Mega World Studios is a creative team of video game developers based in Austin, TX with team members around the globe. They have embarked on a journey to conquer the blockchain games world, and further the multiverse.
We had a chance to connect with their CEO, Kyle Garner to learn more about their latest game announcement, Cats In Mechs, as well as their vision, and their future.
Can you tell me a bit of background about you and your team? What inspired you to get into blockchain/crypto games?
I worked as a tool designer and software engineer for CBS, High Moon-Activision and Bioware-EA. Though I had worked in different roles with these organization, my area of interest has always been streamlining content creation. After a few years, I wanted to choose a career that is more creative and where I can be independent. That’s where my career got a twist.
Even before Bioware when modding a cross-content module framework in Neverwinter Nights, this gave me insights on Multiverse background. With that framework, your favorite character could port story hooks between one custom module and another then return back to the previous to see the results. Our goal was to give players a persistent gamer identity.
My dream of Mega World Studios came into existence. Here, content transferable between games is possible with blockchain and features allow players to port their favorite characters and items and accomplishments.
We identify two of the biggest upcoming bottlenecks regarding blockchain. Education and communication between adopters currently have so many moving parts. The non-crypto gamer and most of the game-developer millions currently have a large barrier to entry with understanding how to use the new technology and the process to start being involved.
I realized there will be thousands of games preparing to join Enjin’s Multiverse and there needs to exist a means where these studios not only intuitively gain guidance but also information. With thousands of games anticipated to join the Multiverse, calling up each studio individually to get assets coordinating and educating each one at a time just isn’t feasible. A more automated approach is certainly needed for the multiverse to grow quickly and accurately.
What then after joining the multiverse? With up to 200 points of psychology sensory going into crawling through the Ethereum blockchain, we are poised to offer a unique marketplace solution and means of decentralizing user acquisition.
Tell me about how the vision for Cats in Mechs came about. What inspired you to make a game like this?
Our team wanted to offer a wonderful gaming experience with the tailored content for the players. To achieve this, we designed the game atop a platform style set of systems in order to provide flexibility, reusability, and expansion for the players. Hence, instead of hard-coded systems, the content is completely modular and capable of being rearranged and expanded easily. It was all about giving players autonomy to craft their game and intuitive celebration of their game discoveries.
The vision of offering a wonderful gaming experience encourages us to work on the demonstration of the toolset capabilities. This modularity helps us configure the toolset and reconfigure gameplay with extremely fast iteration. In the past, we’ve automated several content systems like level generation, item construction, and bot-player generation. 57 more systems are yet to configure in the tech stack including blockchain integration.
The ultimate aim of our studio is to press a button and automatically configure/generate an entire game.
What is the basic gameplay, story, and marketplace of Cats in Mech? How do the game and marketplace work?
The story of the gameplay is pretty interesting and highly imaginative. Infobahn Revolution of 2028 is when entire mankind transitioned to an entirely cyberspace-based existence. Cats were featured so much on social media, they were all set to supplant humans as the central species on Earth. Humans either declined slowly or walked away from planet with their pet dogs to chase space-squirrels. Humans went extinct.
Before their unfavorable disappearance, human beings arrogantly believed that they had domesticated pet cats. The scientists and experts of their species stated that this occurred around 10,000 BCE; when whole humankind transitioned to a living in agrarian societies from hunter-gatherer. However, not taken with cats at first look, they had not accounted on them being so fuzzy.
You see, people’s love for their pet animals got insane and Bio tweaking became a fad to combine a pet’s DNA with their owners’. Previously, cat video consists of around 10% of global media and later, 50% of the humans were passionate about getting closer to their cat pets. All the YouTube media is now historical documentation of the cat people
The cats had no vision or imagination regarding their new hosts. In fact, they initially brought them their prey as they thought they were just cats that were too brainless to hunt. Can you imagine that YouTube and social media became the new religion of the new world?
Now, Cataria V is the home place of the Mau and the only planet where Catmintis permitted to grow naturally (different strains of catnip). "Mint," as it is known, is the single most valuable resource in the galaxy and the ruthless Dr. Priss VonTreat knows it. She uspurped the ruling planetary Mau government in a decisive and ruthless territorial coup.
Cats have built their world based off their natural inclination of height and hunting. As the mega cities grew so did the need for vehicles which could transcend vertical with leaps and bounds. Mechs became common usage to navigate the cat tree platforms.
The game itself is a Free to Play, Top-Down, 3D Shoot-em-up RPG with Blockchain Enabled Content. This game lends itself to non-crypto and crypto-curious players, as well as robustly supporting the crafting collector with numbered limited edition content.
Cat pilots complete fast paced missions for tactical or catatarian purposes. Between missions players use their crafting skills to customize every aspect of their mech’s assembly. As their missions complete chapters, they find and recruit more pilots to assemble their power base. Players climb to the top of the food chain with events and player-vs-player asynchronous missions.
Only you and your motley crew of Mech pilots can save the planet.
May Ceiling Cat Watch Over You!
The Multiverse marketplace part follows Amazon as part of its success model with tailored recommendations and by-games listings. The psychology data behind item usage and ledger history analyzation cross-reference both items and game recommendations.
Within each multiverse game, a market-wall points out other games a player finds strongly compatible and items the player owns which flow between the two. Inclusion of the market wall brings in more users who have been “pre-vetted” to like what they try. Blockchain items drive purchasing confidence so players are strongly inclined to invest in their identity.
Both the central multiverse market and in-game market walls use the server’s data analyzing. A convenient traditional web component which lists these multiverse mapped and blockchain items is in the works. This also makes recommendations for players with the added benefit for player’s to find one another and make direct sales.
Tell me about your integration with Enjin. What was behind the decision to partner with them?
Several factors went into our decision to pursue an Enjin early adoption. Our quest was to find a company that works as hard as we do. The visions of Multiverse seemed so well lined up with our project and what we can uniquely offer that it seems like a perfect match. We had been talking with them since GDC 2018 and seemed to fatefully meet at every conference thereafter.
The fact that much of their staff is made of veteran-Bioware folks makes things even more welcoming, like a family reunion. Their partnership with Unity and our work being done on Unity was one of our biggest factors though. This gives us the confidence we have something valuable to offer both to them, but also to the game industry as a whole.
What are some of the barriers you see ahead for your project and Crypto Games in general?
In general, educating both non-crypto player and game developers is the toughest bottleneck. There are so many moving parts to cryptocurrency and getting started has so many confusing elements. The Enjin platform is fairly straightforward which is nice. The toolset handles the process that is easy to connect gameplay to the cryptocurrency framework, so developers spend time innovating on the technology more than connecting the correct wires.
Fear of the unknown factors prevents many from exploring. This either be a number of coins, wallets, platforms, marketplaces, and technologies are simply overwhelming. This compound with most related activities costing real money to get things going. It required bravery in those endeavors that needed to experiment and develop. Wrong decisions actually cost something more than time. Our toolset which already has the “wires” connected to items and means to manipulate the data transforms those discoveries into a simple matter.
Another challenge is the size of the crypto-aware audience, although growing, is still niche. With 100s and 1000s of crypto-enabled games potentially on the forefront, the audience simply needs to grow. A number of games are needed to welcome the crypto-curious as well as introducing the non-crypto-gamer. This means games co-supporting both those more casual audiences need to exist. This requires an amount of innovation, though entirely possible, is time-consuming getting all the systems to “play nice” with one another.
And then concerning the Multiverse, communicating is already difficult with six brother and sister studios. Getting assets to map to one another is an exponentially complex endeavor done manually. Without data standardization, each game would be its own town with its own sheriff and rules without standard roads for which data dependably to flow. The data itself shared between games in this manner needs to be stabilized otherwise exception builds upon exception and creating multiple time-consuming compatibility issues. This issue straightens out rapidly with our toolset which arranges the metadata aspects into a clean and dependable manner promoting broad expansion.
Last but not least, the number of potential crypto items for sale will be absolutely staggering with 1000s of games producing them. Players focus on what they know and tend to limit themselves to the games they’ve already purchased assets. This severely limits the potential broad economy usage. Using psychology item tools, learning AI, and in-game sensors coupled with EnjinX blockchain analyzer, players can be directed to not only the most useful items in their favorite games, but also refer to other games which they would enjoy.
Tell me about your perspective on blockchain technology and games in general. Where is this all going? and why is it important to you?
The advances in blockchain have so many uses already that it is difficult to place a comprehensive prediction. My prediction with data stabilization and deep analysis possible that new user acquisition channels will become more and more useful. Imagine a decentralized publishing element in the game industry where games point out one another based on player matching and gameplay analysis. Imagine where games universally and intuitively deliver users to one another. Imagine where games deliver tailored content acquired in other games which preserves a player’s persisting identity.
Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One gets to be a real thing.
What is your roadmap, and what plans do you have for the future for your team and your project?
After we develop the game and tool which comprises it, we intend to expand the various types of games which the toolset can make.
- 2018 Q3 - preliminary Blockchain experimentations
- 2018 Q4 - Blockchain gameplay Alpha
- 2019 Q1 - Blockchain gameplay Beta
- 2019 Q2 - Public release of Blockchain gameplay
- 2019 Q3 - expand to include idle incremental games
- 2019 Q4 - expand to include city building games
- 2020 Q1 - expand to include hidden object games
- 2020 Q2 - expand to include Match-3 / Puzzle games
- 2020 Q3 - expand to include Graphic Novel games
- 2020 Q4 - expand to include AR/VR games
- 2021 Q1 - expand to include Card games
- 2021 Q2 - expand to include Endless runner games
- It's our plan to open a pre-sale of Cats in Mechs assets 16th-23rd of November. And with those people, we’ll roll into the closed beta in January.
- April 8th, we open the door for open beta testing.
- GDC 2019 we unveil the toolset to the development community
- July 4th Cats in Mechs game goes to the public in an explosive way. Boom!
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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://cryptobitgames.com/3363/