Wonderman Nation — First Live Gameplay Reveals Incoming …

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The Wonderman Nation team have been working hard at developing the game over 2022 and 2023. Besides some video teasers via our Twitter account, we’ve so far held back from live gameplay demos — partly because the early stages of game development are largely non-visual (design documentation and spreadsheets, tool development, infrastructure and backend development, and team discussions), partly because game development can include changes in development direction based on many factors and lastly, because taking time out to run live demos takes the development team away from development, which in turn can slow their progress.

That said, we’re fast approaching our alpha build, with all critical path issues resolved. So, the time is right for us to do our first live demo, giving our dedicated community a first look behind the development curtain.

What can we expect to see in the live demos?

Q. Demos?
A. Yep, there will be more than one.

As discussed in our live AMA, we had some tough decisions to make in mid-2022. In early Q2, we identified some aspects of the development pipeline that we weren’t happy with. By the time Q3 rolled around we hadn’t been able to resolve these issues, so we decided to change parts of the technology stack and development pipelines we’d used. This was a particularly tough decision because it meant restarting some aspects of the development from scratch and making changes to our org structure.

We made two particular changes:

1. Changing our game engine

We knew for sure by July 2022 that we needed to change engines. We looked at the option of porting work from one engine to the other, but that was likely only marginally faster than starting from scratch. Meanwhile, porting the work would likely introduce issues later in the development cycle. So, we went for the safe and future-proof option of a clean restart, using our previous work as a prototype to inform the rebuild.

2. Bringing the entire development in-house

Originally, the GOATi team were the design team, the art team and the backend and tools developers, and retained the design, art and tech director roles. We augmented the GOATi team with a third-party team for frontend development support — this team had extensive experience building online web games with the initial technology stack, and was led by a developer who had 25 years of work history with GOATi CEO Garth Midgley. They had collaborated on a number of projects, including one in which Garth worked with the third party company as the art director and creative director for 2 years. And so they were a very experienced team that were also very well known by GOATi.

In July, the decision to change engines was made collectively by both teams. However, the GOATi team already had extensive in-house experience with the new engine choice, so collaborating on this work with a third-party studio now made less sense for the progress of Wonderman Nation.

Demo #1 — A retrospective demo in two parts

We’ll be showcasing the initial game builds that ran up until July 2022.

Part 1 — Wonderman Nation

Wonderman Nation — V1 Build — Battle Prototype

We’ll showcase the core battle mode.

Part 2 — Wonderman Attacks

Wonderman Attacks — V1 Build — Arcade Prototype

We’ll showcase the first metaverse instalment for Wonderman, where players progress through the arcade experience to discover new creatures to bring back into the Wonderman ecosystem.

Demo #2 — Battles, breeding, NFTs and more

For our development reboot, we chose to focus our efforts on the core features of the game, with a view to restarting our Wonderman Attacks build once Wonderman Nation was in closed beta.

So, for this demo, we’ll be showcasing:

Wonderman Nation — V2 Build — Battle (alpha)

• Wonderman Nation Battle (alpha)
  — Fully backend integrated
  —All core game systems complete
  — Dynamic environment and prop system
  — Full creature breeding logic and DNA informing in-game abilities
  — Creature selection — Local and community creatures
• Economy complete (alpha)
  — WNDR integrated
  — NKTR integrated
  — Food NFTs integrated
  — Prize pools
  — Notification system complete

Wonderman Nation — V2 Build — Breeding (beta)

• Creature breeding — Fully integrated with backend (beta)
• Creature abilities and stat progression
• Creatures on chain
• Creature NFTs swappable between Pavillion Chain, Phantasma Chain, Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum
• Creature NFT metadata supported cross-platform and cross-marketplace

Development status:

We’re very close to finishing our alpha build, enabling us to then fully target our closed beta build.

We’ll give some more details on the development and upcoming release stages in the live demo and in a follow-up article. So, be sure to keep an eye out for those.

When can we expect to see the live demos?

It’s our goal to run these demos ASAP.

We have some low-hanging-fruit tasks to add polish to a few features, which will deliver a big bang for our buck and showcase these features in a much clearer light. We’re just wrapping these up and then testing the game to ensure we have a stable build ready for the demo.

You can expect to see this demo in the coming weeks.

We’ll be announcing the demo dates via our Twitter , Telegram and Discord channels. So, be sure to keep an eye on those to stay updated.

The demos will be streamed live on the Pavillion Hub YouTube channel, so be sure to also follow the channel and select the notification bell to be notified as soon as our video goes live.

See you all soon!
x Wonderman