Let me slowly check and share some updates about Ex Populus for you!
This is the news for September 2022:
Final Form is about to enter the early access stage, and Ex Populus is as excited as you are. In this post, we’re excited to share with you more about what you should expect from Early Access, as well as information about the Ex Populus team’s journey over the past few months.
evolution
Since the first release of Ex Populus Trading Cards earlier this year, the Ex Populus team has been thinking about how to expand trading cards with a gaming experience for collectors and trading card fans around the world. At the heart of many trading card systems is the concept of evolution. Evolution usually involves increasing the power level of your card or character through some kind of effort, sacrifice, or similar mechanism.
The main focus and feature of this first Early Access release is to provide you with everything you need to increase the power and rarity of your trading cards through the process of evolution. Here's how it works:
When you enter the game, you must pledge your cards to the "Fang of the Gods", a strange obelisk on an alien planet with a legendary "multiverse" history. As a result of your pledge, the obelisk will extract a substance called Chromos from your trading cards. Chromos is important because this is the substance you need to evolve your trading cards and eventually reach your final form. The amount of Chromos you receive, at first, will be based on the rarity level (Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary) of the cards you pledged. The higher the level of your cards, the more Chromos you receive.
Once you have enough Chromos, you can evolve your card. Evolution requires a certain amount of Chromos and four cards, one each of which you are prepared to burn. For example, if you want to evolve a rare card, you will need four common cards, one each of the families (Man, Machine, Beast, and God), and enough Chromos to power the evolution. In this process, all of your Chromos and your four common cards are burned, "gone forever like yesterday's snow", and you receive your single, rarer, higher-level card. Evolution, therefore, requires patience and sacrifice.
Incremental experience and Gacha
Incremental games have become a beloved genre in the gaming industry over the past decade. Incremental games "poke fun" at the meta-systems implemented in traditional MMOs, where players are asked to do similar things over and over again, but with exponentially increasing difficulty and rewards. Each step is a new "increment." In Final Form, the incremental experience revolves around the production of Chromos, the fuel needed for evolution. The first Early Access version of the game relies entirely on Ex Populus trading cards (with DAGs and Iron Pigeons soon to follow) to climb increments of Chromos production, which fuel your evolution. As you pledge your cards and evolve them, you climb the game's incremental tiers until you eventually reach Legendary.
Gacha is a known game mechanic that was utilized in Final Form's design. Gacha is a reference to many games that require players to complete a set of items in order to reach a certain goal. Recently, Genshin Impact has become well known for utilizing a Gacha system in its game design. In Final Form, the Gacha system is simple; players need to collect one card from each family (Human, Machine, Beast, and God) of the same tier (Common, Rare, Epic) in order to have the cards they need to evolve to the next tier. When you evolve, your completed Gacha sets and Chromos Evolution Fuel are burned and gone forever. Your new, higher-tier cards remain.
What you should expect from this first Early Access release is to pledge your cards, extract Chromos as a result of the pledge, and burn your Chromos and completed card sets to evolve a higher-level card.
Early Access and LiveOps
Early Access means the game is still under heavy development. Like most games today, we consider Final Form a service. Our team of professional designers, creatives, developers, and producers (along with professionals from other companies and teams) will work to expand the core functionality of the game. How the game is expanded is based on what we see in analytics, your direct feedback, and our own vision and expertise. The plan is to provide frequent but small updates to the Final Form game experience outside of the core features of the initial release. We are excited to bring you a fun experience!
Mike Tyson's Iron Pigeon
We are also excited to announce that a few days after Final Form launches, Mike Tyson will be releasing his Iron Pigeons trading card set, which will be fully compatible with Final Form. In just a few days after Final Form launches, you will be able to evolve your pigeons in Final Form, including cross-evolution with Decentralized Autonomous GigaUnits!
Final Form Development
Final Form is the result of an early access gaming experience created by world-class professionals in collaboration with people from game design, game production, animated film and other related backgrounds. Many of the game and animated film projects this team has been involved in took several years to complete. Dave LeRiche, Final Form's producer has worked on projects at Wargaming, Ubisoft and Blizzard that also took several years to complete. Mark Harris, the game's creative director was a supervising animator on many Pixar films, which also took several years to complete.
Tobias Batton, CEO of Ex Populus, approached the team with a specific request - let’s give the Ex Populus community and collectors an experience they can interact with in a few months. When the goals of the project were discussed, everyone acknowledged that in order to deliver something of high quality in a short period of time, the scope and feature set of the project would have to be reduced. Nonetheless, as the team developed a vision for the game that focused on collectible rarity and evolution, they realized that the scope of this vision quickly expanded into a potential multi-year project. The team decided early on that the core, critical functionality of the project would be to allow players to evolve their trading cards, and that this feature should be targeted for an Early Access release. With this approach, players would not have to wait years and could enjoy the core experience earlier.
When early development began, the team decided that they wanted the game’s logic to be fully decentralized and visible to everyone on the blockchain. Prior to this decision, the game’s logic ran partially on the blockchain, partially on traditional servers, and partially on the game’s client. Moving everything completely to the blockchain meant changing some of the game’s design to stay consistent with the new goal of full decentralization. During this critical development phase, the company realized that it had lost about 2 months of development time due to the strategic shift, but despite this, a ‘fully decentralized’ early access version was just around the corner (oops!).
Building games in Web3 is a new paradigm with many challenges and obstacles that traditional game developers don’t face. This has been an incredible learning experience for the Ex Populus team. We’re excited and proud to share Final Form with you and your fellow collectors! Want to get ready to play Final Form?
