for the faction leaders.

They will also be rewarded accordingly.

Published v0.1 Domination Docs

Fundamentally, the most important asset of our project is our first core product, Domination. It’s the driving utility behind our NFTs and vision that lead many of our community members to join us.

We had so many great ideas come from the community members that we felt it was important to showcase some of the initial game concepts into a public-facing formal document for our members to review and add to.

For these reasons, a week after our mint (during holidays) we prioritized organizing and publishing our documents.

Domination Docs v.01: ️️➡️ Coda Link

Hosted 2 Pre-Alpha Games of Domination

Game 1:

  • Date: 01/08/2022
  • Start Time: 10 AM EST
  • Total Participants: 101

We were amazed at the turnout.

We had around 38 participants per faction so instead of moving around faction members, we limited the amount of hits points per faction and total “power” per faction to 38 and 380 HPs (10 per member).

We organized a pre-game meeting in the domination-voice channels to describe the rules of the game and how we were going to be administering the moves.

We shared a live Coda doc which we built to function as the game’s dashboard. We set up a system where faction leaders were taking in the moves from their factions then passing the moves to our community manager, Daemon.

Each faction had 5 mins per round to input their moves and 2 mins in-between for us to update the game doc.

Pre-alpha Domination Dashboard
Keeping track of the moves/rounds

On a Saturday morning, we had over 100 players come out and play the very first game with us when the only assets we had available to run the games were Discord and a manually updated Coda document.

Result: Faction 1 won in dominating fashion within 11 rounds.

Besides some logistical hiccups, the games ran smoothly and we were able to play through the first game. The feedback was positive, it validated our product once again.

Game 2:

  • Date: 01/15/2022
  • Start Time: 7 AM EST
  • Total Participants: 126

We hosted our second game 2 hours earlier than the previous one to be mindful of our community members in other time zones such as the EU and Asia.

We had members tell us that they stayed up until 3–6 AM to play the first game.

Because we worked out the kinks of the dashboard from the first game we were able to start on time and the second game ran smoothly.

After analyzing the first game, we got some feedback that defense was a relatively weak and underpowered option so we decided to implement/test a new mechanic right away.

Defense now added .5 hit points back and we added a salvage mechanic to reward aggressors who took the last hit to knock out other factions.

This game was interesting even from a spectator’s perspective. The Generals (founders) joined in on faction voice chats to get a sense of how the factions were organizing and strategizing.

It was fun to see the negotiations and inter-faction relationships form.

Result: Faction 2 won within 15 rounds.

These games were important because they were live games with multiple players, it was the first run-through of our minimum viable product.

Up until this point, the entire game had only really been a concept we've been developing internally.

Here were our biggest takeaways:

  • The reviews were very positive, everyone expressed that they had fun
  • The social elements were really important
  • The Coda doc was a nice touch but without a true web interface we realized that we were not going to be able to iterate the mechanics of the game that we want to test and implement fast enough
We set up a “shit-talk” channel for inter-faction communications

Due to the realization that we couldn’t test as many mechanics as we would like, we shifted our primary focus to developing a lightweight game interface so all of the moves and rounds can be managed more efficiently.

This way we can run more games/faster at scale.

This has been the reason the core members have been relatively quiet while reorganizing our time and bandwidth into creating this interface.

Domination Progress

We didn’t let the lack of a web interface stifle our progression.

The team has been hard at work taking into account the feedback that we got from our community and we’ve been working hard refining many of the concepts for the web-based alpha.

NOTE: We’ve stated this many times before, but nothing we publish is final. Every idea, concept, and game mechanic is still up for further refinement and testing, we, however, don’t want that to hold us back from sharing our progression in our ideas as we build Domination.

Here are some updates on the progression of the game mechanics.

S/O to Surface for always making our work look badass.

Kai Attributes:

  • HP/Power Points
  • Modifier Stats
  • Base Stats Based on Mark (THESE ARE PRELIMINARY IDEAS)

Actions:

  • Repair will be a separate action
  • Upgrade will affect each action distinctly and traits will play a role
  • Move has been introduced with the map mechanic

Map/Movement:

  • The game map will be dynamically generated every campaign based on many different variables
  • This will add Movement to the game
  • This will add additional objectives, movement, and modifier mechanics
  • Movement/Map mechanics add different types of interaction elements (listed below)

Modifiers:

  • We will be adding single Kai modifiers and group modifier elements
  • Maps/traits/items will have an effect on modifiers

Battle Phase Calculations:

  • During PA (Pre-Alpha) we noticed that the order of operations of calculations was important to figure out and define

Trait Bonuses/Benefits:

  • Due to the overwhelming request to make traits have special effects on the gameplay the team has started to attentively develop a unique utility for all traits

As you can tell, the team has been busy defining and furthering the progression of Domination.

As we stated, however, the most important current item on our development roadmap is developing the web interface so that we can administer the games more efficiently and test new mechanics more easily.

The team has outlined the pieces required for this first build.

$DOM Token Development | Creating an Economy

Wen token?

If you’ve been a part of our journey since pre-mint you know that as a team we do not make any commitments or promises for the sake of hype or marketing.

For us to commit to developing and creating a token we had to make sure that we developed the token mechanics from the ground up so we spent time developing our in-game economy and defining the utility of the token first.

This was important to build utility into the token we’re developing.

$DOM Token Flow In-game Economy

Staking

We’re excited to announce that we will be launching the ability to stake your Kai NFTs to earn the in-game token, $DOM, and have a chance to earn before we launch the final iteration of Domination.

We will be providing specific dates and updates in the upcoming weeks.

Closing

To our community members,

Thank you very much for your patience and continued belief in our team and vision. We know that you guys are here for the long-term vision but we felt it was necessary to provide an update for you guys.

Additional Final Points:

  • Surface has come on board full-time!
  • Yesterday was Silo’s first-day full time working on Kaizen Corps!
  • Starting Monday, Hiro will be full-time!

Up until this point, most of the team has been managing responsibilities outside of Kaizen Corps. We are happy to announce that this will no longer be the case.

With these major changes, we will be committing to releasing more of these Medium posts regularly as we continue to sprint towards releasing more information and making as much progress.

Next week, we will be releasing our new 2022 roadmap for Kaizen Corps & Domination.

See you on the battlefield.

— Kaizen Corps Team, over & out.

Founder: @Hiro__Yuy

Developer: @silostack

Artist: @Hard_Surfaced

Marketer: @Argobolt

Twitter: @KaizenCorpsNFT

Discord: discord.gg/kaizencorps

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