Founded by digital artist Nick Greenawalt, Wanderers has worked tirelessly to transform from an art and lore-based PFP collection into an art and lore-based gaming project with real players and backed by top investors.
Having just launched into open beta on the Epic Games Store, Wanderers has had an interesting journey and is ready for more twists and turns as it moves toward launching a mass-market game with NFT-backed collectibles.
From digital art creator to web3 founder
Greenawalt’s journey to create Wanderers still amazes him today. With a background in interactive design and animation, Greenawalt worked for many years at an interactive design agency in Philadelphia, where he honed his skills creating engaging digital experiences for touchscreens, museum installations, and a variety of digital platforms.
“We’ll make touch screens, museum installations, websites, apps, and more,” Greenawalt explains. “It’s really focused on telling stories and making cool stuff for nonprofits.”
As his career progressed, Greenawalt found success as a content creator on YouTube and Instagram, where he taught animation techniques and shared free resources, which led him to pursue content creation full-time, giving up his agency job to become a YouTuber focused on creating educational content in digital arts.
Greenawalt unexpectedly turned to web3 when a friend suggested that he explore SuperRare, a platform for selling digital art as NFTs. As a long-time cryptocurrency investor, the idea of combining his artistic passion with blockchain technology fueled his passion for making interactive digital art. Greenawalt’s animations were a huge success on SuperRare, laying the foundation for his next big move.
“I never thought I would be creating art on the blockchain full-time,” Greenawalt said. “The success came suddenly and I had to explore this new world full-time.”
The beginning of the wanderer's journey
In mid-2021, as the NFT market heated up and various PFP series were launched every week, Greenawalt saw an opportunity to create a unique product and designed a prototype of what would become the "Wanderers" series: a series of animated shorts shot from the first-person perspective of an outer space pilot, each with a plethora of unique features and accompanying music.
“I thought, I can do this, and I sat down and prototyped what became Nomad,” Greenawalt recalls. “It was an animated collection of pilots told from a first-person perspective, with lots of unique traits and variety, and music.”
The launch of the Wanderer NFT was a huge success, with all 8,888 sold out quickly, building a dedicated community, and raising over $2.3 million for Greenawalt.
What makes Nomadland unique, in Greenawalt's opinion, is its focus on storytelling and world-building from the start, and while most NFT series use the same template of a right-facing character, Nomadland NFT features footage of space travelers, complete with a first-person perspective, music, and spaceship controls.
“I think the way we told the story on this project was really important to making the game stick,” Greenawalt explains. “We really took storytelling very seriously: we made some shorts explaining the universe and built a lot of lore with comics and exploration puzzles, and our community responded really well to that.”
This emphasis on narrative and immersion will prove crucial as Nomadland moves beyond simple NFT collection.
Start developing the game
While some NFT projects have struggled to achieve their ambitious roadmaps, Wanderers took a different approach. Instead of following the typical pattern of launching PFP first, they introduced animated characters at a later stage, which allowed them to focus on building a rich universe that could support a variety of creative activities.
For Greenawalt, a lifelong gaming enthusiast, the decision to develop a game was a natural one, and when GameFi Ventures and Animoca Brands approached Greenawalt with an offer to invest if the team would develop a game set in the thriving Wanderers universe, Greenawalt saw it as an opportunity too good to pass up.
“They saw the value in the Nomad universe and believed it was ripe for a game,” Greenawalt said. “Of course, as a lifelong gamer, this was very exciting for me because not only did I have a video game based on my universe, but I was the creator and had amazing investors supporting me in the process.”
The game is shaping up to be a fascinating hybrid of game genres and game mechanics, described as a "roguelike" with "deck-building elements" that draws inspiration from mainstream roguelikes like Slay the Spire and Hades, where players explore layers of dungeons.
What makes the Wanderers game stand out from its peers is that it adopts a free-to-play model in a web3 environment. While most roguelike games are bought once and played, the Wanderers team is tackling the challenge of creating an infinitely replayable experience through live action and new content - a difficult task for a genre that is usually associated with limited experiences.
“Most roguelites have a story that ends naturally, and if players like the first game so much, they’ll move on to other games and hope for a sequel,” Greenawalt said. “We built Nomad to stay relevant and keep players engaged for the long term. You can’t beat this game in a weekend.”
A key component of the gameplay will be collectible cards called Random Access Memory (RAM). These cards represent memories of other heroes and fighters, granting players unique abilities during gameplay. Players will be able to earn, purchase, and trade these cards to curate their ideal build and play style. Bundles will be available for purchase on OpenSea.
Currently, the game is in closed beta with all elements existing off-chain, an approach that allows the team to perfect the gameplay and economy before implementing blockchain functionality.
“Our main goal is to make the game fun and easy to play,” Greenawalt stressed. “We’re at a point right now where we’re just making sure the game loop and the economy and all of that stuff is really healthy and stable before we start storing anything on-chain.”
Wanderers Enter the Blockchain
While the specifics of the Nomads blockchain integration are still to be finalized, the team has a clear vision for how NFTs and on-chain elements can enhance the gaming experience.
Central to this vision is an account system the Wanderers team has built called Codex, which will link players’ gaming accounts to their blockchain assets, a system designed to make the game accessible to a mainstream audience while providing a path to true digital ownership for those interested in the power of web3.
“We can basically link them together on the backend so that you can manage your web3 projects on our portal,” Greenawalt explained. “If you want to play without wallet attacks or anything like that, you can do that and we’ll create custodial wallets for you that you can own on our portal.”
The team plans to build a marketplace where players can buy and sell in-game assets, including RAM cards and cosmetics, and they even plan to let players fuse cards together to create unique items that can also be exchanged for other items.
As for the original Wanderers NFTs, Greenawalt expects them to play a meta-level role within the gaming ecosystem, and hypothesizes that there could be NFTs tied to music tracks that could generate revenue for creators or grant exclusive access to special events and concerts.
“While gaming is our core product right now, we have a broader vision for where Nomadland is and where we want to go next,” Greenawalt said. “We’re at the intersection of art, gameplay, and storytelling.”
With new announcements and activations on the horizon, Nomad is ready to power into open beta and beyond, all with a focused storytelling at its core.
“It’s incredible that I would have imagined a video game a few years ago would be this successful, that other people would play it, and that they would fund a game based on my art and my worldview,” Greenawalt said. “It’s incredible that people actually love this game, that they want to be a part of it, that they want to play it.”
#NFT #Wanderers #AnimocaBrands #SuperRare #OpenSea
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