Monthly Development Update December 2024

Welcome to the final 2024 MDU! While the last week of the month was quiet on all fronts due to the holidays, we got quite a bit done this month and expanded our team to help with the next stages of Warped Universe.

First off, with the help of Glitter Cloud Solutions, we have onboarded two new members to help us get our game into the eyes and ears of gamers worldwide. Mark Jessup — former Marketing Director for Wizards of the Coast for over 10 years, led the go-to-market strategy for D&D and Magic the Gathering for over a decade. Mark also has experience leading teams that have launched titles such as Shadow of War & Shadow of Mordor. We’re in great hands with him. Mike Hayes joined our team to help us prepare for our Season Zero launch. Mike was the co-founder and Vice President of the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) for 14 years, North America’s largest and most popular gaming convention.

Together, with immense experience launching games and events for major titles, they’re preparing us for a successful season 0 launch and aim to give us the best possible opportunity to carry that success through to season 1 and beyond.

Our game development team has successfully updated to Unreal Engine 5.5.1. This gives us a significant boost in the lighting and animation tools available to us, taking the look of our game to a whole new level and has our game developers chomping at the bit to see how far they can push the technology. The first thing on their list is creating new planet environments and a multitude of facility assets which will play a pivotal role in keeping players immersed in the Warped Universe.

On the design side of Warped we’ve added new stylized branding with our Nyzrak and Warped fonts, with the Warped font being used to create refreshed logos for both Warped Games and Warped Universe, whereas the Nyzrak font is our in-game font to accentuate the alien feel of our worlds. To show off these new fonts we hosted a “Decode the Warped Universe” competition where people had to decipher the Nyzrak font to gain access to prizes.

GAME DEVELOPMENT

New mission system

• New interact mission type — Close the Void Tear
  • Void tear testing, effects and spawners
  • Void tear sound cue and attenuation

Facilities

• Creating additional tileable building components
• Adjusted roof asset to include skylight glass material
• Created many decorative assets for the facility equipment
• Reworked the stairs for improved AI pathing
• Created assets for facility types
  • Food / farm facility
  • Housing units
  • Power station
  • Factory & more

Planets

• Ongoing map development and environmental adjustments
• Adjusted plateaus to accommodate facilities and reduced the number of plateau base objects placed by PCG (Procedural Content Generation)
• Rock material
  • Terrain materials for environment map generation
  • Planet birth
  • Plateau work
• Created and refined rubble assets with LODs
• Created particle effects beaming down from Nexus Station
• Fix for PCG small rocks to use multiple meshes
• Added small landscape pillars
• Created a bunch of new blueprints for non play-space cap rocks

Art

• Tested Nyzrak font translation widget
• Fixed crosshair
• In-game Nyzrak sign building tool
• Added new Warped and Nyzrak fonts to game
• New layout of Nexus Station
• Added two weapon stations to interact with
• Added extra levels and access back to the portal
• Work on emissive screen material master
• New master material for weapons and accessories including a couple of tests for meshes and textures

NPC AI

• Implemented new AI controller base C++ class and updated DCS team relations component so that it will also update Unreal’s AI controller and perception team settings
• NPCs will react to team stimulus for informing each other about targets
• NPC AI reacts to weapon sounds
• NPCs will now randomly patrol an area when not in an aggro state and if they have no defined patrol route
• Improvements made to AI patrolling

Engineering

• BuildGraph updates for publishing builds
• Changed server map, BuildGraph reversion for Epic builds
• Upgraded to UE 5.5.1
• Switched all mesh spawners to blueprint spawners by density filter
• Converted planet birthing test map to external actors

Web2 / Web 3

• Continued Web3 flows for full product
• Contract prototype development on local blockchain (Sui testnet)
  • Contracts (Modules) for Cosmetics
  • Contracts (Modules) for Battle Passes
  • Contracts (Modules) for Sui Kiosk
  • Currency and token flow
  • Storefront frontend UI
• Backend API prototype development
  • 40+ end points (read and write actions for Sui blockchain)
• Engineering channel created with Mysten Labs, Beamable and Warped devs
  • Successful kick-off meeting with goals and priorities identified
  • Full technical support established for our Web3 requirements

Business & Marketing

• Finalizing the Warped Universe Whitepaper
• Onboarded Mark Jessup as Fractional Marketing Manager from Glitter Cloud Solutions
  • Former Marketing Director for Wizards of the Coast for over 10 years
  • Leading GTM for D&D and Magic the Gathering
  • Launched Shadow of War & Shadow of Mordor
• Onboarded Mike Hayes as Fractional Marketing Manager from Glitter Cloud Solutions
  • Co-founder and Vice President of the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX)
• Hosted our Nyzrak Decipher Activation Challenge
  • Introduced our new in-game font Nyzrak
  • Competition and giveaway of $WARPED and $SUI Tokens
  • Promoted in collaboration with Sui