Currently vibe coding a self-care app where you look after your own pet seal by curing your own brainrot.
Do daily tasks (go for a walk, avoid TikTok today) → Catch fish → Level up & decorate your home
The app is fully web2 atm but debating some stepn-like mechanics.
Has been a while since I've given an update so here's a breakdown of where Sappy is at right now and what we're focusing on going into this year.
Pre-amble:
With altcoins & NFTs the market is definitely not the same as it was before. I think this is obvious to everyone but I've noticed there are still japanese soldiers that are convinced old tricks and mechanics work. They don't. Liquidity is thin; people want to bid assets that feel like "real companies" not vacuous memecoins.
There's still room for memecoins, social currencies, and "utility tokens" (I would say without these functions, tokens are hard to justify versus equities). I'm not part of the camp that thinks there will never be hyperspeculation in crypto again, because there will be; we all love ponzis and PvPing each other onchain. Just not with solved games -- people need something new and fresh.
So the overarching plan is to continue building for users, sustainable revenues that aren't tied to directly to crypto, and doubling down on the areas that we've already found PMF / Brand Market Fit. Then leaning into crypto during cyclical periods where liquidity is sloshing around at an accelerated rate.
Where we've found early PMF / what we're leaning into:
Roblox: we're going to continue to go hard and accelerate here. It's our main objective to ship more seal/brainrot focused games across most genres to cast as wide of a net as we can for the brand, and to also iterate and see what works and stays sticky.
Our initial incursion into Roblox was very successful peaking at 2M+ MAU and still sustaining a large portion of that player base... for all of its success, that was a relatively amateur first attempt; we've been setting up better AI pipelines for Roblox development that makes it reasonable to ship many more games and 10x those player counts in totality.
It's my belief that Roblox is the sandbox whose audience will be the most valuable on the internet once they are grown up. That intense feeling you get when you see a TikTok referencing an old game you enjoyed on the PS2 or the Gamecube, or when you see a Pokemon card is the exact same feeling the youth of today will get when reminiscing on the things they enjoyed engaging with when they were younger. Fortnite and Roblox are functional equivalents to the old school consoles and exactly where that is taking place.
Which is why as much as I care about scaling revenues through Roblox, the long term brand equity gained purely through being popular on the platform is totally invaluable. It also can heavily convert to merchandise sales today if all touchpoints for the brand are dialed in (which is why brands get overcharged so much by Roblox dev shops for the same ROI that only cost us a few thousand $).
We have the playbook, it's just about iterating new concepts and then aggressively scaling.
Brand Expansion & Merchandising: I've started to create a content pipeline that is easily repeatable, cost efficient (costs next to nothing through either AI or smart reusable concepts), while still being very tasteful and meeting our quality standards for the brand.
We are mostly focusing here on reaching people where they're at through nostalgic/emotional content, or just being visually stimulating through carefully curated aesthetics. Content that isn't superficial and touches people in a memorable way. I've attached some examples to the post so you can see what I mean rather than just read it.
I don't think it's long until larger brands start doing this at scale, but it's always good to be ahead of the curve and most importantly winning on taste -- knowing what will resonate with people and what won't has always been our edge.
The purpose for these accounts is not only to rack up attention but also to begin converting those into sales of both of physicals (plushies & gacha collectibles) and digital avenues like our games, and any other apps we produce. Because they're offshoot accounts it's also a lot easier to be aggressive/experimental with said conversion strategies.
Sappy Studio: I'm wrapping everything like Omnia, https://t.co/VgcGsK4cb0 and everything else into this category because they're all tangentially related.
Beginning with Omnia, our current focus is gearing up for Season 0 which involves players competing in the ranked ladder for a prize pool that has rewards through Monad Momentum as well as a player-funded prize pool. This season will be fairly simple with us mostly logging retention, deck building habits, as well as qualitatively observing how aggressively players push the combat system. Deeper monetization wont exist yet outside of the player buy-in (to be eligible for P2E rewards).
Beyond that our overarching principle this year is to focus heavily on risk-to-earn mechanics where a portion of that excess value is circular i.e. revenues flow back to prize pools or other parts of the economy, treating the game almost like a protocol where the objective is to amass TVL or player liquidity. Social is also a big focus, and that means implementing the Open World hub which from an infrastructure perspective has already been built out and tested by all of you previously. Right now we are scaffolding the environment in 3D and working through how that hub should look and feel, so players are excited to hang out & idle together while they're queuing.
For sappydotlol, what I'm about to say is still early days from a design perspective so a lot can change, but I'm pushing the site in the direction of being a virtual game console. An intersection between Nintendo & Myspace where users can play, trade, and socially interact in a way that's deeply personalised; a breathe of fresh air from the hostility of the current internet.
If you go back to my thesis on Roblox above and the game console references, you can kind of see how this will all sequentially tie together. In essence, the strategy is to acquire a critical mass of players through traditional platforms like Roblox, and use that attention and trust to provide an onboarding funnel for web2 users into our own sandbox filled with a mixture of our own browser-based experiences as well as an aggregation of others. The aim is to make the platform a breath of fresh air & bunker from the enshittified platforms like TikTok/IG/X where users are actually served in ways that delight rather than agitate, and where self-expression is incentivised.
Closing:
As always everything here is subject to change but I've never felt more conviction in our direction until now; I know exactly what we need to do and how, with everything aligning with our team's strengths.
Very excited and grinding through things to the point where I'm getting headaches and can't sleep from being hyperfocused for long periods of time lol. There probably has never been a better time to join the ecosystem from a price to fuck around and find out perspective.
Players can collect pets and battle others in @ExploreOmnia.
An immersive world filled with adventures, risk, and a chance to climb the ranks in the grand arena.
Available to play now: https://t.co/gAJIrtpE5R
OMNIA OPEN PLAYTEST 🎮
In preparation for our Season 0 launch, we're running an open playtest beginning Thursday with both 1v1 and 2v2 game modes.
Link: https://t.co/cmR1Q7UyeI (No download required)
You can now purchase a Sappy plushie.
This is quite possibly the greatest Christmas gift you can purchase for a loved one in HISTORY.
Available while stocks last.
have tons of respect for founders who have been grinding it out throughout cycles and have dedicated so much of their life's work to the mission
@wabdoteth is a great example of someone who is relentless and has that dawg in him
bullish on Sappy. arf arf
In the midst of the market nuking all of our bags, we completed our first playtest, demoing Omnia & the new sappy[.]lol platform to some of our largest asset holders, and we have also integrated directly with Monad Testnet and are now live.
The provisional routine will be every Sunday in the playtesting Discord, and will be incrementally rolled out to different asset holders across the Sappy eco. The next playtest group will be the same cohort so we can see how player's respond to the major fixes we made.
For now people will not be able to post content publicly but in the following weeks that will be opened up alongside me, diakou, ephi, arbs, et al, livestreaming parts of the session. We are effectively trying to iron out all of the kinks with regards to performance, crashes, visual bugs alongside some UX enhancements.
General Feedback/Notes:
- Players enjoyed the core PvP loop
- Build didn’t have move reactions in but had plenty of matches that were clutched out through glitch commands and similar mechanics
- One or two OP moves like Titan Punch, mostly expected since that build was watered down
- Sappydotlol first impressions were overall good and the platform worked as intended - Most people didn’t realise the UX of being automatically logged directly into the omnia app if you were already logged into sappy (good)
- Compatibility / general crashes were annoying but were eventually easily avoided as they were identified mid-session
- Some negative feedback towards some visual clarity issues
- Almost all of the concerns raised regarding visual clarity, UX, and overall game design already aligned with our internal beliefs and planned features for the coming weeks, which is good validation for the team that the track is correct
Bug Triaging
- There were 3 main bugs; one to do with lobby sessions, one with clicking a button in a specific way causing a crash, and a tabbing out bug that causes crashes
- Mac compatibility issues [ended up working in Chrome -- never intended for Mac to work day 1 so pleasant surprise]
I wont post the full changelog here but pretty much all of the bugs have been squashed. Only bug that hasn’t been solved is the tabbing out but that we can’t seem to reproduce.
Main Changes
- Mac working (not performance optimized)
- Partial mobile support (shader issues and unoptimized performance but working)
- Lobby rejoining upon disconnecting
- Monad onchain state
- Misc: Initial load time = ~1s with dynamic loading, loading screen shows feedback so doesn’t feel like a crash, hardware cursor instead of software, etc
- UX: too many in-game changes to note but in general, camera fixes, move selection responsiveness improvements, better animations, etc
This week was mostly just fixing the laundry list of crashes, compatibility issues, and lobby / session UX but in the following weeks we will be incrementally pushing game design and visual changes that will make gameplay even more interesting.
Original plan was to do the next playtest today but I’m travelling right now and Diakou has some urgent IRL things to work on, so it will be conducted early next week.
The first Omnia transaction on Monad can be seen below:
Last week @sappyseals showcased their extremely cute plushies
Watch @wabdoteth talk about some lore behind them and how these will help scaling out the brand
(Part 1/3)
Sappy x @_LINEFRIENDS x @OOZ_OFFICIAL
A surprise IRL exhibition is live in the LINEFRIENDS Myeongdong store throughout all of KBW!
Come in store to get a sneak peek 🦭
If you want to book a call to pitch the team on a partnership or collaboration you can now do so through @moolah
The platform has support for livestreaming so we'll be doing that too when the time comes