Web3 GameDev Livestream: Designing the Onchain Frontier of Player-Owned Worlds

Owned Worlds: Welcome back everybody. You have joined the Web 3 game development livestream. So this

Jon Radoff: is the stream where we talk to developers, the real people building things in Web 3, where making games doesn't about the speculation, the coin, any of that. We're going to be focused here on what's fun, who's making fun, where are we going from there? What have they learned? A lot of you are game developers yourself. So we want to try to bring you knowledge of other people who have gone through this journey that you might be able to apply to your own journey. So today I've got an awesome guest. I've got Jenna here from Wonders. Wonders is a sci-fi universe and game that was born out of that original NFT phase craze, whatever we want to call it back around 2021. And they're still struggling away, building things, and we're going to hear from Jenna about what they've learned so far, what they're building today, where it goes next. So Jenna, thanks for joining me here. Why don't we just start first with an introduction of you. I'm always curious, how do people land in this crazy game development industry in blockchain? What were you doing to lead up before 2021 when you started working on this?

Owned Worlds: Yeah, thanks, John, for having me. So it's a very good question. I started my career as a CPA way back when doing tax and audit. And I quickly realized I wanted to be in tech and I was very entrepreneurial, being in San Francisco. So I jumped into startups and tech and probably worked with like a hundred different startups over the years from a business and finance perspective. I got into gaming for my first time in 2014 when mobile gaming became a thing and ran a mobile programmatic marketplace. So saw the potential of monetization and gaming and something taking off and kind of emerging markets. Ended up, I've taken some travels in hiatuses

Owned Worlds: and I took one after that gig and when I was ending my travels, cannabis became legalized

Owned Worlds: in 2016. So I very much wanted to find a way to empower this super plan and see what's going on there. So I ended up getting into cannabis and helped navigate cannabis companies going from an unregulated to a regulated market, ended up working in cannabis for about five years with my own company, handling business and finance for about 30 cannabis startups. And I ended up going to one of my clients who acquired me called Flokana. Our mission was really to empower the small, sun-grown farmers, regenerative, organic farming and the real power of the plan up and down the coast of California. So, you know, did that build

Owned Worlds: out extensive financial systems with cash and weed. I was really fun, but cannabis kind

Owned Worlds: of hit a wall in the ceiling because you couldn't cross state lines and it was really a fed that, I guess, and didn't work out or pan out and it's still a regulatory, it's a hard

Owned Worlds: industry to operate in. So, took another break and I knew I wanted to get into something

Owned Worlds: that was global and scalable because I like to build and I didn't want to be capped or, you know, limited. So, yeah, at the end of 2020, I just started getting into crypto as an accountant at heart and the CPA I understood blockchain very much and I was like, oh my God, this is definitely the future. I became an eth-maxie overnight and NFTs started coming out. I was very excited about that, interactive entertainment, the possibility to grow a global brand. So, jumped into that and ended up getting introduced to Nick, who is the creator and artist and founder of Wanderers, NFT collection. I was introduced to him about a month after Wanderers launched in September 2021 and I saw this universe and I had, you

Owned Worlds: know, this vision and we teamed up and Wanderers and the future of that entire universe was

Owned Worlds: born. So, fast forward though to the gang him and all of that, Wanderers, one of our biggest holders was Mark of Game 5 Ventures, he was the lead, like the senior advisor to Animal Capriens on their gaming investments and he was a huge Wanderers holder and saw the art and reached out to us a few months after NFT launch and was like, I love this art, like you guys need to build a game, can we invest? So, ended up closing around with Game 5 and look at brands for Wander Labs, build a video game and partnership with Blowfish Studios and yeah, here we are.

Jon Radoff: Okay, so we're going to be talking about things I didn't even know we were going to be talking about today and this is for our audience as well by the way. So, we've got an awesome audience here, I see that already 300 live viewers have shown up, that is awesome. I love every single one of you who decides to show up live. A ton of you watch this in replay,

Owned Worlds: but the best way to engage with this program is that it's a live program and when you show

Jon Radoff: up live what that means is you can post your questions, we answer it, you know, whatever they are. Well, at least bring them up for conversations. So, get in there, get in the channel, ask your questions. Actually, if you have a video camera, we're not even against bringing you on camera. Oscar will find you, wherever you are, post on there, we'll bring you in. So, we're going to be talking about games and FTs, web three journeys, financial networks, Jenna, you have been around all kinds of businesses with really complicated financial dynamics. So, cannabis and blockchain and games. Oscar, did I hit, is cannabis a thing down in Costa Rica? Or is it just all the I lost there? What's the deal?

Owned Worlds: I can neither confirm or deny anything about the mess in my room right now.

Jon Radoff: Yeah. Oh, okay. All right. Well, we'll leave that alone for the moment, Oscar, but I guess, hey, if you have questions about the cannabis industry, that's on the table to today. So, we want to welcome everybody in our community to come in and ask, I want to know cannabis and blockchain. What are those two have that similar?

Owned Worlds: Well, I would say, yeah, I think there were, like, there's definitely a lot of similarities, but it's very opposite because, you know, blockchain is all digital and cannabis is all physical, I think, that ethos and, you know, the people that are part of these emerging industries are similar. Everyone's kind of like a little quirky in on the cutting edge. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of similarities and differences, for sure.

Jon Radoff: Okay. Yeah. I don't, I think Jenna just said we're all criminals. No, I'm not.

Owned Worlds: Yeah. No, we love to, you know, just like Uber kind of pushed the regulatory boundaries

Jon Radoff: early on to find a new market by giving people exactly what they want in a much better way in the financial terms they want, with the convenience they want. Kind of anytime we're in these new industries that have, I guess previously, there've been subject to a lot

Owned Worlds: of regulation, we're just subject to kind of mass skepticism because people don't understand

Jon Radoff: it quite yet. We're just are in the borders of society where those are kind of some of the similarities, but whether you're a big tech like Uber or blockchain or cannabis, I suppose that's kind of the similarity is just like figuring out how to work within the frameworks that we have already. All right. Well, let's switch over to games, but I'm not against people throwing in the cannabis questions. I already see a plus one for push

Owned Worlds: for our server. Oh, because all day, that's my number one. I don't, I don't use cannabis

Owned Worlds: anymore, but OGCUSH number one. There we go. Okay. Well, let's steer a little bit to the

Jon Radoff: game. Let's talk about wanders and what you're doing. I think we have a video we can queue up. Is this a good time to put that into the feed here just so people maybe get a feel for what you're working on? Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Can we queue that up Oscar? Yes, sir,

Owned Worlds: one moment. And it worked. All right. Well, one thing I'm going to say.

Jon Radoff: And it's the last thing about drugs. I'm going to say on this one today, other than other questions people ask is whoever worked on the character with the fro out to hear with the psychedelic colors, they have definitely used cannabis. They have definitely used psychedelics at some point in their life. So prove me wrong if you're the person who worked on that. If you think I'm wrong. But, Jenna, tell us about the game. What was it that we were just looking at? It looks really cool. Production values are great. Web 3s always accused of like not having like real gameplay. You showed stuff that, you know, should fare pretty well

Owned Worlds: unlike steam and wherever people consume games. Yeah. So we, the game is a road light. It's an action, a road light with shading cards and strategic deaf building. So when we decided on what game to make, we, the number one requirement was it had to be fun and it had to be, you know, a game that would reach the gaming market. So the genre is that. It's like Hades in Space meets Bellatro. And right now it's currently available free to play on Epic in Alpha. So we've been developing it since October 2022. It has multiple characters. You can play as your own avatar through our player zero integration. It's currently fully off-chain. We have an entire sci-fi universe with four NFT sold out NFT collections, a community owned token and a platform on our website that connects to the game. And you can collect and do different things. However, the game itself is fully off-chain and playable by anyone with just an email and

Jon Radoff: a password. Yeah. So, General, that's possibly a leading question. But why keep the game off-chain today? Why that decision with the gameplay versus kind of building it up around the NFT collections

Owned Worlds: that are out there? Well, so my approach to building in markets where you don't know what's

Owned Worlds: going to happen with regulations or they're moving so quickly that you have to, you know, remain pivotable and flexible until the final hour. I learned that extensively in cannabis. And so I've got that forward to here and I'm like extremely grateful for it at this moment. So there's a lot of things about the game that make a lot of sense to bring on chain. But as we all know,

Owned Worlds: Web3Gaming has been like this and you don't know what's going to happen and we know that our core product is a very good game and we don't have to force crypto or blockchain into the game. However,

Owned Worlds: we do truly understand the power of it and where it makes the most sense. And we have yet to have to actually plug it into the game. If you solve our trailer and solve treasure, for example, we unfortunately treasure shut down their game publishing business and they were our chain part game. Luckily, we had not integrated anything on treasure chain because if we had, we'd have to be unraveling it and spending loads of money that an indie game developer does not have to spare to kind of figure out the next move. So when it comes to Web3, the most important things I believe that our game would benefit from and all games would benefit from is the items, particularly trading cards. The use case for an NFT is extremely strong and a trading card should be an NFT. It's a digital item. Everyone should be able to trade it. And then payments with stablecoin rails. Like I think those are my two favorite use cases to plug it into.

Jon Radoff: So pay for things with a currency that the player understands is one of the things he's learned. And kick the can down the road on specific chains or and also just user experience. It sounds like. We see this across the board. I mean, I should mention like a beamable something that we see a lot with game developers is particularly if they started like a couple of years ago when some of these so-called gaming chains of the day were giving out a bunch of grants and then they kind of

Owned Worlds: went sideways and nothing ever happened with them. Suddenly these developers needed to find a new

Jon Radoff: home which meant transitioning chains sometimes up to a completely different architecture maybe they weren't even going to be on a EVM anymore like with some people move like from EVM to Solon or EVM to Sweet, things like that. So one of the things we wanted to try to do with beambole as a technology was protect against that basically future-proof people and abstract things like your economy design and just your item design that you work within unit or you're unreal and you're not like really building blockchain integrations. You're just building on top of a simple item system and then if you want to change blockchains you kind of check off one box thing like hey I'm using whatever EVM chain check the sweet box or the Solon box and you're on one of those for example. So we've tried to keep things really really easy from a tech perspective. So many people have spent an enormous level of effort just struggling with tech and they're not doing the right thing which is what I've seen you do in those in the in the trailer visuals that you just gave which is focusing on the fun game. Right? Any game developer only really wins because the gameplay itself is first class. There was 19,000 games in Steam last year. Really hard to rise above the noise if you're not a really fundamentally great game. How do you get like like let's expand the conversation to this because I think this is something really key for game developers generally. How do you get at the fun? How are you doing it? What do you do to accelerate that learning process, your velocity?

Owned Worlds: Like what's your game development lifecycle look like? Well we are partnered with Blowfish Studios and have another studio we work with. It's our development studio. They have been game developers and that but like our wanderlabs team we've never developed a game and the this industry has been is so it's so hard to focus with all the hype cycles of NFTs and then a TGE and then building up to this and then dropping in and blah blah blah and trying to balance that with game development has been really hard for the last few years. We've definitely been a culprit of getting distracted and not just focusing on game development because we basically felt we were juggling two products

Owned Worlds: at the same time. The ecosystem and token and then the video game. I think the best way to learn

Owned Worlds: at least for me personally is to just go through it and make sure that you're getting all of the information that you can and you know digging into the general gaming world, all of the general platforms and partners and then also trying to evolve quickly with the the web 3 gaming industry that's moving at crazy speeds. So the most important part is to always be able and ready to pivot and make quick decisions like the ability we have is a very scrappy lean indie game team that understands the future of gaming and tech and where it's going. We're able to quickly adapt and change course. However it's a blessing in the curse because we will we've definitely been building this game a little too long and right now we need to bring it to market and get distribution and the quickest way to that is the path we're on right now with full focus. Jenna I'd love to go back to some of

Jon Radoff: these early NFT collections that you did and kind of take us to that journey as well. Like what tell us about the collections did those raise capital for you? I remember back in 2021 like that was the financing model for a lot of studios like launcher NFT collection, use the revenue from it, invest it in creating things looks like you in fact have been able to do that so many projects like raised NFT money and then they were like thank you very much enjoy your collectible we're not actually going to build the game that we thought we were because they didn't do it you did which is find an actually competent game development team to actually work with them. So congratulations on just sort of like their self-recognition that you would need help and you got some veterans to help you out and there's sort of this related question we just got from the audience from sumonis is my real question is really can NFTs replace characters stickers think what they're getting at is is that going to become the way that we acquire the content that we use in games and represent ourselves but to take us through the NFT journey and also how things have changed along the way. Totally so

Owned Worlds: we're very uniquely positioned here because a lot of the games that come out in web 3 they launch as a web 3 game their NFT collections are fully tied to that we so so Nick who's the creator and an

Owned Worlds: animator by trade and the artist of wanders he came up with this idea when NFTs were all JPEGs

Owned Worlds: and there are collections and basically wanted to make an animated collection because he's an animator and so he went on Reddit and found like the most upvoted short story writer root frugging to and a dev an anonymous undocks dev emerald to do the contract and then partnered with his his like musician friend lando soundo and together they want to put the difference so basically within 30 days put together wanders og wanders had no idea what was going to happen from it none of them ever had any experience with a startup or a business you know and they made an NFT collection with music lore and animation and it sold out in 30 minutes and brought in three million dollars

Jon Radoff: overnight so community of those were the days those were the days that I was not a thing now is it

Owned Worlds: and like there was nothing like it was just art and that's it was launched and people just got pulled into the universe and loved it and that was how wanders and the community was born so since then we've launched three other collections we we did a free claim for all of the holders called planet pass on polygon in December 2021 so all of our so those are all animated with music we have three full-length music albums that back each of the collections um and then we did another launch the wandernots which are your characters so there's 16 wandernot characters and the

Owned Worlds: the main premise of the story is there was a wormhole and the warp squad 16 went investigating the

Owned Worlds: wormhole and they got they just vanished and disappeared um trying to investigate the wormhole so now everyone's trying to hash and slash their way in the game as well through the universe in search of the missing warp squad 16 um then you can have the endless wormhole loop but everyone has lore has music has animation what really excites me here is uh that the metadata is all on chain so just fast forward five years into the future once like agents and like our whole world can like do things it can get really fun and weird and it's all on chain so it's gonna persist on chain no matter what um but with that being said all of these NFTs were before we even raised money to build the video game so we formed wanderlabs raised around with anmocha and game thigh and started building out the product of the video game itself um this is our ip in our universe and it lays the groundwork so the only thing the the fourth NFT collection we dropped was ram which was early access to the game and the trading cards in the game and now you can burn it to

Owned Worlds: pull the cards into the game um so yeah I think we want to find ways and we will eventually as we

Owned Worlds: grow as an ecosystem to pull the original NFTs into the game but I don't I think there's a world for everyone and it doesn't mean they just have to be in the game okay so you just said

Jon Radoff: agents and the and it's wanders.ai right so there's there's something there about AI I want to get to that because it's a tradition on this stream to talk about AI and every single stream basically I think I think we failed Oscar though I think maybe only about 90% of them what do you think

Owned Worlds: do we have 97% that yeah 97% of all our live streams result in AI conversation for at least

Jon Radoff: six minutes okay yeah thanks for the metric call out there Oscar so we have to try to at least hit that for part of this stream while you're thinking about that uh there was a there was another question in the chat speaking of NFTs and on-chain competitions and things like that have the codes dropped you're talking about the beamable code so a bunch of you are here because you're competing on the beamable leaderboard our community is so awesome Jenna we we point what we internally you're gonna get a little bit of internal beamable knowledge here but we call it the beamable death ray it's kind of a weird thing to call it because it's actually injects life but when we point the beamable death ray which is our community of like millions of people that have been following us around now for a few months on any game that's unbeamable people show up and in mass numbers they buy copies of the game they uh they steam wish list it they buy and mint NFT is with pod digital people minted 140,000 NFT's when we pointed them towards their project so this is a community that's so deeply engaged and they really want the platform to succeed so we love all of you for that and thanks for going up the leaderboard we are gonna give out the code if you're tuning in now you haven't missed it yet we're gonna give out the code so we will get to it I promise that you'll get that but let's let's return back to Jenna for the time being before I turn back to that keep the questions coming by the way we love the questions we've got 800 people that are live viewing this and we love I love your questions so Jenna AI where's it where's it fitting in?

Owned Worlds: uh that's a good question I mean when we launch wanders that AI it was just the domain you know we it's not in there right now however I think as this world is progressing at not web three speeds like lightning speeds ahead um I think AI fits in when you start you know having agents come in and building worlds from everything on chain and with I think IP will eventually move on chains to allow for this however we have already put our entire universe and IP on chain so I get excited thinking about world building and you know playing inside the universe and games because there's so much to be had there and honestly I can have gut feelings of what I think will happen but I'm gonna I'm giving up trying to predict the future and you know build for the future and just try to do things in the present because yeah we're probably not too far away from being able to just hand I mean

Jon Radoff: that was some really cool animation and art that we're just looking at we're probably not too far off from just allowing a generative AI to consume that and immediately just instantiates that character and it looks exactly like it was designed and it interacts with you and uses the metadata that you've got on chain to seed like conversational parameters and then you can use that in the game so

Owned Worlds: I'm I'm just spit-balling so that an agent might be able to do with this we have excited about vibe coding so if you go to our website you can see there's a portal

Owned Worlds: it's called wanders.ai slash vibe so you can go in and download a bunch of our assets and remix it to create something through vibe coding and I just envision this just becoming a bigger thing and I think it's you GC all day like the best you can imagine is is where my head goes

Owned Worlds: with promises. Yeah I mean videos. When you combine when you combine that generative AI with vibe coding

Jon Radoff: that that is the platform that allows a lot of the people who might be building around it to add to it but maintain aesthetic consistency even story consistency right. Yeah I think the biggest

Owned Worlds: question is how do you maintain your brand and identity with the introduction of generative AI

Owned Worlds: you know I think that's that's going to be the hardest part. People kind of have the same reaction

Jon Radoff: to NFTs generally early on though I remember when we were talking about Mediver SPAC when the term was cool in 2020 before Zuckerberg ruined the word for all of us. I still use the word I'm going with it I'm going to be a hipster I'm Mediver so yeah I'm just going to stick with it but you know they said the same that a lot of people said the same criticism which is okay well now we're going to have all these NFTs that represent the object and then all these other games are going to consume the NFT and they're going to it's just going to be this like mess of consistency where you go into a game and it's like if it's a kind of game that imports assets and remixes them internally now we've just got this mess of a world and characters and art and things like that.

Owned Worlds: True because that's it I think it's really about you know the centralized force that's

Owned Worlds: building with it and you're right as long as you put the guard rails in place it's okay to like

Owned Worlds: let it let it know. What are those guard rails so like I think I think where because we have so

Owned Worlds: many facets of the world already and I peed out there we have three full length music albums we have two short films we have a bunch of like trailers we have a whole video game we have three NFT collections and all of them are animated with music and lore and like Rupert has written whole worlds and backstories the most important thing is just loading all of that into a back end which we attempted with the first pass in the by portal but I think those are the guard rails like these are the inputs everything that's already out in the ethos as long as the inputs all just

Owned Worlds: say that I'm pretty sure the guard rails are there. So what do you think Oscar I'll pull you

Jon Radoff: into this conversation because the community's rattling your cage or poking the bear or whatever we want to call it they're they're demanding Oscar to swoop in with his galaxy brain and connect all these things together Oscar I don't know if some of you probably don't even know Oscar has this community like what did you got like 150,000 people in a generative art community I don't know you

Owned Worlds: have you have something to say about this. No we're up to what well I mean the communities at

Owned Worlds: 217,000 members and I see too many yeah there's just too many large busty waifu images for my and that's the main problem with you just see which I think is it's a literal problem because

Owned Worlds: the concern is when you want to protect the the intellectual property when you want to

Owned Worlds: you know protect the entirety of what you've created and then you place the power of creation someone else's hand how do you ensure that the that everything remains as you intended how much leverage do you give people and at a certain point nobody can really own an experience so it's a it is a very delicate balancing act and nobody's figured it out yet you know look at Disney's suing mid-Journey right now it's you want to have total control over your intellectual property but you also want people to have a sense of ownership without legally stealing your ship so it's incredibly complicated it'll never be solved and rule 34 will

Jon Radoff: always be a thing. You're getting a lot of fan love today I don't know what the snoop comparisons are here in the rap comments but maybe it's the cannabis the word cannabis was used early on and it has brought in the wrong crowd or something but but you guys are the right

Owned Worlds: guys you are absolutely right by just how dare you say that you know at flokana we flew snoopin on a

Owned Worlds: helicopter and he's gonna do a love cannabis brand and before he went on stage he made sure someone drove two hours to get him a bucket of Kentucky fried chicken and then the huge blood before the talk with our CEO is quite uh

Jon Radoff: so crypto is asking maybe a little more pointed question he's saying what's your take on vibe coding I think it benefits people to come from tech background but just for the average user I

Owned Worlds: don't see the use I don't know like I'm not sure I agree with that assumption feels like people

Jon Radoff: that haven't programmed before are benefiting from it Jenna what do you think and then I saw

Owned Worlds: Oscar raise his hand so he's gonna win on this too I did as well um I think we I definitely think right now it's like a bit of an endeavor and if you're not super tech savvy it's it feels overwhelming and a lot to do um however as the tools get better I think vibe coding will be much more promptable and easy and you'll be able to use the different inputs better and the average person will be vibe coding all day pretty soon I just think it's like a little clunky right now

Jon Radoff: yeah new tech is usually clunky Oscar you raise your hand um what do we see yeah vibe coding

Owned Worlds: long didn't advocate for the concept of vibe coding and the point of reference I use is if you look at Star Trek the next generation and how people would walk into the holodeck and they would describe an experience and then that would take shape um this is a reason your cell phone looks the way it does it's because of Star Trek the next generation and the pads that they used ultimately um if you've ever designed any software been in a project made a game whatever the case may be it's the um consensus between multiple people arriving towards an end goal and in my idealized world an eight year old and an eight year old should be able to describe to one another the exact same interactive experience the same way that you can describe an image and a machine that can parse a natural language conversation should through some pushing and prodding and poking and guidance arrive at 90% overlap you know like I've been diagram like if you describe pacman and I describe pacman at some point with enough abstraction you can kind of land in the same journal vicinity I think that vibe coding shouldn't depreciate the value of the technician or the engineer or the whatever you want to call them but there is a huge gap which has kept the idea guy from making a positive contribution and has made the idea guy the butt of every joke when

Owned Worlds: it comes to software development especially game development ideas are a dime a dozen but implementation

Owned Worlds: is what matters but when the idea guy can actually like vomit up a concept and have an approximation or an abstraction of that actually land then um that's going to be transformative and we're not there yet but there's enough examples that demonstrated is a viable path and we just have too many compute cycles that are being wasted right now um that could go towards assembling much better versions of you know what we have right now so it's just a matter of time and programmers don't

Jon Radoff: freak out yet but well not well if if you want to probe deep I love the holodeck reference I mean I literally I think it was three years ago wrote this article about how we're building the holodeck that's what the metaverse really is if you kind of combine generative AI and speaking worlds into existence kind of voice prompt into the text prompt system and using that to then generate all of the content that you might see around yourself in the world ask about that I'm blanking on the name maybe you can track it down while we're talking here but when it was after GDC I brought in a founder from one of these a 16z speedrun startups it was creating this generative AI vibe coding platform

Owned Worlds: for kids was kind of like row blocks but the kids can talk and it interprets what we talked said

Jon Radoff: and it would actually bring it like it's the closest thing I've seen actually to a meta to a like that holodeck like experience so all right we're getting a little off top yeah but if you find if you find it Oscar I think it might be useful to just kind of bring that in for everybody

Owned Worlds: um there was a earlier question there was an earlier question here that I'm going to pull up

Jon Radoff: about onboarding of non crypto players and you kind of answered the question earlier around this question which is well start by not engaging them build a game your game is available for alpha now on Epic Games Store you don't have to have a wallet you don't have to have heard about blockchain you just have to be someone who's looking to play a fun game and and be in early and enjoy it but it sounds like someday you're going to start mashing those two together and you will have this aspect of you know the blockchain integration how do you think about that and what is the life cycle of your player and I know that part of your strategy is to kind of kick the can down the road and not have to think about it until you have to but given what you know today where do you think the industry is going on that versus and how are you thinking about those that connective tissue with those players so that they don't have to learn anything that

Owned Worlds: would slow down the game experience totally I think um it has to be seamless it has to be frictionless nobody needs to know that they're interacting on chain um that's like a hard requirement we we we are definitely getting there and we could do it like that already today I think where this industry is going is this is tech and this is infrastructure I don't even want to say

Owned Worlds: the word web 3 game like it's a game in the future web 3 you know what I just quick

Jon Radoff: aside I want to fire this chief marketing officer of blockchain for coming up with terms like web 3 like will you please stop like siloing yeah whoever has that I don't know who that person is because there's no CEO of blockchain there's no CMO of blockchain but the godlike persona that is that person's collection of all of culture that through them channels this energy and comes up with words you should be fired sorry I go back just like we will continue going off on tangents but

Owned Worlds: we start like we need to be moving like web 3 like needs to be infrastructure seamless back-end infrastructure and you know we need to start with stablecoins not with volatile speculative assets that's how it's going to mass adopted and I think we are literally after the last four years finally at that juncture like I feel it I with gaming with stablecoins with everything but

Owned Worlds: back to the question like we started the game only targeting like we've only ever marketed on

Owned Worlds: crypto twitter we've only ever had web 3 players leading into you know a tge and we've had 7,000

Owned Worlds: people play the game average play time of 90 minutes but the the the market is just it's not a market it's way too small so we are going to try to onboard as many gamers as possible I think right

Owned Worlds: now what I've learned is cross platform and the way our game plays it's a hype it can be hyper casual it can also be a lot deeper we're currently on pc but because of the way we've built our systems the the the wallets all of that can be in the background and you can connect multiple chains

Owned Worlds: multiple wallets to your wander id and they can auto be auto created in the background if you

Owned Worlds: don't have one so you don't even need to know you're using it and on top of that because all of

Owned Worlds: this is built on our platform on our website with our own servers it can plug into epic it can plug

Owned Worlds: into steam we are in the process of building out a web GL core so you'll be able to play on our website we have some exciting partnerships coming up where you know you you'll you'll learn more when you see it but we can like this game plays well on mobile on web GL on pc it could even go

Owned Worlds: on switch and console so we just want to make sure we're building towards a cross platform play

Owned Worlds: and that a player can like jump in and out wherever they feel like and it works and you can treat

Jon Radoff: your assets we yeah Oscar I mean another relevant connection there we're making so much connective tissue just in this video but we we had on the founder of that startup that's working on web GPU for Unreal Engine so you mentioned web GL but web GL is kind of slow I mean don't want to get super technical here a bit like web GPU modernizes that whole text on so you can actually deliver the frame rate of a modern GPU based graphics engine through the web browser so like you really will be able to deliver like a unity or an Unreal Engine game through web you can actually do it now it's just not particularly well deployed and games that are using it haven't gotten out there yet but it sounds like you're you're in that trajectory

Owned Worlds: we're also to play online yeah we're in unity six

Owned Worlds: yeah on our way to the web GL port but I'm I'm not technical at all so like um I'm curious to see

Owned Worlds: what's gonna happen we got it we got an assessment and I think we'll pour over pretty good um it's

Owned Worlds: just the assets that require a bill of load time all right I have to give out the code now

Jon Radoff: for everybody who's been paying attention is everybody ready for the drum roll we need an actual Oscar can you get a drum we need we need to have a like play a drum or something when we do this we have a soundboard over here hang on uh soundboard like let's update the let's update the production

Owned Worlds: values in this show already give me a break okay uh let me get it it's time for the code

Jon Radoff: it's time it's time for the code what many of you are waiting for because you are eager to go up that beamable leaderboard earn your spot in one of our very coveted air drop tickets okay the

Owned Worlds: code for today is nomad n-o-m-a-d and I know a lot of you don't speak english as a first language

Jon Radoff: sometimes you don't hear the letters we write it on the bottom right there so you can see it's

Owned Worlds: kind of going around the ticker here I'm gonna track it yeah see nomad n-o-m-a-d

Jon Radoff: type that word in how do you do it you got to go to our discord you have you have to be registered for discord before you try this it's tough to do in the two-minute window if you've never done it before but get into the beamable network discord register validate yourself show us that you're not about once you're in there type slash claim nomad and you're gonna score the points for today so thanks all of you in the community there's 1,250 of you watching live and I hope that every single one

Owned Worlds: of you goes and claims that spot right now all right so we've got a question from crypto here

Jon Radoff: this always comes up I feel like game developers never get tired of answering it and I won't even make you do the top three if you don't want to give three but what are the what is the game or games that kind of inspired you to take this universe and this art that you created and start building a game on top of it where was the where did the influence come for you well I

Owned Worlds: am not the one that came up with the game idea so I can tell you my personal favorite game

Owned Worlds: because I was much of a gamer as a kid I don't play that many games right now I'm sorry don't

Owned Worlds: kill me um but I loved FIFA so FIFA was my jam I was a soccer player my whole life so I love that game um the only other game I play now is duo lingo because I like gamified learning languages but when it comes to wanders I think the biggest inspirations of wanders and it was you know um um the nix nix inspiration one of his favorite games was Hades and Diablo and fire so I can see Hades coming through the 2d art style for sure yeah it's like Hades in space meets Diablo slay the fire like it's kind of very much influenced by that um very cool very cool but I guess we have

Jon Radoff: to go back to the game sister I love the inspiration of the two that kind of Hades art style but then we saw like the card collection the roguelite aspect so like everything is a new experience and you have to be a little strategic about and how you build up your character through that I'm curious how that plays in too like is that card selection piece do you see that as tied into the web 3

Owned Worlds: collection mechanic at some point is is that where like is there a deck building aspect to that

Owned Worlds: yes where does that play out that like our game designer miles he he came up with the trading card

Owned Worlds: twist because we're not just trying to make the same kind of game as what's already been done like

Owned Worlds: Hades we need to find games in genres and make unique you know new versions of them that makes sense with web 3 so the deck building element you collect the cards and before you even start your runs you will go to the card terminal at home base and you will select your deck so it's a very strategic because I don't know how many cards there are maybe like 18 or something cards in a deck that you select and you jump into the game and you go on runs but you don't know what three cards are going to come up throughout the runs that you can pick from so if you and also the game is extremely random we're making some final design updates right now where you don't know what level plan it you're going to be on next and so you need to collect the cards you want optimize your deck you might want one card all the time so you're going to try to collect as many of those cards as possible so the odds of it coming during your run show up but yeah I mean like the the the strategic deck

Owned Worlds: building and randomness element is very much our like real web 3 element that makes so much sense that just you know makes this a new kind of game and it adds more of a collectible element and

Owned Worlds: randomness to it so we didn't want to we wanted to make sure it wasn't a pay to play you know

Owned Worlds: I need pay to play play to win pay to win so the randomness element is what really sets of the part

Jon Radoff: hmm so let's drill into that a little bit more so you know that's sort of the base assumption in tongue you have these item economies where that's the business model that people figure you have to go buy the power items to be able to get through the game sounds like if I interpret you just said you've taken a different approach where it's almost more about the deck composition sort of is the is more like player creativity and how they might want to experience the world but how rather than be if and the pinch points am I am I kind of hearing you correctly on that?

Owned Worlds: yeah but because they're like a deck is so large like someone could go and buy you know in the

Jon Radoff: best card ever like all of you know and but they make a power deck yeah they could have a power deck

Owned Worlds: that's for sure but it definitely gives players freedom and creativity and it has this element of you know excitement and randomness because you just don't know what you're gonna get or what

Owned Worlds: planet or boss you're gonna come at so I think that's what keeps everyone like on their feet and coming back and playing more. What based on what you know about game development today like

Jon Radoff: you've been working on this now it sounds like about four years since kind of like 2021 timeline starting up. What about people that are starting today and have a game idea? What advice would you pass along to them and what is it also just for yourself right now in this market because it's been a really challenging year or even two years for game developers not a lot of capital you can't it meant NFT collections and take in three million dollars right now. VCs don't have much money left publishers are protecting their established titles. Now I know plenty of developers that are doing a great job they've kind of hunkered down they there are people succeeding but what does the market look like for you right now and what should

Owned Worlds: other people know? Yeah um the last year has been extremely tough uh as a game developer as a you know NFT universe I think for everyone outside of this it's also been tough but the fact that we're still trying to get the game to market is I'm a bull we could have quit of a thousand times but it's hard development it's very hard we started developing the game two and a half three years ago um my learnings my advice are focus if you really want to build a game and you have like this burning desire and passion to do it a hundred percent do it I am all for that I support it um I encourage you to focus and and like have a very clear plan and stick to it and don't get distracted and keep adding things and the quickest you can bring the game to market and start building with the community

Owned Worlds: and iterating on it together is better because the game market is so saturated distribution is

Owned Worlds: really hard like trying to even figure out distribution right now has been hard tough and I've been doing business for over 15 years so distributions extremely hard but with vibe coding AI like you can build a game right now and bring it to market at least in like an MVP state in early access state pretty quickly so try to get there and iterate and evolve and build a community and build with the community because that's going to be the best way I think to position it unless you're a large you know studio that has a lot of funding because good luck getting funding for

Jon Radoff: a video game right now I've tried yeah when you say build with the community can you elaborate on that but what does what does that really mean and sort of like day to day week tweak practice yeah I think

Owned Worlds: it can mean a lot of things it just depends on how available you want to be but literally start

Owned Worlds: building a game once you have an MVP and can get it out there start a discord start posting things

Owned Worlds: in discord and asking the community for their feedback having them like help steer like different aspects of the game give them surveys that's what we've done um but it's hard it's a

Owned Worlds: hard balance because you also need to be able to move quickly and make decisions but just make

Owned Worlds: sure the community if you have a community building that they feel heard and that they have some contributions that they can like put inside of the game it doesn't have to be everything but I

Owned Worlds: think you'll be the best job of what that could be and glad you said that I one of the

Jon Radoff: aspects of success that I see amongst a lot of game developers is they really build a flywheel around high velocity building like their own team can build fast which means usually eliminating a lot of the technological barriers that that buyer down a team that's why created beamables so that people don't have to build all this boring plumbing that if you don't do it right ends up your your game just implodes when you launch so we want to take that off the table just like 3D engines like you don't have to build around 3D engine anymore unity and unreal are both great and you can build a great game and then you don't have to do that anymore so like if you're considering any of those things by the way like the builder yourself you are competing with literally tens of thousands of really capable game teams that are going to focus on the fun and in game developing kind of have to define where your obsession is and if the obsession is anything other than making a great game and you're like I get it I love tech too but like if that's not the thing that you

Owned Worlds: really want to focus all your energy on can't say it won't be done there are counter examples right

Jon Radoff: like we have steam today because valve thought it would be amazing to create steam as a distribution per half life and I remember having being forced to install steam per half life back in the day and I was like this is a pain in the ass I can't stand that they're making me do this and I put up with it and okay what happened with steam and now rules the world of PC gaming basically so it can be done but you are a very very small minority of people that will be able to do that so focus on the fun high velocity building focused on the game experience as opposed to the enabling tech and then be able to hear feedback and the feedback can come from your community can come from your own players can come from also data like observing how people play in the game like people say one thing and sometimes play the game in a different way so like triangulating around all of these quantitative as well as qualitative data sources and using it as part of very regular cadence where you ship every day every week like costing shipping is how games are built how good games are built that's that's my thesis on game development it sounds like that's what you're doing Jenna Jenna we're winding down to the end of our hour I'd love you to take us home here what else should people know about your game about your company your studio where can they find you and what parting thoughts do you want to share with our community here yeah I think this conversation

Owned Worlds: has been really great enlightening feels like we could talk all day about all of these things um but yeah if if you're interested in checking out wanderers I encourage you to download the game go play on epic it's free to play uh check out our youtube channel watch our short films and um yeah we should be coming out with some exciting announcements pretty soon on ways to play the game beyond epic and coming out with a battle pass and things like that so join our community and yeah thank you for

Jon Radoff: having me today thank you Jenna thank you to all of you who have shown up live and also all of you who are watching and replay but if you're watching a replay show up live you saw people ask a lot of cool questions we probably wouldn't have brought up cannabis a bunch of extra times if it wasn't for you we got to talk about that we got to talk about NFT is game development all that stuff come and join the live conversation because that's what makes it really fun for all of us thank you again

Owned Worlds: Jenna this has been fun thank you take care all right until next time everybody have been watching the game development live stream the web 3 game development live stream until next time we'll see you