Snail Trail AMA #1 — Project Overview with MOREJPEGS (Marketing & Comms) & Firestorm…
Snail Trail AMA #1 — Project Overview with MOREJPEGS (Marketing & Comms) & Firestorm (Advisor)(Recap)
In this AMA, we will be joined by MetaDerby founder, MetaMike. We’ll be covering the project at a high level. The focus of this AMA will be the business development, vision, road map, and post-IDO plans.
Dave| Avalaunch
Welcome everyone once more to Avalaunch AMA for Snail Trail and today we have an honored guest who has been here before — the irreverent @FireStorlvl and from Snail Trail, we have @moreJPEGS here to make some additional magic.
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
Good thanks for having us!
Dave| Avalaunch
thanks for being here. Let’s get right into it — Please introduce yourself, who you are, what your role is and how your previous experience enabled you to be where you are today?
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
Hey everyone, I’m MoreJPEGs and I am leading Marketing for Snail Trail!
I’ve been in the Avalanche ecosystem since August last year minting Avax Apes, using Trader Joe early on, and exploring the space ever since. However, my background is rooted in the Financial Services Industry.
I was a Digital Strategist at a marketing firm who raised capital for wealth and asset managers. I had a burning passion for DeFi and NFTs so I decided to stop mining fiat and become a full-time Avalanche enjoyer.
That’s how I found this amazing project and joined the team!
FireStorm| SnailTrail
Hey all! I’m FireStorm, one of the advisors to Snail Trail.
I sure hope y’all aren’t tired of hearing from me by now!
Anyways… I used to be an electronic trading guy on Wall street in another life, but I’ve been in crypto since roughly 2016. I joined the Avalanche Discord relatively early, worked with the community and devs to the best that I can since before the mainnet and I became one of the MVPs which to this day, is my proudest achievement!
I’ve been in the ecosystem for a while, invested into and worked with various projects. Most recently I’m serving as an advisor to Snail Trail and Dexalot while heading FireStorm Capital. It’s been an amazing ride so far with Snail Trail, and I’m looking forward to further climbing the rankings for games across crypto with the team!
Dave| Avalaunch
Well stated and appreciated. Worthy contributors to this ever growing ecosystem — So…What is Snail Trail and how does it fit in the current ecosystem? What problems does it solve?
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
Snail Trail is a fun, play-and-earn racing game coming to Avalanche.
Players can race against each other and strategically breed snails in order to build their racing squad. The GameFi sector on Avalanche has been blossoming into an exciting ecosystem and we’re happy to support it with our own innovative addition.
There are a lot of blockchain games that can either be just “click games” or way too complicated for users. The most important question to ask when building a blockchain game is how can you make it so players can skip all the complications of crypto while simultaneously having a great gaming experience? With Snail Trail we focused on 2 things: Making the game fun, and making it sustainable. How do you make it fun? Have extremely simple UI/UX and have an element of strategy to the game. Easy to play, but hard to master.
How do you make it sustainable? Designing with a lot, and I mean a lot, of mathematics and forward thinking. Also, having dynamic game mechanics that balance the game in real-time as players are playing, while also taking a data-driven approach post-launch to monitor and improve the game. Similar to how Ava Labs uses a data-driven approach to perpetually improve the Avalanche Network.
We want Snail Trail to be fun, but we also don’t want the fun to stop.
Dave| Avalaunch
Rock on and thanks for the bespoke answer. Next up — How was the Snail Trail idea born? How did its competitive theme come to be?
FireStorm| SnailTrail
The founders of Snail Trail are engineers who were legacy gamers.
They began exploring their passion for crypto a few years ago and eventually came across Zed Run.
For those who aren’t familiar, Zed Run is a horse racing game on Ethereum where you buy a horse NFT and join races with it.
The whitepaper was a bit confusing and a lot of it was unknown to the player when you raced. This basically made it very hard to target instead of knowing what you can do to improve your performance. They were inspired by this Zed Run experience to build a better game.
They knew their background paired with their connections in the space gave them the ability to build a team to achieve this goal. The idea of racing snails instead of another animal gave a fun, ironic theme to the game.
It’s quite funny to think about racing snails, commonly known for being slow, in fast sprints down a racetrack to the finish line.
Dave| Avalaunch
Appreciate you. The clarity and focus of your Git is as good as it gets. Perspicacious even.? What would you say are the main features that make Snail Trail unique? Can you expand on these briefly?
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
Of course! We feel the features that make Snail Trail unique are live races, breeding, and the gene marketplace.
An underrated part of the game is being able to watch your speedy snails race in real-time. This is where the fun and excitement really shines.
Cheering on your snail as it wins you rewards easily wraps you up in a wave of emotions gamers are used to with any typical video game they love to play. We can all agree that seeing your strategy pay off (literally) is a great feeling!
Every snail has a set of traits, their Family, Class, Generation, and Adaptation. Each of these traits contribute to a snail’s racing performance in their own way. Players can then target superior traits in the offspring of two snails. We’ve simplified this process by allowing players to simulate their breeding, giving them a display of all possible offspring probabilities.
What’s also unique is that snails are hermaphrodites so you get to choose your snail’s gender every breeding cycle (30 days). A female snail can lay one egg per cycle, but a male snail can donate his genes and sell them on the gene marketplace up to 3 times per cycle. This creates an interesting dual-market for both snail racers and genes that players desire for breeding. Of course breeding snails requires an incubation fee.
What I love about the incubation fee is that it is dynamic. It contains a protocol coefficient in the formula that aims to weather the snail population and daily growth rate.
If a lot of people are breeding and the snail population is growing too fast, then the protocol coefficient increases. In turn, this increases the incubation fee to reduce breeding incentive. After balance is restored, the protocol coefficient slowly decreases.
In essence, the game optimizes NFT inflation by itself; it’s really cool stuff.
Dave| Avalaunch
and that’s a mouthful. Appreciate this thoughtful response. What does the structure of the tournament program look like? Are there any partnerships that will fuel the adoption of this?
FireStorm| SnailTrail
This is something we have in our future plans. Currently, we have two different race types. Daily missions where entry is free and everyone gets some amount of SLIME depending on which rank they finish the race.
And there are Competitive Races, where you pay an entry fee and can win up to 5 times the entry fee depending on how you finish the race. In these types of games the top three finishers share the reward pool which is the collection of entry fees.
Tournaments feature is on the roadmap and is a series of races where snails compete against each other to win the big prize. This prize can be SLIME tokens however it can also be any token, if any project wants to partner and sponsor the event.
Not only tournaments but also race rewards are available for such partnership opportunities, any partner/sponsor can offer their tokens as race rewards. This is similar to airdrops but instead as a project/sponsor you can do it in a fun way.
Dave| Avalaunch
You guys means business here today. If this was any better, I couldn’t stand it. the pacing is nonpareil.
Can you explain how the ranking and the rewards system works?
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
We really believe the ranking system is a critical part of the game.
It just makes sense for snails to compete against other snails who perform similarly. Snails speed is determined by various factors such as traits, user decisions and randomness. As a result there are fast & slow snails relative to each other. However this does not mean a slower snail cannot win against a faster one, that would not be a smart game design.
On average a faster snail is expected to win more against a slower snail rather than the other way around. Over time snails who perform similarly will end up racing against similar snails. The fastest snail should not be racing against the slowest, right?
That is why each snail is given an ELO Ranking score. On average, a snail with a higher ranking will perform better than a lower ranking snail. After every race, the ranking is adjusted when the expected outcome is compared to the actual outcome. This ELO ranking determines which league a snail races in, thus keeping the trails in order.
As for the rewards system, races are split into two types: Daily Missions and Competitive Races.
The Daily Missions are free to enter and the prize pool is dynamic with respect to the daily emissions schedule of the token. All racers are rewarded according to their race placement, 1st place receiving the highest percentage of the pool. Since all racers are rewarded, the number of times per day you are allowed to join a Daily Mission race are limited.
Now there is no limit to the number of Competitive Races you can join, however they do require an entry fee and only the top three racers are rewarded from the prize pool. Entry fees will vary from race to race and the currency used is our native token. This is where things start to heat up with some high stakes competition.
Dave| Avalaunch
Someone call the ?man. How is the token economy designed to drive adoption while maintaining token value?
FireStorm| SnailTrail
With great care and looooots of thought, partner and advisor meetings 🙂 Anyways…
The economy was designed with multiple things in mind. First and foremost, we do recognize the play and earn paradigm shift and we wanted to leverage this movement as a way to get our name out there, as a tool to acquire more players.
The typical question we also get regarding the economy, applies to most games honestly, is the question of sustainability. We (us and our advisors, partners, investors) put in a lot of thought and effort into the economy, emissions and the design.
We have a single token model instead of the typical two token model. We believe this allows the value of people spending time on our platform and playing the game to be accrued in a single place without having to come up with sophisticated value linkage models.
Additionally, it eliminates any possible confusion for new players. On the emissions side, we’ve designed our schedule such that roughly half of the community rewards will be scheduled and emitted throughout the next two years.
The other half is reserved (at the back of a piece of advice from an unnamed and extremely intelligent partner) for rewarding the most loyal players with surprise events, bonuses, etc. Besides the design and emissions, the team will also be constantly monitoring specific key performance indicators for the adoption, economy and sustainability and we do have a few tools that we can use to further balance everything out as the game grows.
Dave| Avalaunch
What is the inherited use case for the native ERC-20 token that drives the economy of Snail Trail?
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
Everything done in The Snail Trail Game uses our native SLIME token.
One of the obvious use cases for the native ERC-20 token is Competitive Race fees. In essence, the more tokens you have the more you can race, granted you can manage some top three placements. As we mentioned earlier this is a key component to the token economy.
It is also inevitable that racers will begin performing better and better at a consistent level which may cause those that are not improving to be left in the dust. While others race to earn high shares of the prize pool, it may not be appetizing for you to continuously receive 5% each time. One way to improve your performance is to test out multiple trails with your snail and evaluate its racing stats. Only then you’ll know which trails will provide the best results. This strategy requires more racing.
Another strategy to improve your performance is to breed superior snails. Target those traits that will boost your next snail’s speed so you can start climbing the ranks. The incubation fee will require you to spend your native tokens, bringing up another use case for it.
Finally, in the near-future game updates there will be more evolutionary options for players like the Laboratory, the Microwave, new game modes and an in-game shop that will offer various cosmetic items such as visuals, emotes, trails, sprays, scrolls, banners and so on.
And that’s everything not including it’s amazing name:)
Dave| Avalaunch
Nicely stated and again, I applaud the level of clarity you all have been able to communicate. There are some interesting releases to look forward to in the next quarter right after launch. How does the long-term vision for the project look like?
FireStorm| SnailTrail
Well our main core value is making Snail Trail as fun as we possibly can. Expect us to continue adding cool features to the game like the Laboratory, the Microwave, and a 3D isometric view for races. We’re going to keep building and growing the gameplay to create a well oiled, or slimed, machine of various snail possibilities.
We will introduce new modes that snail owners can compete in and use new strategies to win like battleground or death-match. We’ve got some awesome ideas for our Twitch channel @SnailTrailGame where we will be streaming races live 24/7. Tons of really fun things to do with that. Of course we have some surprises to keep everyone on their toes.
Overall the plan is to be perpetually improving the Snail Trail experience for our community in creative ways. We genuinely feel as though we’ve built a vigorous foundation and can’t wait to build out the ecosystem.
Dave| Avalaunch
Your typing skills continue to astound me. Fastest keyboard on the seaboard. What are you most excited about when thinking about Snail Trail? Are there any milestones you’re looking forward to?
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
We’re really most excited about releasing the game and watching the community grow.
We have such an awesome community, it’s incredibly fulfilling to see how excited everyone gets for contests and challenges. We can’t wait for what’s in store for the game. Being able to bring such a large group of Snail Trail fans together for some really cool events is going to be a blast.
Our first tournament will be a really cool milestone for us. Another thing that will be really cool is to see how many new people we can onboard into the Avalanche ecosystem. It’s crazy to see how some people or projects can onboard a community as easily as build one with natives and we’re hoping to achieve that as well.
Priority number one is getting this awesome game live so we can share it with you all. After countless hours of collective effort, it’s truly thrilling to see it come to fruition.
We’re ready to start racing!
Dave| Avalaunch
Well boom goes the dynamite. Now we move on to the twitter portion of the program where CT, the twitterati, the twittiscenti weigh in and ask the tough questions. This leg of the journey is both challenging and rewarding…first up….
Captain my…@captain_price9 — Could you tell us about the MARKETING strategy that @SnailTrailGame team followed to promote your product?
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
Great question! A lot of people have been vocal about noticing how we may have a different marketing strategy relative to other NFT/crypto projects in the space. The team has always felt strongly about sticking to organic growth.
We believe this is the healthiest and strongest type of growth to build our game awareness and its community of players. It has done well so far as we can see from our recently sold out Genesis Mint and trading volume.
We are very proud of the extremely engaging Slime Gang community that we have built so far and are looking forward to growing the snail family!
Exxon Eskimo aka @Exkimoooo — Snails are extremely cute and i have no doubt that this game will fo far and beyond. My question is do you have a plan to deploy on subnet in the future because i can see that NFT market of the project will be very active.
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
The game was built with the plan to launch on mainnet from the beginning. After development the team will be in constant data driven moderation mode to optimize the gaming experience so maybe in the future it may move to a subnet. We currently have a hybrid model and we believe it should be ok to start on C-Chain.
Subnets take a lot of time and building to produce and curate so the focus right now is to launch the Snail Trail Game with the best experience on mainnet. If and when our growth requires a blockchain on its own, then we’ll move to the subnet.
This should give us plenty of data points to observe as well since other large projects such as Crabada and Dexalot are moving to their own subnet.
@eryn_bae — How do you plan to improve the interaction with new users and with users outside the crypto space?
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
Thanks for your question! Our focus will be growing our user base with the goal of making players, new and old, feel as if they are a part of the community and not just racing alone.
We plan to use multiple social platforms to organize events and spark engagement and collaboration between players. This can also include Snail Trail promotional content that we plan to target multiple audiences with. We want to create a high energy and exciting environment for all players!
@MCBBB8 — Do you have a testnet or Beta Version of SnailTrailGame that can be used as a practice tools for new users?
FireStorm| SnailTrail
Good question! There is no practice version or the game or any plans to implement one. Having a practice version would conflict with our token economy and our intent of players racing in multiple Competitive Races in order to figure out how to optimize their racing strategy for the best results. As for new users, Daily Missions are free to enter and only require a snail to race. Also we will be live streaming the races in real-time on our Twitch channel 24/7 so new users can pick up some additional game strategy there too!
@smailpeoplenft — On which platforms will we be able to sell our snail NFTs? Do you have your own Marketplace?
FireStorm| SnailTrail
Yes we do! The native Snail Trail Marketplace is on our website. It has direct access to each of the snail’s details page where you can easily see its family, class, genes, generation and more!
This will include racing stats when the game is launched. We’ve recently updated the native marketplace with more filtering, sorting, and previous sales info of each snail. We plan to continue adding more features and bettering the user experience going forward.
Telegram
@JerichoJonesy Can Avalaunch make sure to ask about the decision to make Slime a single token with the Snailtrail team when the ‘technical deep dive’ happens?
FireStorm| SnailTrail
First and foremost, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank our key partner AVALAUNCH here. We’ve spent an enormous amount of time working out the plan around the token design. We’ve gone with a single token because of a few reasons (which we touched upon earlier in the AMA as well) but here they are:
- We believe, if we can power the game, the economy and ultimately the fun with a single token, we’ll be able to encapsulate the value better for our players. In an ideal world, we wanted to create a design that allowed the follow of time spent and activity undertaken directly to the token itself
– Usually two token models have one inflationary and one non-inflationary token. Valuation for the inflationary token is usually very difficult, and the technical folks among us will know this, creating value linkage models across two tokens that do different things in an ecosystem is very hard.
– Having two tokens creates confusion for users, i.e. if I’m a brand new user, my only goal is to race snails. Having to learn functions of two separate tokens may effectively be a barrier to game play.
– Listing the single token is much easier than listing 2 tokens 🙂 As most of you hopefully know, SLIME is intending to come to the market in the fairest way possible, and we’ll launch with Dexalot Discovery.
– Most of our partners also worked on this part with us, and this model was universally liked and supported.
But with that said, our founders could definitely add more to this when the technical AMA happens!
Can you tell us about your team members? are they qualified and professional in their fields? what are the recruiting qualifications for team members for your extraordinary project?
FireStorm| SnailTrail
The team is in my opinion extremely qualified and I’d love to explain why. First and foremost, hopefully most of you have read the whitepaper and if not, you absolutely should because understanding the whitepaper is going to be an edge in this game.
Both of our founders are engineers. One of our founders has spent a considerable amount of time building security solutions, focusing on cryptographically secure applications for a very large government research and development firm.
Our other founder has developed many cutting edge web2 applications as a part of large companies, and also has been a game developer for a little while.
Maybe more importantly than this, I know these guys from GAMING. They are legitimate and hardcore gamers.
I’m sure all of you have played at some point in your lives. Have u ever heard the term “CASUAL GAMER” ?
these two guys aren’t that, they were super gamers, focusing on all aspects of the mechanics, design, and game play and I’ve had the privilege of playing with them before.
So my connection to them goes deep and it’s personal.
And it’s not just the founders, a considerable number of people on the team have played the same games with me and our foundrs 🙂
I also want to talk about our chief designer.
This is a gentleman who actually is a real, legitimate artist, who ran his own art exhibitions in the past, who also served as a designer for many large scale projects. I personally love the cool, minimal and unique designs of our snails and it’s 100% his creation and vision.
Our music is produced by again one of our game friends from the past, who is now part of our team.
Our front end is being developed by another gentleman again from our gaming crew 🙂
I think I’ll end this question with, if you played games well with people, that friendship stays around forever 🙂
How can users stay updated with this project? Are there channels, including local communities where users can get the latest updates?
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
Absolutely there are! Our main socials for updates are our Twitter and Discord.
The official Snailt Trail Twitter is here: https://twitter.com/SnailTrailGame
This is where we ran some awesome community contests, promote all exciting upcoming events or game releases, and love to hear back from the Slime Gang as well.
Definitely keep an eye out there for previews and alpha coming soon!
In our Discord, we like to keep the community updated with similar events, but this is where you can ask questions and get quick repsonses from our amazing mod team, some super snails in the community, and even the core team!
You can join the rest of the snails in our Discord here: https://discord.gg/JZTs325xKr
Tons of alpha in there being discussed when it comes to game strategy.
We also have some really cool Discord bots that like sales tracker, snaildex (snail genes and visual rarity from snails you choose), and even a benner bot that creates a peronalized Twitter banner using your snails! All you need to do is enter your wallet address.
Can you give an overview of your Tokenomics, and the UTILITY of Token?
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
Definitely. So a quick review of our token utility is
-Competitive Races
-Incubator
-Laboratory
-Microwave
-Micro-transactions (Cosmetics)
-and more!
SLIME is used throughout all the game mechanics
I also want to touch on some alpha that was particularly discussed by our Discord community after some snails had went deep into the white paper.
Many are curious of where the Incubator (breeding) fees go and if they are burned.
Since the SLIME token’s total supply is 300000000, the incubator fees are kept untouched in the contract and circled back into the game rewards when emissions are completed through Daily Missions and future game modes.
Many projects have problems with UI / UX and this one turns off new users. How do you plan to improve the interaction with new users and with users outside the crypto space?
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
As Firestorm mentioned earlier, we have an amazing group of hardcore gamers paired with a very talented artist and chief designer.
This makes UI/UX one of the top priorities for our game.
With the player in mind, the game design is built for simplicity. We want our players to have a complex blockchain game, but it feels like a reguler fun video game.
Many many formulas and probabilities, however we make it easy. Let me explain. Our breeding mechanic is very comlpex, but the player will be given the probabilities of possible offspring with the Breeding Simulation.
No need to draw up your own family and genes mapping when you can select two snails and it hands you the potential outcomes on a silver platter!
Another example of this is your snails racing stats. We have someone mention on the Discord how they planned to be very busy recording their snail’s races so they can be the best at optimizing strategy.
Well this is all handed to you on a silver platter as well!
Put away the spreadsheets because all you’ll need to do is check the snail’s details page and you can view a history of all it’s racing stats.
These are just a couple of the ways we like to make sure our players can focus on having fun and strategizing without doing any tedious side tasks. We want to provide the best racing experience!
Dave| Avalaunch
@FireStorlvl and @moreJPEGS it has been a pleasure having you here today. The community very much appreciates the time and presence of you both as a two-headed monster extraordinaire representing Snail Trail. We’ll dig in a little deeper on the tech side of things in AMA #2 and I look forward to hosting the next one.
More JPEGS| SnailTrail
Thanks again for having us! Excited to the future ?
FireStorm| SnailTrail
It’s been an absolute pleasure being here! I really hope I get to work with you guys again, we are rooting for the continued success of Avalaunch and we’ll see you all on the trails!
About Avalaunch
Avalaunch is a launchpad powered by the Avalanche platform, allowing new and innovative projects to seamlessly prepare for launch with an emphasis on fair and broad distribution. With its values deeply rooted in the early Avalanche community, we are able to offer projects confident, informed users who are aligned with the long-term goals of the rapidly expanding application ecosystem.
Leveraging Avalanche’s scalable, high-throughput, and low-latency platform, Avalaunch is built by users, for teams, to help grow strong communities.
Website | Twitter | Telegram| YouTube
Snail Trail AMA #1 — Project Overview with MOREJPEGS (Marketing & Comms) & Firestorm… was originally published in Avalaunch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
