Immutable: Guild of Guardians: Altar of Sacrifice
Designed: 2024
Product: Guild of Guardians - Altar of Sacrifice Customer Audience:
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The moment of unboxing should feel transcendental, and validate the player's decision to engage with the game's reward systems.
Guild of Guardians is a tactical game in which players strategically assemble a team of Guardians with different skills, to complete various challenges and compete for a high score. The Guardians themselves are web3 assets (NFTs) can be purchased from the studio, earned in gameplay, or traded with other players on secondary markets.
GoG needed a way for players to recycle assets they no longer wanted, in order to maintain the gameplay and game economy loops. The initial concept for The Altar of Sacrifice was to allow players to ‘salvage’ lower-value assets in specific combinations (‘recipes’), and be rewarded with an interesting, higher-value asset. However, a separate problem loomed nearby— as we grew closer to our first sale, we didn’t have a working solution for the gacha (lootbox opening) experience for the tickets we were planning to sell in the Store. I saw an opportunity to repurpose the ‘asset in > asset out’ functionality of the Altar, and suggested it as a borrowable option. |
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My role saw me overseeing the Product and Design management of the project, which was part of a larger end-to-end with the Store purchase experience.
This initially involved identifying MVP functionality to could cover our bases in time for the first sale. From there, the role evolved to include iteration on mechanics that excite players and drive sales, tuning functionality to enable experiments, and building out strategically based on outcomes. Our partners in this endeavour were Gear Games, who provided excellent support as our offshore development resource. |
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Gacha systems typically offer a small probability chance at a featured prize. This can feel risky and unrewarding, and cause players to hesitate (“Why keep playing if I never get what I want?”). Their lack of confidence was clear in the data from our first sale.
To counter this uncertainty, our next goal was to build features that were flexible for our economy designers, but also transparent, trustworthy and rewarding for players. The first slice came in the form of a Streakbreaker— after a maximum number of draws (eg 30), the player was guaranteed to get their desired prize (if it had not already dropped)— if this was successful at driving engagement, we would choose where to iterate further. |
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The Streakbreaker was a big hit with players. So, we proceeded with more features that cushioned any feeling of risk and randomness. ‘Sweetener’ rewards gifted players unexpected in-game resource with every draw. New ‘recipes’ allowed players to use the Altar to turn low-value assets into high-value assets, so no outcome felt like a loss.
The original function of the Altar (recipe crafting) and its new added function (gacha ticket redemption) were both equally integral to the game. So I had the team branch the UI into separate flows, which could be separately tuned and optimised for their own purposes. |
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