Greetings Whovians!
A lot has happened since our last studio community update, both with the game team composition and of course development progress on the game and supporting services. New Team members include:
Chris (Lead Artist) who’s been helping to both increase the overall quality of everything art, whilst also re-mastering the existing assets to be much more optimised, essentially things look better whilst eating less performance to run them.
Sophie (Animator & VFX Artist) has joined and will be adding those magic touches to the game to spice up the visuals, whilst supporting our UX / Design first approach to the gameplay and interactions.
Conrad our head of Production gained a new team member with Sasha (DWWA Producer) who’s rallying the team efforts on a daily basis and ensuring all project dependencies and workload are mapped out and dealt with effectively.
Nathan (Senior Game Designer) has taken up the helm of designing a suite of meta features to support gameplay progression and various reward paths throughout the game experience. Matthew (Lead QA) is working on optimising our test procedures throughout both dev and live service test phases.
Ayrton (3D Artist) has been working on some pretty cool texturing to ensure all the environment assets are unique elements. Deniss and Connor joined us as game programmers and have been working on various new features and back-end services. Last but not least our Creative and Web Services group has two new web designers, Emily and Karolina. So, it’s all go here as we march towards our 0.7 and then open beta releases.
Skaro Gameboard Update
We’ve been working hard on optimising and upgrading the Skaro gameboard, so that it not only looks amazing in-game but it also serves as a flagpole asset to base the upcoming gameboards on.
Design Process
During 2022 development, we have had a huge amount of focus on gameplay and card functionality, this has led us down the path of optimising the card UX/UI in order to make the cards as readable as possible in all areas they are shown; Website & Marketplace, Collection and Deck building screens and most importantly within the gameplay scene, on the board, in and during a peacocking phase where the full glory of the frames will be shown.
We’re really excited to show you our new UX, ultimately these changes are for the benefit of the gameplay and holders of DWWA NFTs.
We’ve also defined some core changes to the card abilities and functionality which resulted in us having to make a significant change to the card compositions to support these.
New Card UX
Example New Cards
Timing and Roadmap Update
We'd like to finish with some news on the overall timeline and roadmap changes, which we're trying to communicate more often and openly than previously.
In our last roadmap update a few months back, we had hoped to release 0.7 in August and 0.8 in September, releasing the game into a 1.0 open-beta state by the end of October. In our updated roadmap our 0.7 release has shifted just a few weeks into mid September to give us a last few weeks to get all our new cards approved. In addition, we've decided not to release a 0.8 version and instead go straight to work on 1.0 for that October release.
As you can see, 0.7 is a fundamentally huge change in the game, not just in terms of art asset but in terms of gameplay and quality, and you can expect another huge leap with our beta release. By removing 0.8 from the schedule, we give ourselves more time to produce something fantastic without having to go through the process of stopping and starting to release a more "basic" update that wouldn't have been as interested.
That doesn't mean we'll be quiet in September though, we've got streams planned for the first week to preview 0.7 for everyone and we'll be continuing to burn packs as we get the store and a brand new website ready for release!
