Hey, Mike, how are you doing?
Michael what's going on I check
Hi, are you talking to me?
Yeah, yeah, I was doing a quick Mike. Okay. Yeah. Yes. No, it's Matt here. It's not Michael. It's Matt. But uh, yeah
Long day low sleep and just talking to so many people
You know doing so many interviews a day as my mind has not been the same the last three months
but Matthew my apologies we were on a on a space together with coin W and I was once kind of blown away by
What you think web 3 gaming is going to transform into and just the knowledge that you had to break that there
I'd rather back that up, but we're here talking about big time and
Before we before we dive in Matthew
Do you want to give us a quick background of who you are your origin story?
Your career trajectory and then what ultimately piqued your interest and made you jump into the web 3 industry
Of course. Well, thank you very much for the wonderful intro entirely to kind
That was an interesting space some depth some brain insights there and I know you had some incredible observations as well
Sensibly the guild manager with big time
Really? I like to work with kind of large preset communities people who either make content or have
A following or a community that they play video games together with and then we try and do outreach to them
In a variety of ways you can get involved with big time like whether or not you want to play cooperatively
If you want to make content or if you're just interested in the NFT or the exchange component of as well
I think there's a little bit of everything in there for big time
I've been involved with big time or working for them for about just over a year. I
It was a big kind of career change for me
I was in the army previously and wanted to get more involved in tech and so that's how I got involved with big time initially
Guild manager for big time and let's take a few steps back for audience members that don't know
What is big time give us a high-level overview and then we can jump in the nuts and bolts
Big time is a multiplayer RPG game
So think of it aesthetically as a as a balance between World of Warcraft and Diablo
But with a slightly different take on
obviously in-game play very different art style perhaps most importantly is
Kind of how the business model of it works
Which is it's a free-to-play video game where you can exchange the items that you find inside the game
So there is like a secondhand marketplace and players can
Trade kind of verifiably rare items to each other that way
Well, you just said that it's a balance between two of my favorite games of all time
I I spent quite a bit of time playing classic World of Warcraft vanilla World of Warcraft and
Diablo 2 was something that I played extensively in middle school in the beginning of high school. So
Would love to know what components of those games you guys are bringing into big time and then what what a fusion of those
What if what a fusion of those play styles look like when it comes to how each individual?
interfaces with big time I know it's an MMORPG so
Really would love to know what what yeah, like I said, what aspects of those games inspired big time
So I would say the game is 20% of World of Warcraft 80% Diablo
So the World of Warcraft comparison comes from the fact that we've got these four classes
You can switch between them which is a bit of a different take but they balance each other
So you can pick a class or focus on a class that really appeals to your strengths
We want to be the healer the damage dealer you can do so and a lot of that was inspired by Wow
That's really where most of our gameplay similarity has come from big time is not a true MMO
It's more of a dungeon crawler and so you have you roam this kind of expansive overworld
Probably like 20 minutes and men when you're running it
But scattered throughout are these purple gates that you drop into they lead into dungeons. We call them adventure instances, but
for the Diablo veterans, they're they're they're dungeons and then they're procedurally generated so they
Objectives on the inside they change each time that you run you enter into them
So that's that's kind of where the Diablo origin part of it comes in
Yeah, right on and I'd be curious to know how much of the game is available currently to play and
When you'd see when you guys expect a full the full alpha version to be released
There's a somewhat exclusive early access that's going on right now
You know in terms of like total content that will be that's available now versus will be ever available
I know it's a ballpark somewhere between 25 to 50 percent. The way you get into the game now is
Largely through other key players inside the game. We call them ambassadors
There's actually several really awesome ambassadors inside of this chat right now including miss three six nine
but it's an invite-only system so similar to how Facebook and
Like Gmail kind of initially onboarded you get to know somebody who plays your streams. They can give you a way into the game
The mix big hurdle for us in terms of content upgrades will be end of June
That's when we'll launch our preseason from the economy perspective. It's probably our biggest update
Where you can actually start kind of crafting stuff?
Crafting NFTs as well as collecting the in-game token as well. That's kind of next big transformation full launch of the game. I
ideally would be a couple months after the
startup preseason a lot of that will be kind of
Needed off of how successful preseason is but even after we launch we'll continue to do upgrades every 68 weeks on average
Big time is free to play. There's currently a small
beta beta version going on where you would have to get access through ambassadors and
Over the next year or two. We'll see more and more of the game go live
What so one of the things that I love about web 3 gaming and the potential web through gaming is
Building a video game first and foremost. That's so fun to play that people keep coming back to
Regardless like Wow like Diablo like Eve online and like many other games that have come after it fortnight
Minecraft and then adding the notion of asset ownership on top of it, right as adding the notion of taking that in-game
Currency like gold for Wow and turning it into utility tokens on the blockchains
So much you can do from there and taking a lot of these
trades that happen on black markets whether it's buying an old account from 2005 that has a
Legendary item that you can't obtain anymore or just buying another account with more skins than you or have more
More achievements than you on the black market taking that and also taking the kind of
Buying and selling of gold again is in the example of Wow and capturing that value that exists in a black market, right?
building a proprietary NFT marketplace where players can buy and trade those in a kosher way and then
Also charge like a small fee so that the developers get paid the builders of the game get paid and I think it just makes
Environment for for gamers and for builders and would love to know how you guys are doing this with big-time, right?
What are some ways that you see?
Blockchain technology revolutionizing the way through big-time
Gamers interface with this multiplayer Diablo esque and world of Warcraft inspired video game
Well, I don't think I can say it probably any more articulate in the way you just did it
that was a pretty a pretty succinct and and an intelligent way of kind of breaking down the way that big-time works, so
There's a couple ways that we think we add value
Right, like if you look at something like wow, there were already these somewhat illicit incredibly sketchy
black markets that kind of already existed out there and
By basically creating a more established system called open loop for us
marketplace that's where we can kind of take advantage of the fact that
Users are already want to kind of transact their their hard-earned items with each other
And then provide a platform that's both usable by kind of crypto natives as well as people who are not
That's one of the main things that makes big-time a little bit different
We have this hybrid marketplace by design, which is neither like a pure crypto exchange or
Something like you would see on Steam, right? You can use crypto
You can use bank deposits. You can use credit card transactions and you're able to
Interact with each other kind of in the same place, which is a different model intentionally
Part of the reason why we went for that is we saw this pretty strong aversion from
Traditional web to gamers towards anything affiliated with blockchain or wallets and all of that process. We wanted to make that onboarding easier
Easier while still are kind of taking advantage of
The idea that people want to transact these items and so that's how we kind of came up with open loop this
The fact that like the the items while they're in in the game are off chain
Which allows people who don't want to set up a wallet to still collect them
But eventually they're gonna be able to move them outside the game
Through one of our systems called the vault
And and I see that some of these items are currently on sale
For example, if you go to open loot on the website
Aren't the marketplace you have different batter of blade battle blade of serve bleauber is can't pronounce that right battle acts of sir Lionel
Dagger of sir kai dagger of sir bleauber is and then me the staff as well
These are currently not on sale, correct?
If you're seeing them listed there if they're a cosmetic then they are on sale it just means another player is selling them
Big time has never sold the cosmetic. Those are all players who list them
So they found them in some way from playing
Whatever price you see on there is set by set by the players
But they should be they should absolutely be for sale if you see him on there, it's because somebody has listed them
See, I think you guys are doing it, right? I
Some folks in the web 3 community that disagree with me
But I just find that the game should launch
People should be playing it and all the NFTs should be a crude in game
There shouldn't be some sort of an NFT sale or a token sale
I think that everything should spawn from within the game and then people can trade them on the marketplace if they want
Know what your thoughts are on that
Yeah, we agree with you up to a point. We did an initial sale of of land and
Some of the utilities so the land is the foundation upon which you can use the Forge and armory
So if you want to make your own cosmetics, that's how you will do it in the future
Using materials that you find inside the game
full cosmetics drop right now in early access because the game is not done and more importantly the
Economy is not fully implemented yet. So if you were to just launch the game as is right now
People would find a lot of the cosmetics. They probably generally underbid each other
I mean, they're just kind of push all the prices down to zero which early adopters would be really pissed at and so
We have this economy as exists now and they're in the earth in the early access period it changes pretty significantly through
What we call our preseason and beyond
Where the more that you that you play the more that you put into it the more that you can find
So that that kind of does more to protect users who are who've gotten involved early who want to spend more
Having a uniquely in unique appearance inside the game versus somebody who has much more
Extractive mindset like hey, I just want to play this because I want to find something and sell it immediately at that kind of negative
Cell pressure really detracts from the game
Excuse me from the game enjoyment that we've seen with other blockchain games. We did not
Want to go down that path with our game. So we went for something that kind of splits the difference between what you just mentioned
Mm-hmm, and what are some utilities of the land?
I know you said that one is being able to afford certain items, but what else?
So you can forge cosmetics
It's eventually how you'll be able to collect the token you need this
You need you enable this thing called the time warden
Which then goes into your space and then through that basically kicks off a countdown timer
So as you beat bosses or complete missions, you can collect the token
So forge items collect the token and third it's just a cool hangout area. So it's a customizable area
There's kind of different themes that were that are out and more that will come out
But it almost think of it like a version of was was that MTV show cribs
Think of it like cribs you can find these cosmetics inside the game and change the appearance of it
You know, it's a there's like kind of only one or two themes that are out right now
For space but like they're gonna change pretty significantly. We want to make them
Like you can go out there and set your own kind of perfect cool area that looks in
Feels just as unique as as you are as a player and you can invite other players into it
Hang out do stuff like that as well
So that we call it the personal metaverse space
Which is our land NFT is the foundational unit of that they're modular so you can kind of add more space to each other
Looking at the marketplace. I see there are some players that have listed items for
Well over 5,000 even up to 10,000. Is there any way that we can see actual sales buys and sells of
Transactions being made on the marketplace
There is there's an API where people have been able to pull that stuff off and they look at basically the
The kind of available data they've built their own kind of separate marketplace trans actors
I think what you're mentioning like transaction history. I think that comes out with our next iteration of the marketplace
My best guess for that one. I think is probably mayor
So there's some substantial upgrades that'll kind of go into the marketplace upgrade, but that transaction history stuff is on there
And looking at clips of the gameplay I can definitely see what you mean
The Diablo s gameplay with obviously your own graphics your own artwork
and your own lore which I want to talk about here in a bit, but
Looking at the classes, right? You have the warrior the chronomancer the shadow blade the quantum fixer. I
Remember you mentioning that there's a way to switch between classes as you progress. What was the reasoning behind that?
I've often times not often times though. I
Sometimes talk to my own Wow homies about like what what do we not like about retail?
like where did it kind of go wrong in our eyes and
One of the things that always comes up is the homogenization of classes where you basically give every class every ability and everyone
And there's there's no really there's no real uniqueness
From one class to another and I and I'm gonna play that was advocate here
But it seems like this just allows a player to pick any class they want and not really commit to it
They can just switch between one and the other as they as they please and there isn't
It feels a bit homogenized in that sense, but would love to hear your thoughts
Agree, I mean there's like so much to like pull apart from your question
Like what like how basically like how did why did we come up with big-time? Why is it positioned in the way that it was?
And feel free to like jump in if you wanted to clarify it cuz I'm off
Yes, sorry. I I tend to like ask these long-winded crack questions and then sometimes it doesn't make sense to the guests
Basically, what was the idea behind allowing play? So once you start I'm assuming with a level cap or there's a progression in the game
What's the idea behind allowing players to switch from one class to another as opposed to forcing them to stick with one class
From a to see and if they want to try another class, they have to start from the beginning
First off because there's not many other fucking games. We're sorry not many other games where you can switch between classes
First I mean why not right like it's technically feasible
But for other games, it's like people are more committed to their some of their world of Warcraft
Classes than they are to like their marriages and relationships and stuff like that
That's they end up like sticking with those classes for longer
I mean and it need not be that way and it's just another differentiator for big-time
We're like, all right. Well, we saw what kind of every other game had been doing. Let's do something different
It also sets the foundation for a lot more classes to continue to grow in the future. So we have four right now
More will more will come out like undoubtedly more will come out. I think we've kind of teased content of a female character class
That's probably next that'll probably happen kind of early summer
And then after that as we expand the world as we kind of add more content and lore onto it
We're like, you know what really mean?
We really needed this type of character class to really balance something out to to take advantage of this new content that we build out
So having this ability to switch between character classes
There's this much more flexibility as a game in the future because we're not going to be limited of like oh
I don't think the chronomancer can really do that or the time warrior
Well, then people have already been playing these characters for years and years and years. No, no, we're already like, okay
Well, we can grow that way in terms of the way the character classes work right now
You can they're all tied to this pocket watch you think about your base character. It's basically like a half-naked guy
Just kind of runs around in his underwear and then the way that they change their their cut of their class is this thing called
It's like aesthetically like a wristwatch and it changes your character class and you can collect all four of them pretty quickly
10 minutes of like actually starting the open world and you level them up independently
But you can switch between them. Some of it is like as you meet other people in the world you form a party with them
Sometimes you got a healer over here and you're the mage guy
All right, good balance, but sometimes you meet somebody else who's the mage
Maybe they haven't leveled up their healer and you want to be the healer
So it allows you to kind of balance your parties a little bit more easily
And what's the maximum number of players per party?
It's six for your average dungeon. There are these kind of community events right now where you can get up to 30 which are like total chaos
They're great. I mean like they run but like I mean, I love that chaos
it's kind of our initial foray into
Larger raids almost of like the Wow origin where you've just got 300 people who are about to just go cause chaos somewhere
The community events were kind of a notable step up from us for us from the six-player parties to
30 player community events where you're gonna run into people you've never met before in a central area
Yeah, I was a big fan of the old-school Wow raids and 40-man raids were just absolute chaos again
We're quite a lot of coordination. So I could I can imagine a 30-man
30-man raid on big time would be something along the same lines
talking about game progression
Can you choose to play the game so in a solo mode or with the group of like two to six?
You can you can solo anything. It's just quite a bit more challenging
If you solo, it's frickin hard. My player stats are like pretty atrocious because I solo so often
To the point where one of the devs was like I think your game stats are pulling in broken because you died like way too
Often I'm like, no, no those are those numbers actually check out
But if you double or if you have two people or up to six people you're much more successful
The loot and the enemy will scale to how many people are in your party if you solo
It's not as many if you have six. There's quite a few more
So things do scale like that
But generally like if you solo you're gonna you're gonna struggle pretty hard our new tutorial
To like onboard new users into the game. It takes about 90 minutes a couple hours somewhere in there
That's almost that's all that's all like solo play. That's just to get people familiar with
Taking or using all the controls and everything scaled so that it's very easily doable by a single player
What's the progression like for example in Diablo you have normal nightmare and hell mode there are different acts
I would love to hear more about the structure
Right now we don't really have a structure like that. It's just leveling up and then
Dungeons get progressively more challenging and the higher level you are you can just access more more challenging dungeons with different layouts
So you kind of are able to get more I I don't think we're gonna go towards something
Like with Diablo where there's kind of multiple levels
I think I think for our progression
It'll kind of expand more laterally then then kind of a difficulty in like a vertical way if that makes sense
Like we're we're gonna add more worlds. There will be kind of more of a solo or lore based world. That's called
That's like another parallel world to the one that we've already got built where people are gonna be able to go and then just in the future
A much more greater focus is gonna come from the crafting component side of it to the crafting right now is pretty minimal
But we undoubtedly it's a big part of why people get into blockchain is to make these items and be able to
Transact them or use them inside of a game
That's probably what I think is going to draw in a lot more players once that's kind of more available on a larger scheme in the future
One of the things that made me fall in love with video games growing up was the lore the stories
that developers would tell that the writers would tell and
When I played Wow, for example, I was of my group of friends
I was probably the only one that was always reading all the quests and really getting into the lore
And that is what draws me in oftentimes to MMORPGs or even games like Diablo, right?
The cutscenes in Diablo 2 really pulled me in when I was a kid and would love to know a bit more about your
lore the story behind big time and
The kind of the tale that is gonna overlap with the game progression as players continue to play and level up
And go deeper into the into the world that you guys have created
We've done a pretty atrocious job of releasing where our content has
Has been released so far like what the lore looks like so far
Um, I actually think I've released more lore talked about it more like from Twitter spaces than we've kind of published
So hopefully it doesn't make it back to to to like the CEO and stuff. Otherwise, I'll get in trouble
But here's the kind of general premise of big time
It's set distantly in the future
time is collapsing and it's kind of
Time in space kind of generally pushed everybody in the universe into one place. It's called times
And that's where people play right now
the bad guys in the world, it's
They are called big time think of it like big, you know
Bay oil big pharma and the way that we kind of negatively refer to those things both big time is the people in the future
and they're the bad guys and then they're kind of nefarious activities is causing that time to collapse and so
The reason why you have this mishmash of different historical characters coming together is because time in spaces been pushed them has pushed
Them all together. The good guys are evermore Academy. That's where a player and big time kind of joins on that side
The character classes are tied to separate historical figures. So for example, our mage is tied to Merlin
Ben Franklin Albert Einstein like those kind of you know
Classy historical characters that are each associated with different players and you're just basically competing against the bad guys big time
Which has a variety of kind of droid based
Enemy and you know in the future at least for future releases of the game as we expand the world
They're tied to different time periods
There's a time travel component to big time
So as you can you should have be able to kind of travel back and forth in these
Hybrid different time periods using your character classes. And so that's why we kind of went for that
It's time travel who doesn't enjoy that it also allows for an incredible amount of expansion of game content in the future
Right on okay, so I like that a lot any idea what inspired it
That's a good question, um
You know, I here here's I don't really have a good concept of how how the individual creators came up with why why time travel
That in particular that's actually such as a very simple and good question. I feel embarrassed that I had don't have an answer to it
Here's what I here's what I can tell you is we wanted to you know previously the founder worked at Decentraland
And was like I did not he did not want to make another
Decentraland metaverse type of experience. He really wanted to make up more of kind of a game first game and
Uniquely within that we felt that users are MMO players had this kind of
Accentuated desire to have ownership of their in-game items much more so than compared to something like a first-person shooter or like Halo or something
Like that so it's like wow people with MMOs really like
Owning their stuff and they also really hate blockchain
But blockchain gives you kind of an a unique ability to own your stuff
So how do you kind of give them the benefits without?
You know turning them off immediately with the fact that you call it like an NFT or coin or something like that
And so that's how we went for this kind of hybrid marketplace system in terms of the gameplay the time component just makes it
very easy to expand I kind of think that the the general model of big-time is it'll
It's never gonna probably really be done
It's gonna keep expanding there will be a free-to-play version for everybody that they can download
But the content upgrades will kind of come every couple months for probably the next five to ten years
I think that's just the way big-time is gonna be because we want to keep people immersed
It's just the way that our studio was built vice
Something like epic or EA or rockstar or something like that
I to my knowledge. There's not a lot of other MMO style games that have a time-based component to them
Think we saw that there was a great opportunity to do something unique there and we're like, all right
Well, it's let's roll with it
It also just gives us a unique ability to tie in a different art style
And that's really where our artists kind of shine. They had to come up with an art style that literally is timeless
that but is also like optimized to so that people with a
Wide variety of kind of hardware can play this game without it being overly taxing too
So that's kind of roughly the left and right limits of how we bracket it into big time
Dude I didn't even think about that. You made a great point
The time travel gives you guys so much flexibility to take the game in so many different directions
And kind of this I was reading about kind of this multiverse
This kind of multiverse aspect of the game as well where you have
Characters inspired from different universes and you can just tie in more universes. It's kind of like MCU exploring the multiverse now
They can tie in old films like the original x-men or Deadpool or even the old spider-man's all and it brings worlds together
So I can see what I'm glad you phrase it the way you did cuz I can see where the vision is now
And I also think you made a really interesting point about
MMORPG players and attachment to their characters and their items. I'm one of those people
I played Wow on and off since 2005 and I really do wish that I owned my items
I have some I have some items that are extremely rare that if they were
NFTs that I could sell them on the open marketplace. I could probably make some nice change off of it
So and it is really interesting that you said MMORPG players want to own their own assets
But they hate blockchains. It's so true
Anytime I try to talk about this stuff to my gamer homies that is they don't want to hear it
They don't like it. They hate NFTs. They hate blockchain. They hate crypto, but they don't realize it's gonna solve
What the problems they have as long time Wow players or maple story players or room crap player
Even E-ball online. I think these types of games could benefit tremendously from from watching technology asset ownership and all that good stuff
You guys are you guys have quite the impressive team as well. And I know that you might still be hiring
What are some I don't want to ask you if you guys you're hiring saying you are but like what are some
Improvements or some places in your team that you think you guys could use more help and from your own anecdotal experience. Oh
Our guild manager sucks, so we got to get rid of that guy
First and foremost, I mean like it's uh, it's challenging
Admittedly, like I do work on the marketing team so I can kind of only speak about
You know the marketing team that directly I am I am NOT a developer, you know
Freely offered so like my development advice is pretty trivial any time I offer it
Think one of the just general challenges of being on a development team or at least from what I can see is
It takes a long time to put together a really good game
And there's just generally a lot more users than there are developers and even developers have to go through and like stress test
And play test and then develop something and they want to make something new
We're never just gonna copy and paste something that somebody else is already doing. We're always gonna do something uniquely
So that's there's kind of never enough engineers
There's kind of never enough time and you're never gonna be able to keep up with kind of all the great suggestions that come from
Your your wide array of community members. That's the persistent challenge. I don't think that's
Idiocynchotic too big time, but I think that's just a general challenge, especially with games
That's just really hard. I noticed that quite a bit on marketing
It's just general outreach of talking to folks is they have
They play these games for hours big time for hours and put a lot into it and they have very strong opinions on it
And they're they're they're free to share it as as they should be when you're passionate about something you have strong opinions about it
That's hard because you can't do everything like big time will never be will never really
I think appeal to somebody who is a professional halo player
Or a professional call of duty player nor, you know, kind of nor should it be
so like being able to create something that
Appeals to a large enough people that they can still get involved in it and really sink their teeth into it and enjoy it
I think has just been one kind of persistent challenge for us in terms of hiring
I mean just go check out our jobs applications. Those some of those positions have been open for quite a bit
And again highlighting your big team
How many folks are in charge with the creative direction of a big time whether it's the gameplay whether it's the the economy
Whether it's the story and the lore. I would love to know what those meetings look like. I
I only sit in on like one to two of those meetings. One of them is the gameplay test those happen every day. They generally
Get together and play a certain part of the next patch or next world that somebody has built and they kind of give their feedback
Experience because like somebody has just spent like weeks or months building something and then just get like 40 or so
Artists or engineers in there who just like rip it to pieces for all the bugs that are in there is like pretty brutal
So they've got a those dudes are pretty tough and they take feedback incredibly well
Most of the artistic direction with the gameplay comes down to this the CTO Matt Tonks
He I think previously was head of AI at EA or epic
but one of those two and then he kind of oversees the both the
The engineering as well as like the artistic vision and implementation that a big time that team together is about 30 to 40 people
Somewhere somewhere in that amount. I think there's about 50 or 60 people in big-time total
So really much more heavily oriented towards the the engineering and in our play. That's really where the majority people are
Also forgot uh forgot to ask about
Whether there'll be a PvP aspect of the game
I love PvP is probably one of my favorite parts of not just WoW, but also Diablo
And would love to hear the vision of what player versus player looks like in big time
Yeah, I think that PvP at the earliest it would come out for us is probably towards the end of 2023
That's kind of out there earliest. We've done some tests with it
It was okay, but not I think at the level that we were ready to like launch and have him be a significant appealing feature
It would be out there, but it would basically existed at an MVP style
Minimum viable product kind of like level of quality
We really wanted to complete the kind of overworld before we added on such a significant new gameplay content
You know in terms of what PvP looks like I don't have a good idea
We're really I think probably more at the idea generation phase of whatever that would be as opposed to committed to something like
It's going to look like a tournament style where you know two players enter and only one leaves or versus something like a raid or
A large kind of like evio battle or something or excuse me eve online type battle
I'm not sure. I actually think the biggest direction pull we're going to get from that is from the players
The main place that we get our feedback that we really incorporate it is from
Our discord where they have we have this game feedback channel
Most people think i'm blowing them off when i'm like post it in game feedback like you've got to do that
They're like, oh fine. Are they just think i'm no
No, that's where the developers like scrape and pull through it every day whether it's a bug or it's a suggestion
That's where they go through it. So if somebody has like a very
Kind of strong opinion and maybe many other players think similarly on the way they think pvp should look
I'd honestly i'd tell them to go post it there
Um and go get a bunch of your friends to react to it positively as well. Like it should look like this
Um, or we think this would be really cool
That's the probably whatever whatever we end up doing is probably going to be whatever the players really want the most
I love that. I think not enough
Video game developers and big game studios
Listen to their player base. I think that Activision Blizzard I listen, man. I love you guys
But they have not done the best job of listening to their player base over the last decade
Um, and a lot of that is evident in kind of the player drop-off of wow
So you guys are doing that you're taking your time. I think a lot of game studios rush
And try to get a game out and the game isn't it isn't either
It isn't what it set out to be to begin with because it was rushed. It didn't have enough time
Um to to kind of develop all of its limbs and it ultimately falls flat after you know
Six to twelve months and we've seen it up with a lot of big games that come out a lot of big studios
So take your time. I don't think there's any rush. I i've heard a lot of great things about big time. And so it's finally
Um, it's great to finally have you on in here
Hear more from someone that's in the trenches building what you guys are up to and what your vision is
uh, I want to open up the floor to some audience members to ask questions that they like but
Is anything that I haven't asked so far that you think is important to highlight? I didn't dig too deep into
Into the vault technology and some of the other components that you highlighted earlier, but I I wanted to keep things
I want to keep things more high level and approach this from from the mindset of a gamer
But happy to go into more details if you'd like
Yeah, I well people are kind of raising their hands and wanting to come up on stage
I'm happy to kind of get on my pedestal and just uh kind of ran rave. Um
With my aluminum foil hat on so I you know, the the vault is
Um a pretty simplistic idea at its core
It's just how you mint in-game items onto a chain and then move them outside the game
That's that's really what the vault is
But the idea is that it gives you this ability to be more chain agnostic
so if you want to mint it on to eth or
Solana or hack whatever is going to be still around here in the next year or so
You're going to be able to mince onto a variety of things
So we're not like committed to a single chain kind of forever and ever
Um, but that's it because while they're inside the game, they they exist off chain
But that allows users who perhaps hate nfts or something like it
To still collect them and put them on the marketplace
But for those users those passionate users out there that are like no, no
I really want to use it on sell it on open sea or trade it there
Then they're going to be able to do that as well
So that's that's kind of what the core of the vault is
The other part about big time is you know, there's a lot of web3 games that are out there
A lot of great projects with some kind of great trailers that are that are to be released
Um, but they haven't released their games yet. Um, it's freaking hard
It's freaking hard to make a game that people are going to want to play
For for years, let alone just like a you know, a couple weeks or a couple hours
So I think the fact that we've even released a game is it's kind of notable
It was definitely an intensive decision. I think if we were a larger studio, we would have just waited
And then just like boom we release it's all done. It's great
We may release them, you know, one day seven day and 30 day patches, but that's about it
What you see is kind of what you get
but for us our our general model is
Grow every every six to eight weeks improve it iterate it move it forward
And we when we release something kind of in those a new feature in those patches
We watch those that game feedback and the game data like
Like crazy and then we just iterate it improve it for the next either hot patch or the next content upgrade
Again can't iterate enough how much I love the fact that you guys are listening to your players and taking player feedback
I think it's oftentimes overlooked
Captain Levi you're on stage, sir. You get some questions
Captain Levi you with us? Yeah, um
Yeah, can you hear me guys?
I really love the overall
Mechanics and parameters surrounding the game. I just have a few questions regarding
Upgrading content to give the character skill sets
Um, I I don't know if you touched on it, but I I probably did not hear you clearly
I wanted to ask you would there be it from
For example, um a character could fuse
Um with another skill to improve or amplify the power of that skill itself
So you're talking about can can characters fuse together to get more power
Is that your question? Yes. Yes
Broadly speaking no because
quintessential to what we do for every content upgrade is to rebalance you don't want this
Character or singular ability to be completely dominant because honestly it just takes all the fun out of the game if you have this one ability to just
Molly whoops its way across the map and just you can level up to 100 and you're unkillable. It's it's not fun
Um, it's it's really not so we always make sure we balance things between character classes to make it make it enjoyable
Um fusing character classes would probably bring us a little bit closer towards that being unbalanced
Um, I think some of the some of the haters would call it nerfing
But sometimes we we plus up the strength of certain characters or give them unique abilities
Sometimes we have to dial some things back, but we normally iterate that on that six to eight week period that I just mentioned
Well, that's that's actually quite awesome
Um, I I also want to ask about some of your medium articles
Um as of January 19th, there was an airdrop program
Um, could you tell us about this and then how did people from that airdrop was the use of what airdrops were giving
And um, is it does it have a specific use case in the gameplay?
Yeah, I I we may need another space for me to go into all the details of the airdrop but it's basically correlated to two things
um, we we give these kind of core in-game items between
Um forges and armories and other key utilities, which are the components you need to make stuff if you want to make a cosmetic
You can either go buy it or sometimes you can get it from an airdrop
Meter to a player based on roughly two things how much they already have
And how much they play so if you have a lot of space where you have a lot of like
Forges and armories already you're probably going to get some more of those base inputs
If you play the game a lot, you're probably going to get more of them
And if you have a lot and you play a lot, you're probably going to get the most
There's this kind of articulate tearing formula for exactly what you get
Um on our wiki, I would probably direct you over there
But basically we want to incentivize people who either
Spent a lot in the game or play a lot and how do you
Because ultimately those people are going to be kind of the the key seed players for the community moving forward
So that's who we wanted to kind of reward with the airdrops
Wow sounds good, um, that's quite awesome to be honest
My next question comes from another medium article
Where I see that one can actually add funds to the big time account
One can make a bank deposit. Um, is there going to be an exchange?
From um, whatever fiat currency the bank deposits is and then how does one switch from you know
That's fiat from bank deposits to um stable coin
Um, do you do the conversion yourself or is it thought past that does it for you guys?
It's most of the transactions go through circle
Um, that's kind of the partner who built the foundational technology of our marketplace
To clarify your question you're asking a great very in-depth question for some people who may not be as familiar with big time
There's essentially three different means that you can use to buy stuff on the marketplace. You can deposit with
Um you and I think up until recently you could do bank deposits. I think we just put that on freeze
Um, they all kind of settle in us in u.s. Dollars
the uh, and that's that's
So everything is going to be denominated in that on the marketplace. And so that's that backside is all kind of run through circle
Um, but that's how we uh, that's what it's going to settle in
So i'm not sure about the conversion rates of whatever currency you're going to be depositing with but that's what it breaks down to in the future
though, it's going to be usdc
Um, but primarily towards like credit cards something very familiar to what web2 gamers are used to
Oh, that's that's good. Um, I I really appreciate the detailed answers with giving to my questions. I
Um, i'm going to be going more on in-depth in for the big time projects
Uh, maybe i'll play a few games or two. Um, i'm sure you guys are very best and I hope that the big time
Gg the big time game project stays bullish moonward. Um, thanks a lot. Noah over to, you know
I have another question from a community member that that is having connection issues
Is it possible for players or digital artists to utilize the creator's kit to produce and offer their own skins and accessories?
For purchase the other players within the game
There will be this kind of api that that uh
That will come out in the future
But really the business model for big time is not going to be for artists and stuff to make their own stuff
We don't have that kind of anywhere in our on our timeline now in the future
It's possible but at least for like the rest of 2023, it's going to be these kind of pre-built cosmetics of varying
Obviously different rarities and kind of different aesthetic appearances, but that's that's not the way we're going right now
So his next question is will players have the ability to import 3d models and structures
From software such as autodesk maya and auto cad into the big time universe
Can you tell us the big go ahead? Go ahead
I was going to say it's not like this person really wants to make stuff for big time
Actually the probably best place I would point them is because if they if they if they're really into like art and development
I would definitely kind of point them towards our jobs listing website
There's kind of never enough like great artists and talented in-game developers that that we can hire
So if they have like a great artistic vision, they think we'll kind of mesh or kind of mesh with with big time
We'd love to kind of see what they're able to do. Um, that would be really cool
Part of it too is I mean there's a variety of things you can we can talk about
For why why we haven't kind of unrolled that as a feature
But one of it is we really want there to be a big time aesthetic
Right. We want there to be this this feel this look this kind of brand to to big time
and if somebody were to like for example come in with like a chainsaw or like a
Like a tank or like a motorcycle a cosmetic it may not be super appropriate for big time, right?
Just doesn't really fit. Well, it can look sweet. Don't get me wrong. I think all that stuff is sweet
Uh, but it just may not fit well at big time
So that's really why at least for right now the focus is more on like how do we release cool looking cosmetics?
Um in spaces but within that kind of general big time lore and look
And his last question, um, sorry, hold on I'm lost my spot here
so his last question is do you guys have plans to implement dedicated servers in each region to mitigate potential issues with latency or lag for
Players so players around the globe can have seamless gameplay experience
Um scattered throughout the world. Um
We but we kind of bifurcate them
Um to limit server capacity right now, right because we're in early access. That's when we
We kind of crank it up, you know, turn it up to 11 and we want everybody to start playing
We'll we'll doubtlessly kind of bring on more servers and more capacity in each one of those
but like making sure latency is is not a problem rubber banding is like not an effect is is
Absolutely crucial to us. It's one of those things. It's like a supply and demand type thing. So if we see that there's
More people playing from a certain region than we will uh, then we're going to increase it there
But right now we're pretty scattered all over the world and we generally don't really have any problems with server capacity
Beautiful well, look it looks like we have a shy audience today
So not a lot of people coming up but matthew had a great time talking to you
I love learning about big time as I mentioned earlier. I've been following you guys for a while
So it was great to get you on stage learn about what you're building and you're bringing together components of two of my favorite
Again video games of all time diablo and world of warcraft
I haven't gotten the chance to play
I'm looking forward to testing and running around in the world and figuring out the different nuts and bolts of the game
And hopefully you guys are going to be one of the web3 games
That are trailblazers and set an example for the rest to come if you have any closing thoughts for our audience
Go ahead and share them now. Otherwise, it's been a pleasure
Wait, wait, really quick. We got uh
We got a streamer gamer that wants to come up to stage. So I want to grab him and then we'll do your closing thoughts
All right. Uh, I think it's dac gaming welcome, sir
Here i'm gonna try to bring you up again
Sorry for the delay twitter spaces
Yeah, it's dac gaming i'm having issues bringing you up man. It's saying um
Saying error i'm not really sure why
Yeah, I don't know what's going on unfortunately it seems like I can't bring him up he might rejoin yeah he's rejoining let me see
Oh clunky spaces man, I think you just got too many people in here man. You got to start firing people. Yeah
Uh, yeah, I don't know what's good
I don't know what's going on man spaces. It needs an entire makeover from top to bottom. There we go
We got dac gaming in the house. What's going on? Can you hear me? Hello?
Yeah, a lot of clear a lot of clear can hear you. Thank you for the opportunity to speak man
I love the game. I'm ready to see what it unfolds under because I play a little mostly on console
with my like four main team
uh with different type of things like diablo heavy and diablo heavy the path of exile stuff like that and this game kind of
Speaks to me and I just wanted to see that the complexities of it because I like to do solo content for to see how well
I can do it and then with team building type stuff. I like to I like to play all different characters combo different
Build sets and everything else, but I don't know. I remember reading something early 2022 came out for xbox series x
But I don't know what you got for ps5. That's all
We we were actually just on pc right now. Yeah
Uh, because I I got a dm message from marcus though. I'm not gonna interrupt you
I got a dm message from marcus and wanted me to meet up with him for like 30 minutes today. I was like, uh
Yeah, like who is this and what is this so i'm like, you know, so
But I I got your invitation to come listen
So I was like i've been listening for last hour and what you come up with is very revolutionary
I'm very interested to be a part of that and
try to see how well I can
Come up with stuff and help the community grow and on the console market on ps5 market, whatever man. I'm here
Beautiful just let me know what you just let me know what I need to do
Well, uh marcus marcus is ten times the person that I am so they're gonna be able to answer your question
All right, he'll be able to answer he came in
I'm sorry to interrupt one more time. You gave me the invite on the calendar
I tried to hit it and get to him but I gave him all my information like my discord stuff
I saw how that process is going to go but I thought I would come in and say thanks for the opportunity to talk
I'm pretty much done with my question
I just don't know when you're going to release uh that like there's vib access you could buy one
But it's not going to work on ps5. It's only gonna work on pc
Correct. Yeah, I don't even have like an articulate answer for
First but the transition to pc and or excuse me to xbox and ps5 at least from my
rudimentary understanding
Is it has to do with detuning than it else?
Um, because pc pretty gamers generally have
Um, but I think we'll probably do it
After the kind of full launch of the game. That's when we'll expand
Awesome these other platforms. Well, i'll be i'll keep an eye out man, and I will talk to markers today
It got him. I think he's got a meeting day with me like five or five thirty. Not too sure but
But uh beautiful. I hope so and then we'll just collaborate more with that because he reached out me
We'll do so collaborates like sure what an opportunity let's go let's do this man i'm ready
Marcus is great. I mean I would be remiss if I also did not shout out like the ambassadors really do a time
Exceptional, especially kind of community leaders. Fortunately, one of them is one of the better ones is actually on here right now. Miss 369
But like that's finding communities. I know you as a streamer probably have one. Yeah
I'm not i'm not because you offer anything but i'm just gonna put this in and let you let you speak some more but
I'm a small guy, dude. I do it on the weekends. I have a 40-hour work week
I do normally because i'm a reliable engineer type person
But i'm a big gamer i've been a gamer since like nintendo. So
You know, i'm just I like i'll play video games for two things
That's entertainment and connecting with people because people have the same passion that you do
All the different genre of games you do and you and you meet really cool people
Really, uh in the community. I like to be a battle-biter, but I like to help people out with stuff and give them ideas
Hey, try this way. Try this concept. See if it works for you, you know stuff like that collaboration, man
And that's what I enjoy about it
Yeah, no, I love the word that you just use their battle buddy. I think that gives me a bit of an insight
That's pro-level word it's a pro-level word
No, that's awesome, uh, hopefully
You know you check out with marcus and we get you involved with it. Oh, man
Thank you again for the opportunity to speak. Thank you so much
We got mrs. 369 on the mic
Okay, um, can you guys hear me
Yeah, hi regionally with charlie, uh, sure
um, i'm usually a person that plays the game a lot of the times and I feel like
I've had the ability to play with a lot of different people
And in regards to your question if you can actually get the game in a console
There is the way that you can get it and this is just information that i've seen other players do it through steam
I think you have to add it as a non-steam
And then figure out the configuration for it, but it's definitely a possibility. I just wanted to say that but that is that okay
Uh, thank you for that information. But is that for xbox series x or is that for the ps5?
How would you do that? Exactly
Uh, it's i'm not sure it's cutting off on that
Can hear me, okay, is it cutting it out i'm sorry hello
I yeah, I have to return that
But I think we might not be able to hear dak
I I don't know. I think there's some connection issues going on here. I'm not sure from who's at it and it is though. Yeah
But it's definitely something that you can do use i i'm not a
Exactly it can be done, but it's a possibility. Yes
All right, I appreciate that. Thank you very much on that information
I just you know, i'm just wanting to see what the aspects were when they get passed when the development team gets done to the
Port that over to ps5 or xbox how what's different so that so we have more
Crossplay going on but i'll look at that myself and see what's going on
I don't know how they're going to import that into ps5 or xbox. That's all
Yeah, you're you're welcome
I mean, I would say add me on discord and I can try to get that person to contact you and let you know how to do
If something that you're interested in oh, I am very interested into it. I'll just dm you give me my stuff. No problem
No problem collaboration right there battle buddy. There you go
This 369 pretty much blows my mind with anytime she sends me like feedback or like offers feedback like that
I'm like, I didn't know that was uh
I didn't know that was like even possible. So always always a fantastic resource
Definitely better than the guild manager with big time. So thank you for that
Yeah, thank you guys all from coming up and
I'll swing it back to you matthew any closing thoughts for the community before you head out today. We really appreciate you coming on
Um and nothing nothing profound just thank you very much for having having me on here
It's been great chatting with you. This has been a pretty awesome conversation for the for your followers and your listeners
I've done a lot of spaces
Um, it can tell from the kind of way that you ask questions and the way that you run this that you you know what you're doing
Um, thank you for your kind of expertise here for being a great host and uh, best of luck
I think you're making some really awesome stuff
Well, the feeling is quite mutual
Matthew and I really appreciate the kind words
So big time community if you all are in here. Thank you for joining whale coin talk community. Thank you for joining
Remember that everything here on the aquarium at whale coin talk is meant for educational purposes only nothing is financial advice
So be safe out there. My name is noah signing out. See you all tomorrow. Take care
Have a good good talk to you