Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. Give us a few minutes before we get started.
Hey, so it looks like we got the project account on Steve. I don't see your
your request at all. So your screen is not the same as my screen. So can you just try reconnect and we can just get started. Thanks.
It looks like we got Steven. Sorry, sorry for everyone for the technical difficulties. Happy to just dive right in. We have a deep dive with Dream's Quest. I'm very excited to have you here, Steve, who is the CEO for those who don't know. Steve, why don't you go ahead and give everyone
high level overview of your background as well as dreams. Thank you. It's great to be here. So yeah, I mean, I've been in crypto since 2016. Spent a lot of years more mostly in financial services and FinTech. So
So D5 was an easy one to transition into. When I got into crypto, moving into gaming was an entirely different idea. But I've had other businesses that I've built and executed and sold in the past. So for me, doing something like this as a founder and entrepreneur,
to Puneur for crypto was obviously quite different. But I saw it as, you know, after many years being in crypto, doing advisory work and running a marketing company in crypto, it just seemed like maybe there was an opportunity to do something that was exciting and fun and completely different and to push our own boundaries of where we could
go and what we could do to tell stories and have some fun. So really was back in 2020 that we started working with other people, assembling a team, discussing cool ideas and concepts for what could work in the game 5 space. Before the word game 5 was even a term, in fact, you know, I just looked at things like
So kiddies back in 2017 said that's funny, but it's kind of useless. I don't at least see the point of it. But then, you know, I guess we were early to realize the whole gaming sector had a potential to really do something. And then it all turned into the game-fi and then play to earn and then just kind of kept going. But in the meantime, we said, let's just get
our project going and they start building. So really we formally kicked off in terms of assembling a bigger team back in, I think it was about February of 2021 and then went through a whole fundraising phase which we completed in October of 2021 listed on Google
coin, listed on some other exchanges since then. But really our big objective and goal was to build a phenomenal company, starting with gaming. But we've pivoted a bit over time. We originally were going to build a, let's say, more of a Web 3 kind of, you know,
2D game that would just be a card game and we thought not the most exciting thing in the world we can probably do a lot better than that so we very quickly hired an incredible team we are now a team of 50 people which is pretty big for blockchain and projects like ours but building a world
web 2 and web 3 game that's really built on mobile phone. It's a fully immersive open world RPG. So if you compare it to games like Skyrim or Horizon or Elden Rings, we're in a similar style
in terms of the walkable environments and the way you can walk through and experience the world. Still in development, but our MVP is fortunately just about finished. And I also mentioned some of the pivoting we've done, so although we started with game, we've since brought on some people who have been in
the world of film television music and they've helped us along the way with a lot of the content and lore and story that we've created, some of which we've put up on fandom. And we've also been working with some incredible composers and vocalists who are award-winning people in their own industry and have
to song for us, which is our first song, which will be published once we have the rights to publish it. I mean, we have the rights to publish it, but we have to get it licensed first. So we're very close to that as well. And then we've been working on some other things in the background, like taking our stories to flip them into other things like film and television. So we're working on a film script as well.
So it's although the game is our main focus these other things can potentially just teach on our whole ecosystem It is something far more incredible, but as people will realize if they look at our social channels We've been keeping content going but it takes a long time to get these things out the door So it's just you know keeping our heads
down in a bear market and just building. So that's kind of a quick overview and backstory there. Yeah. I understood Stephen, thanks for sharing, but can you also perhaps give some insight into the game itself, right? So the lore or how it's played
Yeah, subscribe of course. Yeah, so I'll tell I'll tell two sides of it so one side of it is the the the lore and mythology side so we developed our own story it's a story of you know thousands of years of things that have happened where there are all
whole range of different types of beings that have existed in this world who came to be from nothing to suddenly existing. You could call that a story of creation that's our own version of it. We have a range of beings that exist within this world and they live in a world where they're first kind of discovering who they are and what they're about. And that
That world, of course, we need the reason I'm telling this is because that story needs to have a reason to lead you into having a reason of the game. So we decided to kind of roll back to the very beginnings in Critic Story line that led to a period of time of conflict, a period of what we call discord. It was the first era of conflict that led to
an era of peace that leads to mistrust over that peace accord and that leads to eventually a secondary wave of mistrust and effectively a world that turns into something that's quite remarkably different from where it started and that's where we bring players into
the game. So the world that we've been creating is an open world game on a mobile phone. So the controls are similar to something like a Gengen Impact for navigation. It's a fully 3D environment in the world. But as a player,
You're you're gonna have quests and dialogue with other NPCs There is a variety of ingredients you can pick up that we call organic matter From a mechanics point of view there's two different ways the organic matter can be used it can be used in its raw form to craft various types of
of element that gets infused into crystals. The reason I explain that is because crystals are essential to attaching to your weapons because it's what charges your weapons up and gives them a whole range of powers from life force to improving your endurance or stamina to doing all sorts of magic.
things like creations of shields or slowing down time or allowing you to move between locations. There's a whole range of things you can do. But your organic matter itself can be used in its raw form or it can be used in what we call extract, which is for, let's say, rapid recharge.
So that gives a player kind of the option of learning crafting on the one hand or rapid recharging and having to decide which of those two types of currency being ingredients is more important. We've been building a skills tree for players so that when they're playing the game they actually have reasons to continuously upgrade their player upgrading the weapons.
Leveling up so all the kind of traditional things you'd expect There's a lot of mechanics in there around the weapons the weapons are quite interesting because they're not a single weapon But it's a staff plus attachments like a blade or a holder that holds a crystal so that means that there's a lot of different ways
that the players can interact with these weapons and items and assemble them in a variety of different ways. Naturally, different weapons have different bonuses and malices for gameplay. So ultimately, the player landing in the game has to figure out the world that they're living in now, who they are,
which is why we call the game "Origins" and the Fall of Azoria references the mythology about the world having fallen. And so now as the player enters, it's kind of like, "Who am I? Why am I here? What am I meant to be doing?" And you go through a variety of quests and journeys trying to basically figure out what is it I'm supposed to be
doing, which is not too different from a game like Skyrim or Horizon. Along the way, you're going to meet friends and foes. You can join factions like you with another games. But it's an absolutely stunning, beautiful world. Our team have done, I mean, really an amazing job with the graphic arts and the work.
We'll be having some little video snippets. We're going to be sharing very shortly on YouTube and Twitter just giving people little glimpses into the world we've been creating. And also there's a game mechanics deck that we put together and that's going to be going out very soon as well. We just dropped a game mechanics article that kind of explained
some of the game mechanics and we've also got a new blog site that's going up that's going to have a lot more content to share. So we've spent a lot of time building so we can now start to publish and release a lot of stuff. So yeah, there's a lot going on in terms of our build, but it's super beautiful.
for an exciting and I've been sitting and testing and playing it the last two weeks and even my kids were playing with it and saying, "Oh my God, this is so cool," which is great when an 8 and 10-year-old are happy to play it and asking, "When can they do more?" So we're making great progress, but it's really exciting to have an open world that really works well on a mobile and that's
That's been our big thing is camera, lighting angles, making it so that it's truly a really immersive experience and it's not just something you go in and out of. We want to make it that's both a story as well as lots of fighting sequences for people to enjoy just getting in there and, you know, exploring the world and discovering what there is to discover.
I'd like to know, Steve, if you think you mentioned about just trying to build and keep your heads down over the bear market. What's the vision of the project after building over the, for over a year in the bear market and what's that process like? You mentioned also that you've been in crypto since 2016.
Yeah, so it's really good question I mean the bear market has certainly shown us how important it is to be cost conscious and be resilient and to fight through it and just make sure you're really careful with how you spend it also gave us a lot of reasons to Monitor and watch a lot of game projects sort of disappear
I don't know why, I don't know if they overspend or if they spent too much of it on one thing or another. So we took the position of let's be cautious with spend, but it's also look forward to what world our world building should turn us into. And what it made us realize was creating beautiful immersive world is important.
important, a vision of being able to do things like eSports in the future because we realize people really like to be able to compete. So we need to be able to offer eSports in the future. We want to be able to offer a multiplayer experience in the future. They're all just tech challenges, one by one. We want to
to give people something they can really be proud of in terms of the game itself. But we also took it upon ourselves to realize that there were some technical challenges that why don't we take this bear market as an opportunity to build technical wins for blockchain?
So one of the things we've done was we built this insane bridge that basically allows players to own their game assets, although they're sitting in game, playing the game. They're inventory, the organic matter, their crystals, their weapon components, can be
We stored on chain in their wallets, but it's all being done as a passive and frictionless transaction. So when it's up happening is number one, you own the assets, but you're not sitting there confirming them constantly. But two, they're fully in your custody and control, and three, they're dynamic, so that
As the player plays the game and upgrades weapons and items, we're able to do that in the game, which is a normal process. I think people are comfortable with computer games or mobile games, but we're also upgrading those items on chain seamlessly in the background. So this was one of the reasons why we started to look for technical parts.
partners we could work with on chain because we realized the importance of having really good partners so that we can enable speed of transaction, low cost transactions because there's still costs for all the gas fees. We can't get around that. We just have to find ways to make the experience for players the most seamless and frictionless possible. So to that end, we actually
announced the partnership with Arbitram. I believe that article just came out on CoinTelegraph today. It was either yesterday or today. So that's just, you know, us taking it to the next level in terms of one of several partnerships. We have a few others that will be announced shortly. So we've, we realized that not only is it about being able
to own game assets. It's also about owning game accounts. So what the bear market showed us, which I think has been interesting, is go look at what traditional games are doing and look at where they're making mistakes. They don't let you own your game assets, they don't let you own your account, and from a web three point of view, not everybody wants
to be forced on a single chain so that made us also consider how do we give people a multi-chain experience where they can store their assets wherever they like. So those are the things that we've built. They're working. We've also built our own content management system that allows us to generate game assets like new web
happens, new, organic matter, what have you, and we can generate them directly inside of our own CMS, which then both pushes it to the database, which then populates it to the game, but also pushes it on the chain. That way we can also sell items on our marketplace. So there's been a lot that we've had to do to build all these things. It's not quick and easy.
It's a lot of hard work, but the full synchronization from game to chain works and the main objective or goal we had was we don't want it to drift and become out of sync. There's nothing worse than having an item in your wallet and you can't see it in the game or you see it in the game and you can't sell it because you don't have in your wallet. So we wanted to make sure that that experience was
As clean as possible, the last thing we wanted was to have players saying things are out of sync or they're not reflecting what's in one place and it's reflecting somewhere else. We wanted everything to be really, really tightly connected. But at the end of the day, we want players to have full access
and ownership and custody of every asset they've got and their accounts as well. So we've managed to solve the asset ownership and over time we'll be just expanding on that to add the full account ownership. So if any of you decide as a player I want to sell my account,
and by all means go right ahead because that's really for us shouldn't be a problem. But you know, that's a massive disruption to the gaming industry. So we just had to really focus quite a lot on what's important and what do we need to do so that when the market picks back up, we can come out saying here's what we've got and people can start participating in enjoying these things.
Yeah, I think that's a good segue to the next question which is to highlight the web 3 side and the ownership side of things in your in your game I think you mentioned you know you guys have both the web 2 and web 3 component Yeah, I'll tell us more about that and how all that works well, so the web 2 is
If you play a mobile game, you're just playing a mobile game. There's no connection whatsoever between that and a blockchain. And you're playing a web-to game, whether it's a desktop game, a PlayStation game, a mobile game on Apple,
or iPhone or Samsung or whatever. The thing is, it's just you're playing the game and all the assets and all the things you've got are stored usually in the game. They're usually just backed up on the cloud and on occasion you'll find the games are also backing up to a game database so that there's always an additional way of restoring content.
So we've built all of that. But at the same time, and this is where it was an interesting challenge too, was we had to also build all of the same core infrastructure on chain so that players have the ability to also store their game assets and have all of
the images and the images are dynamically changing the same way they would between a game and a database. We had to find a way to do the same thing on chain. We had to find ways to allow items that are upgraded to be upgradable on chain so that they're dynamic NFT rather than just static
And then we had to bridge the two together so that what you have in one place you have in the other and that's where the frictionless Self-Custody without confirmations really kind of came into play or at least Confirmations in the sense that you know the the confirmation
It might be a single process for everything rather than a constant process. It would be more like something you would do on your wallet one time when you're on the marketplace or in some cases not required at all. So really it was like three different processes all going on at once. Build the game like normal. Build all the Web 3 components.
for players to own all the assets and set everything up the same way and then bridge the two together so it was a bi-directional synchronization. And then for how do we give players who are playing in the game, the ability to play and buy and sell
things with, you know, their fiat like normal. And then those who are looking to buy assets can do the same thing on chain. But again, we have to synchronize both directions so that players have everything. And those who want to be on one chain or another are making sure they have access to the, to their game assets with
which whichever chain they want to be in, of course, depending on which chains we integrate to. So, yeah, so there were a lot of technical hurdles to achieve and also trying to make sure we didn't lose sight of both our web to gamers and our web three community.
Awesome. I guess that also answers my next question, which is how how do you deal with asset ownership from the game or is there anything else you like to add? Yeah, I mean there is something to add. I mean, so let's just take for for example the player who Gifts an item to their friend
So they may have bought something on our marketplace rather than buying it in the game. They, let's say I buy an item, I send it to you because you know I'm a nice guy so I'll send it to you as a gift because you've let me be on this wonderful Twitter space today so of course I want to give you a thank you. So I'll send you this super cool weapon. So when you receive the weapon the weapon is sitting there in#
or your inventory, your Metamask as an item, but you haven't got the item in the game. So the way that we handle that particular process is through a mechanism of locking. So when you lock the asset, you're locking it on chain, which is preventing you from selling it, but
That is what sends a message to our database that says, "Hey, for this particular player with this particular account or wallet address, we know that they've got some new assets that have just been locked, so then it immediately adds them to the game so they show up in your inventory." So that locking process was actually quite a fun
fundamental component just mentioned because that's the the way that we have this sort of dual custody between the player having access to the game asset on an on chain and in game at the same time but the player has the ability to unlock the assets in order to sell them gift them or trade them with friends.
Got it and I'd like to give the audience some time to ask some questions out of the space But before we move on to that are there any other cool cool mechanics of the game you'd like to share and how can the community find out more about James quest So we're we've got a mechanics
article that's up on Medium. We just had a tweet that went out a couple days ago. So if you look on our Dream's Quest NFT channel, you will see that scroll down just not far down and you'll find a new article that's come out about our mechanics.
So it's all laid out and explains everything in a reasonable amount of detail. We have a game's mechanic, pitch deck, which is really like a cinematic experience of animations and graphics that shows some of the on-chain, off-shake chain stuff I've been describing. It shows a little bit about the storyline.
It shows a little bit about the skills tree, the crafting, the weapons, the assembly of the weapons. So there's quite a lot there. And then as I mentioned, the best way to kind of keep up on the kind of more game lore content specifically is on our fandom pages, which is fast.
So we've got our content up there. We're about to release some new content within the next few days, which has expanded on some of the information about the game mechanics and about combat systems and about the game mechanics and about the game mechanics and about the game mechanics and about the game mechanics and about the game mechanics and about the game mechanics and about the game mechanics and about the game mechanics and about the game mechanics and about the game mechanics and about the game mechanics and about#
the crafting and about the usage of essence versus organic matter in its natural form and about the crystals and how crystals are used. So there's a lot of different mechanics that we've been designing and building to make the game truly a really, you know, proper immersive AAA style game. We've really made every effort
to create a whole range of mechanics and animations and what have you. We have our own team that have done a lot of animation sequences. So you'll see more and more of that coming out too. But certainly check out these articles and we'll have that game mechanics presentation out very shortly. I think probably later this week or early next week.
Awesome. Okay, so now let's move on to the audience section. I think we have our first audience member up here. Tolga, please go ahead and ask your question. Thank you, mate, and thanks for the event. Actually, the latest medium article that you mentioned, the real
awesome. I advise people to read out my question. You mentioned about something very different for the gamers looking process. It's very interesting how will you make gamers adapted to this process so easily actually. I wonder. Well, if they're playing in the game itself and
the mobile, they won't have to worry about it at all. So what happens is that as all of the assets are being pushed to chain, they're pushed as locked assets. So for you as a player, you don't have to think about it. It's only at the stage where you go to our marketplace and the marketplace will display all of the inventory items
you have on chain and it will display items that are locked or the items that are unlocked. So naturally if you're going to unlock an item it's because you want to sell it. So we'll make it clear on the marketplace. So the UI UX there is really going to be what drives the user behavior and we'll have little you know remind
Remember if you want this asset in the game you'll have to lock it so we'll have little bits of fun and cute dialogues to remind people what they need to do. So I don't really foresee there being too many challenges or problems with that because the locking mechanism is really only there to remember.
move game assets from the game in order to sell them on the marketplace or to buy new assets in order to lock them in the game. If you ask me, probably the most challenging one will be to remind people, "Hey, don't forget to lock your assets if you want them in the game." But I think once you realize it once, it'll probably become fairly evident to people who remember.
Awesome. Okay, so next up we have DC go ahead. Hello, can you join me? Yes, nice to meet you. Thank you.
Thank you, nice to meet you too. So I just wanted to tell you about the inspiration behind the request. Sorry, what was your question?
I just wanted to do the inspiration behind the increased inspiration. Wow, that's a great question. I think that, you know, that's, it's really not just me, it's also my co-founder, Pauli, who's our creative director.
A lot of it has been inspired by, for both of us, we've both had on occasion some really weird experiences in our lives. Things just happen sometimes, they're coincidences. Sometimes there's sightings of things we've seen in the sky and say, "What is that? Can't explain it." Sometimes it's just
Who incidental weird things have happened in life and a lot of it's also just from travel going places seeing things experiencing many many cultures in many places and when you combine all these things you say you know sometimes all these stories we read about Roman Empire or or the Greek Empire or about
You know other historical tribes or whatever's are all interesting, but maybe we need something different and I think somehow when when Pauli and I and are and Leslie who's also one of our founders co-founders when we all got together and just started rifting ideas we all just started coming up with wild and crazy and different
ideas that just felt like this is a story that could be told. And you know, you first start off by kind of coming up with a couple of core characters and who are they and what's their backstory and what's happened to them. And then to be honest, once we had kind of these core ideas, we brought some writers onto the team.
We have two phenomenal writers who are from Hollywood, one of them was the screenwriter for Scream. So, the other guy worked on Journey to the end of the Earth. And they're both incredible writers with huge ideas. So, at that stage, it kind of
from ideas to just content development. And then it was always a question of whether an idea made sense or worked or whether it was too grounded on things we already know on earth or are there other ways to tell a story that's not following the same old same old. So I won't say it's been easy, it's been challenging. We challenged ourselves to create and
new content and new stories that have just never been told before. And that's not easy when we're influenced by so much content that surrounds us every day from TV and movie and books and many, you know, histories that are already here for us to take up. So we had to try to find ways to just create something entirely new and
magical and different. I think we've done that, but it'll be up to you guys to judge and tell us if it feels like it's really truly unique and different or not, but I think we've done it. I think it's really, it's been a journey. I can tell you, it's been very hard. And we're not done, but we do have over a thousand pages of written content now.
Got it and last but not least lights go ahead Okay, thank you. So I have a question about your NFT marketplace. Can you tell us when your NFT marketplace won't launch and can the NFT holders so case there are entities in your marketplace
and how do you promote energy creators and artists to use your marketplace and do you also support in optimizing? That was a lot of questions. I might have to have you repeat them all. Okay, so first of all, the marketplace itself will obviously will become more
relevant as soon as we're closer to our vertical slice. The MVP, as I said, is just about finished. It's working. I'm playing it on an Android. We do weekly refreshes after we get bugs. We're layering in the tutorials and the dialogues and some of the
environment now. So we have the walkable environment, but of course you add more trees and grass and stuff to make the place absolutely stunning. So that's all being done over the next three weeks so that we have a completed MVP. We want to get to the point where I would say by September
which is what we have planned right now. We have what's called a vertical slice, which is what is the game industry term. The vertical slice is where you basically have all of the key components that makes the game what you want it to be in there. So for example, you have different types of game mechanics, you have environments, you have story and mythology. There's other
There's a list of things and you write down that list and say these are all the things that need to be in. So that list being ticked will be a vertical slice complete. At which point we'll be able to put it up onto Apple Store and to Google Play for people to start playing. And then from there we'll start adding new extensions of the game. But at the same time,
around that period. So I'm going to guess August, September timeframe. Roughly around then is what I would expect the marketplace also to start coming online. Some, you know, exciting assets that'll be available for gameplay, limited edition items that people will want to gain access to. We'll also start selling concept art.
and potentially snippets of music and other things that are not part of the game that are more like collectible items so we'll split between the two. So that's our marketplace plans and generally how we're going to do that. Tell me your other questions because I know you had a lot of things you want to ask. Yeah, no.
It was basically just around the NFT marketplace as well as if there's sort of other features in the NFT marketplace. But Steve, unfortunately we've run out of time. I'd like to continue the floor for your final thoughts.
if you have anything to share with the audience before we wrap up or any upcoming campaign or announcement you'd like to make? To be honest, what I'd like to say is my gratitude for all of you who have come here today. Naturally, we've been working really
hard. It's been a tough bear market no doubt and I appreciate all of you who have stood by us and continue just to trust in us. It's not easy to keep people's trust when you're trying to build something and it's a bear market and token prices are down but we're going full steam ahead.
We have a lot of new things coming out as I say the arbitrage announcement is now out. We have some other announcements coming over the next couple of weeks. A lot of new content that's coming out. Sneak peaks of games, new video, marketing videos coming out. And yeah, really I don't have much
more. I can add to that. I mean, everything else will come as it's ready in terms of film and music. Those are the two things we're working on, which are obviously fairly epic and huge things, but those announcements will come and trust me, they're worth waiting for, because when we make those announcements, they hopefully will be pretty exciting. They certainly are for us.
Awesome and Steve, I'd like to thank you again for the time. It was extremely insightful and looking forward to have you back in the near future. Thank you. As always, this is for entertainment and information.
and not investment and vice. And Steve, again, really appreciate it. And thanks for coming in. - It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. And please do give us a follow on Dream's Quest. - We'll do. Bye. - Thank you.