Wonderman Nation — Live AMA Recap
YouTube — 12th December, 2022
On December 12, 2022, Wonderman Nation conducted our second AMA with the CEO, Garth Midgely, and the Community Manager, Zencuna. Surely everyone had fun, and hopefully the team answered your great questions about Wonderman Nation. We would like to thank everyone who is patiently waiting for the launch and for your unending support.
Here’s a recap of the AMA:
Question 1: Will Wonderman Nation continue to release new creatures each month?
Answer: Wonderman Nation will be releasing planets in the metaverse game every two to three months, and the release of new creatures will depend on the release of new planets.
Question 2: What is the difference between playing the game on Steam and on the mobile web?
Answer: We had a chat about this when we did our testing. Going back to the Phaser–Unity thing, the good thing about Phaser is if you get it working on Phaser, you get this great cross-platform seamless experience. It’s going to be quite a beautiful experience once it’s done, but it’s harder and slower to develop with and not as powerful in some other ways. Now that we’re with Unity, it’s going to change things a little bit, so that’s still to be decided.
We’ll probably release it as a downloadable installable app first just to keep our release pipeline pretty smooth as we do beta, get new features in and get things locked down. From there, we’ll do some WebGL builds. We’ve got a really proficient team with graphics and shaders, so if WebGL is not doing some stuff as fast as we want, then we might support certain browsers and try to get some optimizations in. And just putting it out there: Once we’ve developed it in Unity, we may even go back and develop a Phaser version as a second thing, which comes as a phase two of development, where we take that development and recreate it. It’s going to be a stepped release for sure.
Question 3: When can we expect the first beta to go live?
Answer: I want to go back a little bit and say when we first did our schedule for Wonderman Nation, we had a 12-month window, and internally, our actual schedule was around seven to eight months. Because we’ve developed a lot of similar stuff, that wasn’t optimistic. Optimistic would be five to six months. So, for us, seven to eight months was pretty realistic. Since we sort of lost six months, we thought, “Okay, maybe if we push really hard, push for the optimistic, we might even be able to get it done at the same time.”
Anyway, we’ve built some cool features, which I’ll share with people in a different call, which has made things a bit slower but for a long-term gain. That’s the long answer.
The short answer is, again, we’ll do a staged thing where we do a creature sale, and we’ll open up the creature breeding, so people will interact with a part of the game pretty soon. We’re going to be working with some partners to market, promote and launch that across a few different platforms to get the biggest announcement and biggest awareness we can, so it depends on them. I can’t guarantee what their schedules are like, but I’m hoping it will be early-ish next year.
To say January might be a bit short because everything kind of drags out while everyone gets back into work after Christmas. I’m aiming for February for the first beta, where you’d be playing with the breeding. Ideally, we’d be aiming to have beta gameplay available for people within one to two months after that.
Question 4: Will there be more open investments for Wonderman Nation?
Answer: In terms of private investors, we aren’t pursuing any extra private investment at this point. In terms of public opportunities, the Wonderman creature sale is the first. Buying creatures will be the first thing for the public and then breeding creatures. That’ll be the next ecosystem update.
Question 5: Will you stay in Phantasma Chain?
Answer: We are probably adding BNB chain. It depends on what Phantasma Chain do as well.
We definitely are still working with Phantasma Chain. It’s not like they had a hack and now we’re going to run away. I mean, people get hacked. It happens, right? Not their fault. It comes back down to what features they have and when they go live.
I’ll speak to the Pavillion side: What we want to do is have Pavillion just be a central entity, and then we connect with Phantasma Chain, we connect with Binance Smart Chain, and we connect with others. People can send their assets into Pavillion to be accessed by the game, and then ideally, we’re able to facilitate swaps between chains as well.
Phantasma Chain are working on those swaps at the moment, but the token swaps were the avenue through which they were hacked last time, so understandably, they’re being very careful with the swaps. It wasn’t their chain necessarily; it was the swap part that got hacked. So, it depends.
Unfortunately, this happens, so we’re sorry; we didn’t plan this to happen.
Question 6: Can you update us on the progress over the last couple of months?
Answer: As we’ve been finalizing the creature breeding — the way the creatures breed physically, where the bones are, how they animate, and how all the stats line up — we’ve been working on the battle. Wonderman Nation Battle we call it. We’ve gotten that to a good point, and we’ve gotten the creatures ready.
Now, we’re working on the front end for the creature breeding. We’re doing that at the same time as working on Pavillion and the whole BSC integration, basically tying all those things together. That’s the current status.
Question 7: Will you launch the breeding with a big partner?
Answer: We spoke to a whole lot of different partners, and I probably won’t mention who’s shown interest, but if you know our cap table, then you’ll have a fair idea. There are others as well who didn’t come in on the round but have their own marketplaces, and they’re very keen to have us launching our NFT creatures on their marketplaces.
I won’t mention the list that we have in mind because we’ll see where everyone’s at in January, but we’re thinking that we’ll launch on three to four different marketplaces, kind of like how we did with the public round for the token. We launched on a few different launch pads, so same thing with marketplaces. I think we had — what was the number in the end? — something like 25,000 public sale participants in Wonderman Nation, which is great for the whole community. So, it will be a similar thing for the creature NFT sale.
Question 8: Do you think Wonderman Nation will be a success considering we are in a bear market?
Answer: Even before the bear market, one thing we were saying was that there are two kinds of developers. There’s game developers who are always there to make a fun game, a game that you play because you want to play it because it’s fun, full stop. And then there are the developers who make play-to-earn games, which people play because they can earn, full stop. The hybrid now which people are working on is the combination of both, where you play for fun anyway.
Since day one, that earning hasn’t been our focus — it’s the fun that’s our focus, and the play-to-earn is the additive that gives people more incentive or just new ways to play.
Regardless of the market, people play games in recessions. This is a really good point: If people look it up, during recessions, gaming represents really great value entertainment. It’s cheaper to play a game than it is to go to the movies and buy popcorn. You get thousands of hours of entertainment out of a game, especially with a free game.
So, the fact that we’re doing a fun game, it’s going to be free to play, and there’s going to be earning potential in there as well if you play well, we think it’s a great product to survive not just a bear market but a recession as well. So, yes, we will survive.
!Thanks for reading. Keep an eye out for our next AMA, coming soon!
Project Links:
And be sure to follow us here on Medium.
