The mission of wassieverse is simple: to bring the wassie lore and rich wassie culture to life with an NFT omnibus of 3D experiences, high-fidelity adventures and entertaining mini games.
To see this through, we’ve assembled an all-star team of game designers, sound engineers, 3D modeling wizards, illustrators, product specialists and veteran memers - all building in stealth for over a year, completely self funded and dedicated full-time to the upcoming wassieverse launch.
But more on us in a minute.
If you know of wassies then you know they are to be loved and protected and then in the same run-on sentence tortured, creatively massacred and put in harm’s way as often as inhumanly possible. For those of you less familiar with the great wassie infestation (and why we love these smol digital punching bags), here’s:
ze (very) brief wassie lore
Wassies are smol and fragile creatures birthed from an unknown radioactive incident. They are hearty, harmless and highly destructible, living for an average of 14 days unless kept in de fridge to extend their halflife.
Wassies come in many shapes and sizes, all of them represented and thriving in the wassieverse. When not refrigerated, they can often be seen sacrificed on the TL for various unceremonial reasons — invite good vibes, attract a potential mate or just blow off some steam after a long day of shitposting.
When they expire, new wassies soon rise from the ashes remembering all that its past ancestors had experienced but with no greater instinctual knowledge. Sadly, this means that a wassie never truly learns about the dangers of this world, destined for an infinite chain of horrible and hilarious encounters.
Wassies have their own language although we won’t use much of it here. If you prefer the lingo of the smol, a detailed whitepaper written in full wassie speak is in the works.
Over the past 3 years, the wassie experience has become baked into crypto’s collective memory, immortalized in intraday memes and a sea of static pfps.
As the wassie movement bubbled over the confines of crypto twitter and into the mainstream, we started to wonder — what if you could do more with wassies than just photoshop them being mauled by a bear, working in McDonalds or larping as an entirely different meme?
What if you could own your very own wassie — a malleable NFT that you can make smile when you’re having a good day or frown when you’re down bad?
What if you could bend your wassie, squish and warp it in new and increasingly morbid ways? Take your wassie on smol adventures or pit them head-to-head against other wassies?
And what if you could do all that and more in a fully fleshed-out 3D universe with Pixar-level graphics and future AR-VR support?
This is the vision and a fast-approaching reality of the wassieverse.
After more than a year of heads-down building, rebuilding, crafting, flipping burgers, using Blender to 3D render wassies (then in some twisted irony putting them in an actual blender), we’re finally ready to share what we’ve built so far and what we yet plan to build.
enter de wassieverse
Since day 0, we wanted to amplify the wassie lore through interactive NFT experiences and give the community a real sense of ownership, stake and personal investment in the wassie culture.
We knew this would take a village so about a year ago, we started putting together a team of experts that includes game designers, sound engineers, 3D modeling engineers, smart contract developers, illustrators and product leads, and we got to building.
Our work began at the start of the NFT craze, and while it may have been tempting to ride the hype train and launch with nothing more than a litepaper and a dream, we wanted to prove this is a team that can deliver. Just over a year since we started, we finally feel ready and proud to share the wassieverse with the public.
For a taste of what we’re capable of, start with our website — a fully interactive wassie landscape built from the ground up in Unity by our insane game design team. You can do many wonderful things on the site like introduce smolting’s head to the fridge door, or have everyone’s favorite dart trampled by a seldom passing bull in the background. It’s fun for the whole family.
By the way, none of this is even part of the wassieverse mint — it’s just our calling card.
During the actual wassieverse mint you’ll receive your own 3D, fully malleable wassie NFT that will grant you access to a series of wassie-led games and experiences, the first of which will already be available at launch and more that are in development.
Think of your wassieverse NFT as a gaming console that comes with a bundle of games and adventures for your wassie, allows you to use our AR/VR-ready assets cross-metaverse in the future and much more.
The first of these experiences - available immediately at mint — will be Canvas.
about Canvas
Canvas is a 3D photo booth where you can load up and tinker with your new wassie NFT till the end times.
Change your wassie’s expression, pose and lighting to fit your daily mood. Pick from gorgeous background scenes (designed by our in-house artist) and environments to drop your wassie in. Add stickers, manipulate your surroundings and decide on the best camera angle to capture each moment. In the end, share the result with others as an extension of your new wassie and yourself. The memeability potential — unlike a smolting’s life — is endless.
Here’s a brief demo showcasing just a few of Canvas’ features and functionalities:
So why are we starting out the wassieverse with a 3D photo booth?
The way we see it, everyone’s talking about the metaverse as this brand new paradigm when in reality, social media platforms have already played out as a de facto 2D metaverse for years.
There are some amazing leaps being made to get us closer to a more traditional vision of the metaverse: a fully-immersive, interoperable, decentralized network of virtual 3D worlds. But for now, the closest thing we have to a true convergence of meatspace and digital experiences are public forums like Twitter and Discord.
This is the metaverse that Canvas will augment. Everyone and their mother is moving from 2D to 3D but there’s a golden opportunity that awaits when one is willing to progress backwards. With Canvas, we have built a massive 3D infrastructure to help you express, play and live within your familiar 2D metaverses.
Canvas being a 3D environment also means it has some neat advantages:
- Posability: change the pose and expression of your 3D wassie with minimal effort
- Lighting: change the brightness and exposure of the scene and add effects
- Green screen: getting an alpha channel is easy
- Camera: render the final image using a variety of simulated camera setups
- Animate-ability: create and connect a series of poses and movements
In the context of 3D environments like video games, all these things are to be expected. But within a 2D metaverse, being able to make a completely custom, expressive JPEG to use in any situation, with the same ease and in the same amount of time as typing a tweet is game changing.
This is what we will have ready for day one, but make no mistake — we plan to go all the way. We see a bright future in a real-time, persistent 3D metaverse and want our wassies to be right on its frontlines, fully integrated and 100% malleable.
mint
The total supply of the wassieverse mint is capped at 13,370 NFTs. The prime utility of the NFT will be to grant you access to an omnibus of experiences and mini games through your very own 3D wassie(s).
Each wassieverse NFT is generated on-chain and contains all the metadata of your unique wassie. Rarity is based on a number of different layers, including base, skin items and accessories (more on this in another post).
The wassieverse NFT will also have secondary utilities like future airdrops and access to all planned wassieverse adventures — plus plenty of things that we want you to create.
If it wasn’t clear yet, we’ll say it again — upon mint, you will immediately have access to Canvas, our first wassieverse play. See, we chose to build first and launch second, as we felt it important to get you fully immersed in the wassieverse out of the box.
We’ll be sharing all the information about the mint with the community in the coming days.
utility (wassienomics)
While we know that most NFT games include some variation of P2E, the first wassieverse games and experiences will not be play to earn. For the time being, we’re focused on cultivating a strong player base and will rely on creating fun and immersive experiences to achieve player retention.
We’ll of course continue to iterate and may adjust our approach in the future based on GameFi trends and our community’s feedback.
The core utility of your NFT will be as a master key to the wassieverse. Additional perks will come in the shape of wassieverse airdrops and allowing your voice (or creativity) to help shape the future of the project, upcoming experiences and more.
online store
In parallel with the wassieverse mint, we are also preparing a wassie shop selling actual physical art, wassie dolls, t-shirts to wipe your tears of happiness (or sadness) with, potentially a brand new line of fridges and much more.
Like we said, the team wants to ship often and fast. Nothing’s off limits for a wassie — even the meatspace.
de wassieverse team
Wrangler — Questionably obsessed with detail, he always aims to expose the beauty in things, even wassies. With 15 years experience in 3d modeling there are few as equipped as him to build the Wassieverse (and we looked).
inversebrah —smolting, the flagbearer of wassie culture and one of the originators of all wassie lore. Also gets mentioned on twitter a fair bit
Notwassie — The master puppeteer of the Wassieverse, he dropped out of a CS program when he realized you don’t need a fancy degree to learn to simulate physics. Proved it by making his first physics based game in 2009 using Blender without writing a single line of code.
Bags — More than a shitposter and certainly not just another memer — he’s both. After years in finance, he now prefers to let bots do the heavy lifting while he focuses on planning the strategic growth of the Wassieverse by pretending to know what he’s doing.
rawr — The officially unofficial CMO brings many years of experience working within the finance industry and is a master of organization and structure. Spends his limited free time rescuing dogs with his girlfriend and currently provides a loving home to 15 dogs in need.
0x4C756B65 — Our resident expert of things; along with his experience in security engineering he brings to the Wassieverse a passion for drinking Somersby, and often spends his time changing passwords from wassie1 to complex strings that would take many minutes to crack.
Cyborgjox — a serial entrepreneur, who has been building, launching, and scaling startups in the technology sector for 15+ years. Hobby meme maker and technology tinkerer, in crypto since 2013.
Nemo — deep in operations, Nemo brings a world of know-how from his years of building in crypto, advising protocols, investing in web3 and affectionately calling people idiots. All skills in high demand within the Wassieverse.
Crowmoore — Enterprise dev by day, master game dev by night. Finnish, and thus usually cold.
SpookAsem — Illustrator from South Africa and occasional tattoo artist. Loves drawing ghosts and spooky landscapes. If they had any free time they’d probably enjoy reading books or baking. But alas.
giovannipickle — The soundsmith of the Wassieverse. Pickle enjoyoooor. Seriously actually in it for the tech.
Ibis — resident wordsmith and user acquisition buff, Ibis joined the Wassieverse to escape the evils of the real world and replace them with new, enhanced evils. Refreshingly average swing trader.
join us for world domination
Or just come be part of the smol familie, whichever you prefer :3. If you’ve made it this far, reading wassiespeak shouldn’t be an issue for you, so here goes:
@wassieverse on twitter dot com for project news, update, da dopest memes wiv potential spelling mistake(s)
discord.gg/wassieverse for da same ting dan on twitter — just different medium iwo
