The calendar unapologetically tells that our team spent almost a year building a single gaming-based web3 project. That's fucked up, and I'm not proud of that, to say the least. The reasons that we still can't fucking ship are many: the war, many personal turbulences, and the nature of this project being a side-quest for each member of the team. It's also how we spend our own capital developing with almost 0 outside investments. Our size as a team makes it difficult to create a "grown-up" production pipeline. Building the level of detail necessary to make our virtual world believable and engaging is challenging in and of itself, and the additional lack of resources further worsens things. Yeah-yeah, cry me a river.

To summarise, building an immersive experience with a small inexperienced team is not exactly fun. Although we're approaching the release date (we hope to announce it quite soon), I can't help but overthink what we've been doing this whole time inside my head. There were a few posts a year ago where I envisioned this important thing we're building in vivid colors - even providing some context in terms of style/lore. Now as we put the final touches, I see thousand different ways we may fail. So I keep asking myself: do people need another virtual world wrapped around ERC-1155? 

Bilita is not a traditional game, yet we had to think about it in terms of conventional game design: with a ton of moving parts that are already complicated dancing together as it is. Carelessly throwing NFTs into the equation only adds to the complexity and challenges we face. Across the previous cycle, lots have been written by the most talented visionaries of the market on why web3 virtual worlds weren't able to gain traction. On the one hand, July 2022 post "A Road forward for Web3 Gaming" highlights the "tokenization of in-game assets" as the major problem. Since most GameFi products are too focused on the financial aspects to compensate for the lack of everything else, the developers eventually face two challenges: economic outflows and over-speculation. On the other, the virtual world you're building has to be exciting to, well, play around: that's where the case for boredom comes into fruition. For decades virtual worlds existed for fun and distraction. Unfortunately, many web3-centric gaming projects in their current iterative period failed to provide the same level of engagement and immersion that other interactive experiences offer. Simply put, players are used to playing games with rich worlds, detailed graphics, and gripping storylines, and instead, they mostly got Axie-clones, with titles here and there needing to catch up in all the areas mentioned above. 

So what made us believe we could overcome many traits of the typical GameFi experience? Firstly we've decided not to focus on GameFi. We can't build experiences that could sustain as avenues for making a living. From the get-go, Bilita turned into a conscious choice to stay away from in-game tokenization. Instead, we focused on things we were good at in the physical projects: emotional resonance and one-time-only events. In our view, the solution to our vision of a virtual world was simple: if everybody started seeing virtual worlds as more transactional and less fun, let's cut the corner into something transcendent. One only needs another metaverse if it offers something unique. 

That's how Bilita was born in our minds as a memorable, one-of-a-kind event beyond the traditional gaming experience that touches upon something deep within us as only unique art can do. The "one-time-only" part is an essential piece of the puzzle: digital abundance has become such a delicate part of our life that radically reducing the supply of one's art has become a solution to a wide circle of artists. Bilita evaporates the minute you come into contact with it, and that's by design. In that, we don't want to put the audience on an artificial waiting list to make a case for the uniqueness of the product - it's just an instrument to make the viewer pause for a second and appreciate what's in front of them.

With the alpha build in our hands, I see all the blind spots, design mistakes, and conceptual failures. I doubt some visual aspects, and I suspect it would not be able to touch the viewer in any way. Of course, I'm prejudiced, and it's probably a result of a grinding year-long production cycle for a project with a relatively short length. It's a tricky concept to handle even without Web3 as an additional layer - that now requires moderate audience expectations. But we're ready for it. With Bilita, unlike how gaming products of the last 20 years have become social-consumption goods packaged as game experiences, we rather came closer to the obscure early 2000s games that were linear experiences where you played through a storyline and impossible interface. Yet I'm fully aware that these linear virtual worlds are fascinating until the story is played out, after which the audience doesn't have much reason to continue exploring the world.

With a web3 layer, we aim to push limited-edition storytelling beyond. Bilita is our first step in that direction. We'll see if we succeed or not.

The calendar unapologetically tells that our team spent almost a year building a single gaming-based web3 project. That's fucked up, and I'm not proud of that, to say the least. The reasons that we still can't fucking ship are many: the war, many personal turbulences, and the nature of this project being a side-quest for each member of the team. It's also how we spend our own capital developing with almost 0 outside investments. Our size as a team makes it difficult to create a "grown-up" production pipeline. Building the level of detail necessary to make our virtual world believable and engaging is challenging in and of itself, and the additional lack of resources further worsens things. Yeah-yeah, cry me a river.

To summarise, building an immersive experience with a small inexperienced team is not exactly fun. Although we're approaching the release date (we hope to announce it quite soon), I can't help but overthink what we've been doing this whole time inside my head. There were a few posts a year ago where I envisioned this important thing we're building in vivid colors - even providing some context in terms of style/lore. Now as we put the final touches, I see thousand different ways we may fail. So I keep asking myself: do people need another virtual world wrapped around ERC-1155? 

Bilita is not a traditional game, yet we had to think about it in terms of conventional game design: with a ton of moving parts that are already complicated dancing together as it is. Carelessly throwing NFTs into the equation only adds to the complexity and challenges we face. Across the previous cycle, lots have been written by the most talented visionaries of the market on why web3 virtual worlds weren't able to gain traction. On the one hand, July 2022 post "A Road forward for Web3 Gaming" highlights the "tokenization of in-game assets" as the major problem. Since most GameFi products are too focused on the financial aspects to compensate for the lack of everything else, the developers eventually face two challenges: economic outflows and over-speculation. On the other, the virtual world you're building has to be exciting to, well, play around: that's where the case for boredom comes into fruition. For decades virtual worlds existed for fun and distraction. Unfortunately, many web3-centric gaming projects in their current iterative period failed to provide the same level of engagement and immersion that other interactive experiences offer. Simply put, players are used to playing games with rich worlds, detailed graphics, and gripping storylines, and instead, they mostly got Axie-clones, with titles here and there needing to catch up in all the areas mentioned above. 

So what made us believe we could overcome many traits of the typical GameFi experience? Firstly we've decided not to focus on GameFi. We can't build experiences that could sustain as avenues for making a living. From the get-go, Bilita turned into a conscious choice to stay away from in-game tokenization. Instead, we focused on things we were good at in the physical projects: emotional resonance and one-time-only events. In our view, the solution to our vision of a virtual world was simple: if everybody started seeing virtual worlds as more transactional and less fun, let's cut the corner into something transcendent. One only needs another metaverse if it offers something unique. 

That's how Bilita was born in our minds as a memorable, one-of-a-kind event beyond the traditional gaming experience that touches upon something deep within us as only unique art can do. The "one-time-only" part is an essential piece of the puzzle: digital abundance has become such a delicate part of our life that radically reducing the supply of one's art has become a solution to a wide circle of artists. Bilita evaporates the minute you come into contact with it, and that's by design. In that, we don't want to put the audience on an artificial waiting list to make a case for the uniqueness of the product - it's just an instrument to make the viewer pause for a second and appreciate what's in front of them.

With the alpha build in our hands, I see all the blind spots, design mistakes, and conceptual failures. I doubt some visual aspects, and I suspect it would not be able to touch the viewer in any way. Of course, I'm prejudiced, and it's probably a result of a grinding year-long production cycle for a project with a relatively short length. It's a tricky concept to handle even without Web3 as an additional layer - that now requires moderate audience expectations. But we're ready for it. With Bilita, unlike how gaming products of the last 20 years have become social-consumption goods packaged as game experiences, we rather came closer to the obscure early 2000s games that were linear experiences where you played through a storyline and impossible interface. Yet I'm fully aware that these linear virtual worlds are fascinating until the story is played out, after which the audience doesn't have much reason to continue exploring the world.

With a web3 layer, we aim to push limited-edition storytelling beyond. Bilita is our first step in that direction. We'll see if we succeed or not.