Recap of AMA #2 of YAY Games with Avalaunch
On the 25th of August, 2021 @ 11:00 a.m. (PST),we conducted our 2nd of 2 AMAs with the YAY Games team, hosted in the Avalaunch Telegram. Our guest was YAY Games CEO, Nikolay Epifanov.
Below we present to you a transcript from that AMA with the full questions and answers.
AMA Transcript
Mark| Avalaunch
Let’s get started everyone. Welcome @YAY_Nick! Nick is the CEO of YAY Games, and will be helping us cover some of the technical components of the project. How are you today, Nick?
Nick| YAY Games
I’m great, Mark, how are you, man?
Mark| Avalaunch
Wonderful, it’s really great to have you here. The previous AMA with Guilherme was excellent, and I know the community is excited to hear more about what you guys are building at YAY.
For starters, it would be great to hear about your career in game development, your past experiences with crypto and your role at YAY Games.
Nick| YAY Games
I have become a part of gamedev since working with Nvidia in 2005, around sixteen years ago. At that time, I was developing SLI profiles for the driver of video cards for games that weren’t yet released. After Nvidia I started IT management and consulting, working there for 6 years in the telecommunication industry and state companies.
In 2014 I co-founded a company Creagames which currently is in the Top 3 Publishing Companies in Russia and CIS. Since 2018, I have been actively looking for promising crypto projects and investing in them in the early stages. At the same time I studied for EMBA at HULT London Business School.
I have been interested in crypto for a long time and have been integrating DeFi projects into my portfolio for years. As soon as I familiarized myself with YAY, I was able to see that it has immense potential. When I met the founders of YAY Games, I immediately realized that this was the ideal place for me. I spent around 20 seconds considering their offer and was excited to start as soon as possible.
Mark| Avalaunch
Nice. That’s a really deep breadth of experience. The industry is lucky to have you!
You are currently the CEO of YAY Games and the COO at CreaGames. Could you tell us a little about CreaGames and how these two companies might benefit each other?
Nick| YAY Games
As a major publisher, Creagames has developed a large pool of partners in the game development industry, which I plan on actively using to achieve the goals at YAY Games.
In our YAY Games roadmap you can find the Publishing section in the Q4 2021 and, although, I’m already working on turning the marketplace into a full-fledged publishing company for the development of innovative decentralized gaming. In 2018 I found a sufficiently qualified and effective operational manager who could replace my candidacy in Creagames, therefore I felt it is time to pass my responsibilities onto him.
Mark| Avalaunch
There’s a lot happening behind the scenes at YAY Games and your team is working on a few different innovations in the blockchain gaming space. What are some of the technical achievements and goals of the project that you are particularly excited about?
Nick| YAY Games
DAO Mechanics:
The community will be able to vote on the change of different classes characteristics, items, and other objects in a completely transparent and decentralized manner.
Let me give you an example
Side chain technology:
Provides the ability to start playing without advanced knowledge of the crypto industry, allowing gamers to build up their knowledge at their own rhythm.
The ability to transfer assets to mainnet and vice versa.
The ability to earn income without an initial investment or without increasing the cost of in-game assets.
The ability to play and use game mechanics without having to create a wallet.
Mark| Avalaunch
The concept of “game mining” might be new to some of your users. How does it differ from our traditional understanding of mining in cryptocurrency and how does it benefit both the players and the YAY network?
Nick| YAY Games
Within games, we are introducing a pioneer achievement system for our users. Achievements system would be the ground for Loyalty Program which would be ground for Game Mining Rewards based on YAY Airdrops. There will be different achievement cards in the player profile section, each one with its own name and image, that will reward users with $YAY tokens after the achievements have been completed.
A progress bar will show users the different stages of completing an achievement (1 out of 5 steps for example), and users can redeem their rewards once it’s finished. Many achievements can be achieved on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This is basically a play-to-earn mechanic,which YAY network benefits from.
For example, there are pay 2 play mechanics in BP, such as Gold PVP + to transfer progress from sidechain to mainnet. Consumables + Cosmetic, changing the visual aspects of your character or spells, and others e.g.
Mark| Avalaunch
Full decentralization is something that is important philosophically to the project. In your opinion, why does decentralization in gaming matter? In what ways might these concepts drive the entire gaming industry, even outside of blockchain, forward?
Nick| YAY Games
Undoubtedly, the most important thing that the player gets is the unrepeatable emotions in the process of playing. But with almost 100% probability, all achievements and extracted resources remained under the control of the companies and servers on which this game was based itself.
And the whole economy was built only on in-game mechanics. The exchange of resources for real assets is punished heavily by the gaming giants. Full decentralization allows players to get a control over their resources in a game, therefore building a new economic future.
And the whole economy was built only on in-game mechanics. The exchange of resources for real assets is punished by the gaming giants. Full decentralization allows players to get a control over their resources in a game, therefore building a new economical future.
Mark| Avalaunch
How does blockchain game development differ from traditional game development? What are the unique challenges and opportunities for game developers looking to break into blockchain gaming?
Nick| YAY Games
The hardest thing probably is not the tech development itself, but to give the users a clear understanding of the advantages of this approach and what they can get by playing games based on blockchain. Furthermore, we would like to attract gamers who are unaware what blockchain is. In this regard, we have developed the Bold Point, where with the help of gamification, we will be able to convey all the benefits of this approach.
Regarding tech development, the most challenging part is projecting such systems, as everyone knows once something is written in the blockchain it is uneditable. It implies to transactions as well as to smart-contracts where the game is based on. Of course, we can use patterns in which we will give the user an access to a new contract from the interface, but the issue of migrating past achievements remains open.
The second technical difficulty is the speed at which blockchains work and microtransactions. If we work with dynamic games where there is a lot of action happening during a short period of time, then we can stumble upon the problem of freezes and the high cost of the game session itself. We hope that the solutions that Avalanche proposes will allow us to bypass these limitations.
Mark| Avalaunch
Gaming and blockchain have always managed to be synonymous, but real innovation and broad adoption have been hard to come by. What is it going to take for crypto gaming to break into the mainstream and how is YAY pushing ahead in this area?
Nick| YAY Games
Our engineers are currently undertaking research towards the popularization of games. In our opinion, one of the solutions is the libraries development for the most popular frameworks in the gaming industry, which will allow you to quickly create games on the blockchain, as well as implement the blockchain into existing games.
Thereby, we strive to popularize GameFi and bring it to the public.
Mark| Avalaunch
How do you see NFTs changing gaming? What is their role in the YAY Games ecosystem?
Nick| YAY Games
NFT brings a new layer of value to games and allows you to monetize your work. In the future, we are planning to make an exchanger where players will be able to exchange their valuables for equivalent items in other decentralized games.
Mark| Avalaunch
Combining DeFi and gaming is a foundational concept of the project. How is the project leveraging elements of DeFi to make better games?
Nick| YAY Games
Players safety, and the unscrupulousness, and fairness of the financial system are at the core of our priorities. Decentralized gaming creates an economy that can transcend common game mechanics, which allows us to implement the full-fledged DeFi.
For example:
Many players would like to reach supremacy, but this requires the appropriate equipment. It may get unaffordable at a certain point, it would be great, for example, to take NFT on credit, wouldn’t it?
Mark| Avalaunch
Let’s talk about Avalanche for a bit and why the team was drawn to the platform. As a game and crypto developer, what technical advantages does it offer to the project?
Nick| YAY Games
Taking advantage of the speed, high security, and low transaction costs of Avalanche, we can ensure our decentralized gaming marketplace provides the best service possible. Users will be able to trade tokens and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) seamlessly and cost-efficiently.
By building on Avalanche, we can make our platform more interconnected and cohesive. It will allow our games to create several different blockchains and subnets, helping divide certain parts of their in-game economies within a larger ecosystem.
Mark| Avalaunch
In your experience so far, what has your experience been like building on Avalanche. How does it compare to other L1s?
Nick| YAY Games
I admit that Avalaunch is definitely a friendly system for developers — from fast development to comfortable cost, and they give an opportunity to use Solidity. Unlike other systems, Avalaunch provides the most complete and understandable documentation.
Mark| Avalaunch
Yay Games is a multichain project, launching on both Avalanche and BSC. What are the advantages of being on both chains? Do you plan on expanding into other L1s in the future?
Nick| YAY Games
The benefits are obvious. Blockchain networks are still an area with a high threshold of entry for ordinary people, and we assume that there will be a barrier between two networks in which users are comfortable. In order to unite everyone on our marketplace, we made the right decision — to build a bridge to Avalanche and, further, to other networks.
Mark| Avalaunch
What technical challenges have presented themselves so far and how have you solved them? What issues might you be watching out for in the future?
Nick| YAY Games
The main technical challenge for us was to create a sandbox environment for players who are incomprehensible to blockchain and to transferring their achieved results to the main blockchains.
We solved this problem by creating a sidechain. According to our plan, we will release a VR version of the Bold Point game and one of the difficulties would be the transfer of digitized content in the form of NFT to virtual reality.
Mark| Avalaunch
What can you tell us about the upcoming game, Bold Point? It would be interesting to hear about its development and what makes it unique.
Nick| YAY Games
Bold Point is an NFT-based role-playing card game that offers a fun and competitive experience. The game is designed to build your character and level it up through battle, either against other players (PvP) or against the computer AI (PvE). It is also possible to wage bets when playing against other players (Gold PvP) and earn even more rewards for each win.
Beyond its level, each character has unique skills and characteristics that improve with each victory, thus becoming stronger in the battle arena. Both characters and loot represent unique tokens that can be bought, sold, traded in the NFT marketplace, or be equipped to strengthen in-game features further.
Aiming to break down adoption barriers, Bold Point is designed to bring blockchain gaming to a large mainstream audience.
Gamers are not required to have any knowledge of crypto to play. When signing up to Bold Point, the game makes an essential distinction between crypto users and non-users. For players unfamiliar with blockchain technology, simply choose the option “I am new to crypto,” and the game will carefully guide you through the necessary steps.
Realizing that a large portion of the population is still largely illiterate regarding cryptocurrencies, the Bold Point has also set up an innovative and fun blockchain education system. The digitized crypto knowledge base will help those who want to familiarize themselves with this disruptive technology, thus increasing adoption through education.
Finally, and perhaps the most vital point, is the groundbreaking game model behind Bold Point. Play-to-earn games typically require an initial investment to be able to participate. However, Bold Point is both free-to-play and play-to-earn, meaning gamers will be able to start earning from the very start without the need to put up any capital upfront.
We build a healthy and inspired community with high social interaction. We commit to positively impact the social environment by donating towards developing renewable energy sources for sustainable mining.
Mark| Avalaunch
In 2021, crypto gaming is accelerating fast and the industry is moving into more ambitious efforts like MMORPGs and virtual reality. How does YAY Games fit into the current innovations happening in blockchain gaming?
Nick| YAY Games
Innovations I already mentioned: Sidechain technology, DAO in-game balance changing using $YAY as governance token. I can also count Publishing for decentralized games as an innovation. For the Bold Point game we have plans to support AR and VR technologies for trying all character equipment on the player him or herself.
Mark| Avalaunch
In terms of farming, what can we expect after launch? How does the farm, its emissions and the token fit into the architecture of the YAY ecosystem?
Nick| YAY Games
In the beginning, farming will operate in two networks. In our opinion Yield farming is one of the best ways to popularize tokens among users and players within our ecosystem. As tokens are used in many game mechanics, so the opportunity to get a token for farming, besides the direct purchase and game mining mechanics, creates quite obvious and significant additional value.
Mark| Avalaunch
How do you plan on bridging the token between Avalanche and BSC? Will you be building your own bridge, or utilizing an existing solution?
Nick| YAY Games
Yes, we will build our own bridge that schematically based on existed open source ethereum and binance smart chain bi directional bridge solution:
Mark| Avalaunch
Tell us about the YAY Marketplace. We’d be interested to hear about its design and implementation.
Nick| YAY Games
YAY Games Marketplace allows you to place any blockchain based game on our platform. The mobile version of the marketplace for Android devices is also under development.
With each upcoming month, the marketplace audience is aggressively growing, and in Q4 we will switch to publishing mode, in which we will offer our rapidly growing audience games from young and ambitious third-party developing teams.
Also, we are ready to help them with gamedev and crypto expertise brought in by CreaGames and Indacoin.
Mark| Avalaunch
YAY Games is being built for not just gamers, but traders as well. Could you tell us more about how YAY appeals to both types of users?
Nick| YAY Games
Except creating in-game economies, we go beyond — we create an economy that goes beyond the game space. Technically, you may not even play the game, but purchase some things a user likes as a liquid asset.
Mark| Avalaunch
Love that. OK, last question from us and then we will move into the Twitter questions!
Tell us about the YAY Gaming Tournaments. I know there are game mining mechanics involved in these tournaments, and am interested in how these work from both a gameplay and technical perspective.
Nick| YAY Games
We are planning to hold 2 types of tournaments — the first will be conducted on any simple games — from prediction games to any casual like flappy bird (that game will appear on our market place right before IDO and will support simple play-to-earn mechanic).
Mechanics of tournaments for simple games — hourly sessions are created, within which the player with the highest score or the best result gets an airdrop + goes further in the tournament grid. In other words, it is a battle royale where the winner or Top 3 players advance to the next round.
And I won’t reveal the second type — it will be presented in Bold Point exclusively and covered in one of the nearest updates in our medium 😉
Mark| Avalaunch
Honestly, there is so much happening with YAY Games I feel like we could cover this for another hour. But we must move on!
Nick| YAY Games
You’re absolutely right, Mark )
Twitter Questions
Let’s get to the Twitter winners!
- @devil_queen43 asks:
I was trying to find information about your roadmap but couldn’t. Could you tell us your short term plans?
Nick| YAY Games
Short-term expectations is to push $YAY into new casual games which would be presented on the platform + release of single asset staking feature.
For mid-term we plan to focus our main business strategy on decentralized games publishing — to become the first and leading publishing company within the GameFi niche.
Also we plan to release MVP for Bold Point and NFT Marketplace this fall. We also plan listing on CEXes, right after achieving good volumes on DEXes, for now we are negotiating that with the number of Tier 1 CEXes.
Let me drop $YAY roadmap here
2. @OnlyGam18270560 asks:
Currently the world is experiencing a global crisis due to COVID-19 and the markets have reacted. Will this impact your project? What are your plans to navigate an uncertain world?
Nick| YAY Games
Well there are a few factors: most of our team members, especially key employees, were already vaccinated, so we’re well protected. Our company structure and corp culture are pretty agile, so this is not a big deal for us during 2021.
We are trying to give full support to employees and their families which become affected by the Covid. If we talk about Creagames we already managed this as well. In terms of business performance indicators — the number of players and overall income increased during the pandemic time.
3. @TraThoa asks:
Has the smart contract been audited? Is there any safety mechanism to prevent over-minting (to prevent any foul play/hacks)?
Nick| YAY Games
Smart-contracts are currently undergoing audits in several audit companies, the most well-known one is Inspex.
To prevent overminting, we use owners multisig, which won’t allow attackers who even got some private key to commit fraudulent actions.
4. @hauhau1166 asks:
Whenever a company is in the early phase of a startup, there are many challenges to overcome. What are YOUR largest challenges and how are you working through them?
Nick| YAY Games
Actually, to overcome these kinds of obstacles — is one of my main expertise. I owned a consulting company named Digital Expert for a few years. Our main goal was to build clients’ processes in accordance with their company’s growth level.
Such challenges are well-known, for example we must keep the rational balance between cost of implemented processes (estimated in time, money and, indirectly, quality of the products) and estimated value from certain process implementation.
Community Questions
- Tumana Jahan asks:
Tell us a little bit about security? Have you done an audit of the platform? Are the smart contracts error-free? What are the test results?
Nick| YAY Games
Yes we’ve done an audit for token, vesting and bridge smartcontracts. We received few comments from Inspex and already implemented them into the contracts.
2. SamJennifer asks:
Do you have any Coin Burn / BuyBack systems or any token burn plans to increase the value of token & attract Investors to invest?
Nick| YAY Games
Yes we have burn function from both $YAY and $BPT, this function would be used for supporting in-game mechanics only.
3. Des asks:
How Yay Games concept to increasing the values of $YAY token?
Nick| YAY Games
The main concept of token utilization and creating buying pressure is to present it as much as possible in in-game mining mechanics in every game on the platform. So the main token idea is basically to represent in-game currency.
4. Moonlight asks:
What are the advantages we get when holding $YAY tokens? Why do we need $YAY tokens in the #YAY Protocol ecosystem?
Nick| YAY Games
The main advantage except receiving airdrops — is getting various in-game benefits and advantages. We already developed more then 15 in-game mechanics for Bold Point that be affected by holding $YAY or $BPT
5. Ben Affleck asks:
Do you have plan to include staking in your ecosystem? If yes, When will be the staking program be launch?
Nick| YAY Games
We plan to launch single asset staking feature in September after the DEXes listing
Mark| Avalaunch
That’s a wrap!
We really appreciate your time here today and are VERY much looking forward to the IDO and using the platform. Thanks!
Nick| YAY Games
Thanks Mark, and thanks everyone for your time, interest to YAY Games platform and our future products! See you!
