Hello everyone!

We have received the final backer data from Kickstarter and are sending out a first backer-survey later today/tomorrow! All you will need to tell us is your Discord username for claiming access to backer-only channels and to answer an additional question related to your game account (if existing already). The sooner everyone can respond to those the better so keep an eye on your email inbox!

At the moment we are working hard with our partner BackerKit to finalise setting up the pre-order/addon-store which we expect to go live early next year - once our shipping/distributing partner is ready. Then you can add/edit your shipping address and do further customization as required.

Founder Token Distribution

The Founder Token is a special reward that is given to the top 100 contributors to the campaign and we can share some stats on that.

The average top 100 pledges to be eligible is 863 EUR - the median is 350 EUR - the lowest pledge eligible based on time of backing was  60 EUR - you can see the full breakdown of anonymous pledges and stats here.

Digital Rewards (NFT) distribution

In regards to the digital rewards - and especially the NFTs - we are currently deploying our smart contracts to Flow and verifying them on testnet and will have finished this process this week. For those looking to trade those items with another player, our partnerVIV3 is transitioning to mainnet already and will be supported on day 1 - they are currently scheduled for next week and we hope to be ready by then too.

If you are into this technical stuff then feel free to take a look at our Github: https://github.com/bsidegames/chainmonsters-smart-contracts

Progress on Development, team and everything else

As promised in our campaign we will keep you all on track regarding development progress, updates and everything else going on and there will be two major sources for that.

1. Kickstarter + Company Blog

Once a month there will be a huge blog post coming out on Kickstarter itself plus a copy on our Company website (https://bsidegames.com) which summarises the current month, important events and all progress made towards the game.

2. Discord

Starting with the upcoming Closed Alpha launch (early 2021) this will be your weekly and daily source of updates and news through various channels. We want to integrate you into the development processes as much as possible so you not only get access to the "stable" builds but also you will be able to opt-in to our more experimental testing branches anytime - those might not be as stable and online 24/7 but you will literally be kept up to date with our daily internal builds(!).

Chat with some members of the team about upcoming features, submit ideas and report bugs on the fly.

Discord is going to be your main source of communication.

Join us HERE if you haven't already!

Game System Upgrades

As you may know, the demo during Kickstarter was running on a pretty outdated version of the game since we had to finalize it many months in advance prior.

One of the biggest changes to our systems we are doing at the moment is upgrading to a much faster and distributed multiplayer server thanks to Max, our server engineer (not "me", Max Weber) and our new partnership with Unity and their Enterprise-grade Multiplay technology.

In terms of visual fidelity we are doing internal testing with a new Day/night and lighting engine that *should* improve the visual quality of our levels dramatically - this kind of system is always difficule to pull off but our current workflows are looking promising!

We are also transitioning our player characters, NPCs and Chainmons into 3D models that can be customized any way you like. Using a custom shader they fit right into the beautiful pixel-art world so we keep the art style the way we promised - BUT - we gain access to advanced solutions for e.g. customization, battle animations and an easier workflow for e.g. cutscenes, dialogues etc.

Closed Alpha launch, schedule and Flow integration

We are currently working hard on wrapping up Pre-Production on the game to transition into Full Production and thus Closed Alpha in January/February of 2021.

That means right now we are onboarding new team members, optimizing workflows, adjusting the visuals and game elements based on feedback and updating our core systems. This process has been going on for about 6 months already and the more time we spend on here the easier it is in the future to push out a continuous stream of game updates, content and exciting new features.

That being said, we are currently on track to launch the first Closed Alpha build on Steam, iOS and Android in our promised timeframe but we will let you know ASAP in case something is going to delay this or if we have to re-schedule a specific game element.

Dev Stream

Our first official development stream will be next week (exact day/time TBD) hosted by Max on his Twitch where you can take an early look into how the new day/night system is supposed to look like and diving into some advanced blockchain concepts to be explored in the next few months!