Monthly product update: July 22

Progress and updates Weekly reports
#1

Hey Martians,

It’s August already, and our product team have something great to share with you all.

Top 3 product achievements:

  1. Mining missions gameplay has been significantly improved. It’s still in-development, and so far we just launch a test version (see here), but we are already working on phase 2 - adding proper UI, sand worms attack mechanic and energy barrels resource.

Mining mission early interface

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  1. Referral program is live. Mars Colony App. Now anyone can join the campaign and promote polygon lands, earning fees and brining your friends to our Meta.

  2. Back-end and front-end infrastructure has been significantly improved, enabling higher throughput and improving speed of launching new interface updates.

Product objectives for August and September

  1. Player engagement (number of missions played, average time spent on playing land, user retention)

  2. Polygon community growth (land sales, missions plays and engagement)

With that being said, here are the list of initiatives we are going to be focusing on

Polygon growth:

  • Slashing rewards for users who don’t claim passive income within 36 hours.
  • Allowing users to claim land on Polygon for hCLNY (Colony token from Harmony)
  • Enabling free to play (allow users with no avatars to take part in Mars missions)

Player engagement and retention

  • App UI revamp - adding sidebar and making app more user-friendly and understandable for landowners and players.
  • Open utility crates and obtain utility NFTs - feature that unlocks utility NFTs for mining missions
  • Mining mission & play-to-earn transition -our first strategy-type mission where a players’ goal will be to mine resource with limited number of steps, avoid sand worms and return safely to base.
  • Avatars & missions launch on Polygon
  • Buffs/ de-buffs from avatar professions, levels and rarity
  • In-game leaderboard
  • In-app land marketplace
  • In-app game utility NFTs marketplace
  • System : gas /fees management

Features de-prioritized:

  • Robot missions
  • Polygon DEX

In addition to, there are a few questions that you guys raised during the AMA that require better clarification:

  • Liquidity on polygon
    E> we are preparing a proposal. In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts and ideas on this.
  • Passive/active income split
    E> We will take a look at 50% proposal split and share our thoughts on it.

Anything else, let us know your thoughts.
Mars colony product team

7 Likes
#2

Not a fan of this. If people take vacation you are penalizing them. If you really want support for this, then extend this beyond 2 weeks. 3 days is not reasonable.

If you want to grow your user base you have to be concerned about the user.

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#3

I disagree, a vacation is in essence a break from productivity. If you wish to continue working on vacation to keep things moving forward in your professional life, then you accommodate accordingly. If you wish to continue earning in-game on vacation, accommodate accordingly(bring a device you can use for two minutes every day and a half to claim rewards.)

Keep up the solid dev, team :muscle:

1 Like
#4

Will narrative ever become a priority? There is no story to this game whatsoever. At one point, I think we had alien pet-owners or something like that, but that narrative never got off the ground. Then I think we got random messages from aliens (encryption). But that has no connection to anything else. Now I think we might have worms? But again, what’s the connection? No narrative got off the ground. There is no narrative. Why are we on Mars? Why are there two Mars planets? How do they interact and relate? Why are we mining stuff? What are we mining? What are these aliens? What are these worms?

If we don’t know and that’s the narrative, that’s fine. That’s great. But there is no narrative string connecting any elements. It’s like we’re just throwing out sci-fi tropes and hoping they stick because we’ve learned that they “should be part of sci-fi.”

I’ve said it before: narrative matters. We don’t have a story. Everything is a story. So if we don’t have one, we don’t have anything. Brother, I know, was beginning to put together a narrative, but has anyone taken on that responsibility since then? Or are we just pretending like we don’t need it?

In short, none of this tech, back-end, who’s on vacation, who’s not, bridging, pCLNY, matters if we don’t have a story that develops and changes, that has characters and conflicts and themes, and internal consistency. I’m on Mars and I have no idea why.

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#5

Weekly product update:

10th sprint is over and here’s what it has brought to us:

  1. Global UI revamp is 75% done and will be ready for tests this week.

  2. Mining mission UI and new 3d assets will be soon ready to make 2nd iteration of mining mission beta test.

  3. Utility crates opening is in progress and contract migration will be soon too.

  4. Polygon avatars minting has been delayed a bit due to some tech issues but still coming up pretty soon.

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