By the end of April, Echoes of Cryptalia will transition every product and Game Mode from our domains into play.cryptalia.quest. This will be a crucial step, when we will finally present our live product as a GAME on its own merits. MIGHTY PHALANX: THE AGE OF PLAY COMES RUMBLING. As the Team marches in BUIDL mode to that goal & others yet to announce, looking forward is as important as looking back. Echoes of Cryptalia is a young and incredibly fast-growing project. We launched the first product, our Gamified Loyalty Program (which we’ll rebrand), on December 14, not even 4 months ago. A team of just 4 members to now 8, took the dream of a scalable game BUILT IN PUBLIC with interconnected game modes and brought it to existence, hungry to become their own FATESHAPERS. During the next weeks, we will market aggressively and expect a lot of new faces to show up. So, in this article, I’ll write a brief summary of our journey for the newcomers &, most of all, I will show you were we are at & what can every gamer expect from the future.
Clarity note: ‘Aesthetic’ refers to everything that can be captured with our senses: color, sound, even the subjective play experience. In art, we’re interested in how that sensorial information transforms into feelings of every kind: marvel, wonder, fear, joy and FUN.
First mock-up concept for Agonitas, Fertile Death. September 2024.
One of the renovations that we constantly label as key is the upgrade of our aesthetic aspects: art, music, sound & storytelling will all play a central role in the new stage of the project. Aesthetic changes are never to be looked down, not in any commercial product, not even in political campaigns. It would be a crime to disregard them in GAMES, which are, above all, a form of Art. I don’t say this to be romantic, on the contrary, I say it precisely because I am realistic. For web3 games to succeed, not only in crypto but beyond into web2 gaming, we have to build products to match the expectations of both audiences. Since it’s fundamental that early web3 believers in Echoes of Cryptalia receive their fair earning mechanisms, it’s also our duty to design those mechanisms to be projectable & even amplifiable in a future where a strong influx of web2 gamers come our way. That’s the motivation behind Gamified Staking and its ability to align incentives between investors, players all kind & even the Team, towards an intrinsically sustainable long-term ecosystem.
We will, of course, delve even deeper into our earning designs — it’s necessary and we’re proud of them. Yet, today, we’re talking about the aesthetic of our project, which includes basically everything from graphic assets, to sound & even playability itself, since all of that takes part in the gaming experience and are, consequently, core to the feeling of having FUN. It’s key that, regardless of personal motivation — be them mostly to earn or mostly to have fun –, everyone understand this: for a web3 game to succeed in the mainstream (for any game, to be honest) it has to be AT LEAST as fun as a good web2 game. If that requirement is not fulfilled, the game is doomed. Most importantly, it’s only after that threshold is crossed that the earning mechanisms will be seriously taken into account by web2 gamers in their spending decision-making processes.
Agonitas, Fertile Death. First Iteration by Pablo Gómez. September 2024.
So, the question that follows is: What makes a game good? Well, that’s a tough one for sure, but not without answers. First and foremost, fun arises from enjoyable playability. The game itself, considered “only” from a logical standpoint, with its mechanics and game objects, has to be appealing & with some degree of novelty or innovation. Nevertheless, it’s clear that no one would play a TCG where cards are just text over white squares, no matter the quality of its game design. Even the simplest, most abstract games, such as Tetris, leverage on the effect of attractive colors and excellent music — I’m sure most of you can sing the classic tune of this masterpiece. The thing is, games ask something really big from players: immersion. They need players to feel like they have entered a new world and become someone else, someone that’s part of it. Here is where aesthetics kick in, providing a sort of “solid ground” for the player to stand on and flow with the universe they’re being presented, new & unfamiliar.
Good game design is crucial, the cornerstone of a game, but it’s not enough on its own. A good game usually has good everything: a fitting story (from ‘rescue the princess’, to plots full of surprises), distinctive eyeball-kicking visuals & unmistakable music, among many others. Yes, all of these have a strong impact on the perceived “quality” of a game. But crucially, they play a definitive role in gameplay itself, providing clarity on interactions with the environment and with other game objects, such as enemies and items. When the team was composed by only 4 members, I was forced to be “acting Art Director”, knowing that eventually the task would surpass my abilities: sooner than later we would need a specialist.
Fernanda’s recolor & composition instructions. March 2025.
When Fernanda arrived to put everything into “aesthetic order”, one of the first things she told me was that a complete color reform was urgent. The main target: the combat backgrounds that the community knows and loves, as do I. Evidently, we hire specialists to listen to them, and the reasons were more than good: the excessive ‘colorfulness’ of the backgrounds competed with the most important visual elements: Heroes and Dice. To provide visual clarity to players, we literally had to make them greyer. As a fool, I was somewhat afraid of imaginary consequences (how will everyone react!). Nevertheless, the new colors looked nice and the effects on clarity for fighters were evident.
WIP iteration 2, recolored & added element by Alberto. March 2025.
Fernanda was adamant: position and color corrections were needed. March 2025.
So, Alberto plunged head-on into the task, adding his personal touch, but the asymmetry was essential to make Agonitas feel like a strange place to be in: to enhance the effect of the Cryptalia and their consequences. She also asked for changes in color for the crops & the stone lute and by then I had ZERO doubts, just by seeing the first, still incomplete, results of the process. Now, I’ll show you the final rework of this beauty, with a Hero performing a Chant in it, so you can REALLY see the impact of the change in game object clarity:
Agonitas, Fertile Death reworked for the launch of Echoes of Cryptalia: FATESHAPERS. Yaelie chants Apoteosis Magmate. Pablo & Alberto. April 2025.
Echoes of Cryptalia: FATESHAPERS comes with high standard artistic improvements that not only make it look EVEN BETTER than before, but that also impact the clarity of gameplay itself. Every single asset is being upgraded and recolored accordingly and, as promised, a new User Interface is on the works. Using another beloved background, Hilare, the Stone Witness, I’ll present to you the concept instructions by Fernanda, using only placeholders — Alberto is working on their composition as we speak, to enhance the player experience of every Master Tactician. In our opinion, this new layout (together with some game design decisions) will have a DEEP IMPACT on clarity, feedback, visuals & general AWESOMENESS of our beloved game. (This image is very big, so I’d recommend for you to click on it to see it full size.)
New Combat UI layout instructional concept by Fernanda. Every object depicted (dice, bars, menus, etc.) are placeholders as the final Pixel Art is on the works. April, 2025.
The incredible upgrade process that you see here, by the Art Team, is equally strong in every game development process we’re tackling with play.cryptalia.quest on sight — game design, original music, coding, storytelling. FATESHAPERS is not only the name of the new game module we’re about to launch, not just a good sounding word to market. It’s a sentiment from the entire Echoes of Cryptalia Team, that time and time again decides to build their Fate with their own hands.
It’s also an invitation for every gamer to join and RISE to the Phalanx of Echoes and immerse themselves in our world, an ever-growing game experience Built in Public by a passionate & battle proven team. This article is but the first of many surprises and improvements of the project in every aspect.
Stay vigilant for more in the coming days — although tomorrow might be tricky for me, as I’ll be in the studio directing the recording of YET ANOTHER AWESOME THING. Hehehe.
