Devs Log #1 | Behind the creation of the Kryptomon Mobile App

Hi everyone — Brian aka Hack1ge here! For those of you who don’t know I’m the Chief Product Officer and SVP of Game Development here at Kryptomon.

I’ve been involved in the project for well over a year whether it was as an investor or helping the team out on early game balancing / breeding. My love of gaming started when I was 5 years old playing Mario and Zelda on my NES console and evolved into a long-standing relationship with MMOs. I’ve had the opportunity to help consult on a number of them over the years specifically related to PVP design, balancing, and eSports.

With the Open Beta release of our Android client, which launched exactly 7 days ago — we thought it would be a good time to run through what this journey has been like for us coming from a purely web-based game to the mobile platform.

Why mobile? Isn’t the web/PC enough?

The evolution of gaming has come a long way from the early days when I used to play WoW on my PC as part of the alpha testers group. The PCs back then were less powerful than the phones we carry around in our pockets or the tablets we sit on the couch with. This is clearly reflected in the fact that roughly 60% of all gamers play on mobile devices now. Our goal at Kryptomon is to bring our game to the masses and so it was a no-brainer for us to target mobile platforms. In addition, many of the game features we have such as Tamagotchi really are designed around the need for consistent access to the game. As many of our Trainer’s club members will attest, the mobile game helps a lot with training and caring for your Kryptomon.

What challenges have you faced while making an NFT-based mobile game?

The Gamefi / blockchain gaming industry as a whole is very much in its infancy right now — I’ve been doing development for over 20+ years and have seen the rise and fall of my technologies. We are very early in this adoption of blockchain technologies and so the most difficult part is that many tools/code libraries do not have the maturity level that you would typically expect when building gaming infrastructure. In addition, as many of you know, there is still a fair amount of pushback from mainstream technology companies who are trying to maintain their market share and stop disruptive blockchain technology from advancing in the gaming industry.

Any update on iOS?

As a long-term iOS user, I definitely felt the disappointment of realizing that one of the companies I felt was always pushing the envelope and a leader in innovation was so adamantly trying to stifle the advancement of blockchain technology. Unfortunately, this will be a very common issue during the transition from Web2 to Web3 — the old Web2 companies will try to keep control and maintain their positions in the market.

We have been actively treating our iOS game client like a supported production release for almost 2 months now. Every feature that goes into our web and Android games is also supported immediately on iOS. We have had a small group of about roughly 15 alpha testers who have been using it to ensure the game works and is stable.

!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!

I am happy to announce — we have recently received tentative approval to run our Closed Beta for the Trainer’s club so stay tuned for more details soon. I am cautiously optimistic but given our history so far with Apple we will have to see how this progresses as there are additional steps required to move us beyond that release and Apple has shut down other blockchain-based games in the past after previously approving them.

What does the future hold for Kryptomon in the mobile space?

As many of you know, we have pretty high ambitions at Kryptomon in terms of where we want to take this game. First up for us is to finish building out our game modes which will include Challenge-a-Friend, Story Challenge, Battle League, and Tournaments. These will all be designed with mobile first in mind. We hope to have all players moved over to a mobile game client as soon as possible as the web version of Unity games can be very buggy and are limited in terms of what we can do with online networked play.

Longer term, as I told Umberto, I was only going to join Kryptomon if given the freedom to bring something to the gaming industry / blockchain gaming that the world has never seen before. Unfortunately, our CMO has me under strict orders when it comes to 3D metaverse spoilers but I hope soon to showcase what the team has been working on, and for those of you that know my background you likely have a good idea on what may be coming. I promise it won’t disappoint...

Feedback?

As always, the team at Kryptomon is very committed to our community and always willing to listen to feedback from our players. You should know you can always reach out to me or any of the mods — either on Telegram or Discord with questions, comments, or concerns.

Click here to download the Kryptomon Mobile App (Google Play Store).