Redefining a game genre with web3 technology: welcome to Castle of Blackwater

So you’re looking for a new challenge. You have a background in hospitality management and a co-partner who’s looking to step out of his current role as a recruitment headhunter. You scan the landscape for opportunities. What’s out there? How about dropshipping? Ghost kitchens? Then there’s hospitality or recruitment, your specialisms — what doors does AI open there?

But no, you ignore them all and instead opt for… web3 game development. For which you have — let’s count — zero of the required skills. And, to make it even more exciting, you choose to be a social deduction game. Remind us again what that is?

Meet Jojo Meylaerts and Remo Vloet — are they crazy? Let’s find out.

Of course, there is always another framework for a story. Jojo and Remo have been gamers for years. They are extremely driven. They are avid readers and learners. They share a love for crypto since 2016. And yet… a web3 social deduction game? A relatively niche type of game within a relatively niche type of gaming?

To understand how they got there, we have to go back to the early days of web3 gaming and one play-to-earn game in particular: Axie Infinity. Who really has good things to say about Axie as a pure game? Not many. Still, Axie has had a serious impact as a cultural phenomenon and has brought a lot of good things to light: Merit Circle, for starters. Also, relative wealth for a fair number of players. And Jojo and Remo’s eureka moment.

The two men had become friends at hotel school, but then went their separate ways: Remo to his first venture, the creation (and later sale) of a flexible workspace app, and Jojo to his father’s company. After a while, they got together again to catch up and started talking about developments in the crypto world — a shared interest. Play-to-earn was just emerging, and so Axie inevitably came up. They were not impressed.

“We were very disappointed,” Remo explains. “In the sense that this was such a cool technology and gaming is such a cool niche to be in, but we thought, ‘Okay, if this is really the way that stuff is done now, we can do better.'” Jojo agrees: “Axie was never going to be successful in the long run, purely because of the inflationary economy.”

Targeting the social deduction niche

But why social deduction? For those unfamiliar with the genre, the mechanics revolve around players discovering the hidden roles and loyalties of others, with a healthy dose of brinkmanship thrown in for good measure. Physical manifestations of the genre include the card game Werewolf (also known as Mafia) and the board game Blood on the Clocktower. Some of the most popular digital examples include Town of Salem, Goose Goose Duck, and Among Us.

“We played Among Us a lot,” Jojo says. “That game had been popular for a while, but we felt like it could have benefited a lot more from their sudden explosion in player growth. We thought that was due to a lack of monetization, but also a lack of strategic depth. It’s really hard to get stuck into that game. It doesn’t have the progression systems that some modern games have these days.”

So the idea behind Castle of Blackwater was essentially to right the wrongs of Axie Infinity and Among Us. They would use monetization as a way to enhance the player experience in a sophisticated way – rather than effectively stand-in for good gameplay, as in the case of Axie Infinity — while enriching the gameplay of the social deduction genre with new levels of depth.

Remo and Jojo also had their eyes on the long term. “We did a lot of market research and found that the social deduction game genre has a lot of potential to scale very organically because of this play-with-a-friend factor, but also because of the influencer thing: it’s great to create content around.”

Web3 to the rescue

One reason social deduction isn’t one of the most well-known genres is that it doesn’t lend itself well to monetization, meaning developers are less likely to be drawn to it. But web3 offers new forms of monetization — not least in the form of NFTs — that Jojo and Remo felt could be the key to unlocking social deduction’s potential in that regard. This is a refreshing twist: not Let’s force web3 monetization in a game that can do just fine without itbut LLet’s see if web3 technology can enrich this genre.

“No, it wasn’t just, ‘Let’s build a web three game,'” Remo says. “That was never the intention. Let’s build something really cool. Let’s enable new technology. Let’s do it differently than what’s out there.”

Love for hard work

So that’s the idea covered. Now, how do they bring it to life? They grind. Going back to the two co-founders’ love of games as consumers, Remo talks about what he learned from playing RuneScape as a ten-year-old.

“It really taught me about dedication, because sometimes you literally had to spend two weeks mining something or chopping wood, which is fucking boring,” he recalls. “But when the goal is there, you have the discipline, the focus, the motivation to just keep going. I think that’s very similar to what you see in entrepreneurship.”

This time, however, the grinding was a little different. “I read a lot of books on game design and game analytics,” he says.

Jojo also took the bull by the horns. “My background as an IT recruiter helped me understand how to speak the language of engineering,” he explains. “How to meet the right people and speak their language.” But he went even further: “I literally spent two months on YouTube watching Unity development tutorials and using ChatGPT to write my own code. I ended up developing two mini-games that you can now find in Castle of Blackwater, which I’m very proud of.”

A big moment in bringing Castle of Blackwater into the wild was the creation of a ‘GDD’, or game design document. “You really go into a lot of detail about that,” Remo explains. “Like, ‘Okay, this is what the characters are going to look like, and this is how we’re going to do it.’ Then we were really active in reaching out to web2 and web3 industry leaders on LinkedIn and saying, ‘Hey, we have this game design concept, can you shoot it?'”

Harnessing the power of synergy

Of course, YouTube tutorials and reading books can only help non-specialists so much when creating a video game from scratch. They also had to assemble a team, for which they trusted their instincts. “We were able to make a pretty comprehensive game because we found the right people,” says Remo. “People who believed in the vision of Castle of Blackwater, even though we didn’t have a lot of money. They wanted to work for us because they found it inspiring and it was a cool place to work.”

“We meet people by chance,” he continues. “If we feel there’s a synergy between us, that’s basically how we hire people. It’s like going on a date and sometimes you can just talk and talk and you don’t really have to think about what you’re saying because the energy is flowing.”

That’s how they found Helmer De Witte — CTO of Castle of Blackwater and someone Remo calls “a genius.”

Building a community around the castle

The next steps for Castle of Blackwater will be to grow the game’s community, which is already pretty healthy, with 21,000 followers on X. Jojo points out the importance of video in this regard, and they’ve already seen a few go viral. Then there’s the lore: deepening this particular thread within the game’s content will be crucial, Jojo believes, as it has its own self-perpetuating synergy with the community. “We have the potential to have little faction hideouts and community spaces,” he says.

Behind the scenes, Jojo and Remo will be managing the game’s relationship with the COBE token, and ensuring that the web3 monetization aspects of the game are handled properly so that no player feels forced into it. Nor will they be – to echo the early ‘anti-inspiration’ of Axie Infinity – the ‘point’ of Castle of Blackwater.

And of course, they’ll keep grinding, with overtaking Among Us their main goal. “Even if we achieve half of what Among Us has and then, because you’re adding value to them, you convert 1% of those players into a web3 player…” Remo dreams, before returning to both guys’ laudable theme that making the game work — not pushing web3 on them — is the most important thing. “But that’s not what we’re focused on right now. We want to achieve product/market fit first — and then we’ll iterate and improve.”

Welcome to the Castle. We think you might want to stay a while.

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