Nicolò Merusi (Nimer)

Let’s recap of our biggest challenges and wins this week…. For those new to us, we are an indie studio trying to make the greatest competitive digital TCG of all time with cards you actually own, @origins_tcg This weeks BIG Challenge - We started our card grading journey with the idea of trying to build an exact 1 to 1 of real grading effects, just in digital. While this was a cool concept, we quickly realized it just doesn’t look great on digital cards and ultimately felt weird, so we pivoted. The updated vision became a digital glitch system, which has produced some really cool effects on our hand drawn cards. This week like many before, has been a week of discover something cool, try a bunch of versions, dial it in, rip 1000s packs, realize the original idea won’t work as is, start almost completely over again but with better understand of the goals and the tech, repeat the process again (you can see some of the random ideation of the glitching effect below) In the end I know the attention to detail and 100s of hours of ideation and testing will produce a much better grading system for players and collectors, but sometimes you wish you could just skip to the good part! This weeks BIG win: - Honestly this weeks BIG win has been you, the community! The highlight was 2 calls. 1. A streamer offering to organize a streamer tournament for his network, to help build momentum in his country. 2. A builder with a 90k member tcg collecting discord offering to set up a game night to play Origins and talk about the upcoming Alpha Edition Kickstarter 2 separate calls with people who recently fell in love with Origins and simply wanted to help us WIN! I mean, who does that?!? All in all it’s been a great week! How was your week? What were your biggest Challenges & Wins?

It’s time to make my first and hopefully last public apology. I apologize for trying to paint @koingamesio & @origins_tcg as something we're not, and myself as something I'm not. •Koin is not a AAA studio with a giant team and budget. Koin Games IS an indie studio filled with a passionate team of competitors, collectors, and builders. •Origins is not our third or fifth hit game together. It's our 1st game as a studio (though many on the Koin team have built hit games together before), and it's the game we believe the genre and the players deserve: the 1st Free-2-Compete TCG with digital cards you actually own. •And I am not an experienced CEO. I am a 1st-time founder who, after 15+ years of building one of the largest sales teams in tech, left it all and risked the millions I saved to build something I believed in. The truth is that building Origins has been by far the hardest thing I've ever done. Partly because it's my first time, partly because good games are extremely difficult to build, and partly because we are trying to do something that has never been done before. Now, after 4+ years of building, failing, pivoting, failing, and pivoting again, things are finally starting to look pretty good (1M+ trailer views, 16,000+ demo downloads, 97% positive on Steam, almost 200 creators in our community). All thanks to not giving up, the incredible team we have, and, frankly, thanks to YOU! So thank you to every player, collector, and creator who has supported us over the last 4 years. We wouldn't be here without you, and over the next few months we will need you and many others more than ever! To finish, I don't believe an apology means anything unless you make a real change… So from now on, I'm committing to talking about the wins, the challenges, and the mistakes. And I commit to asking for more help from the people we are building for. Starting now. So if you're a fan of fair competition, real collecting, or just backing indie teams, here are a few ways you can help… Play Origins, invite friends or enemies, back the Alpha Edition Kickstarter (Oct 27th), make some content, heck, even share this post, or simply follow along as we try to change competitive gaming and collecting forever! Oh and in the spirit of building in public, here is my real face.