GMGM everybody thank you for joining we'll give them let's give them like two more minutes I know you guys have been on a ton of spaces today preparing for your mint coming Thursday so very exciting we'll give them a couple minutes and let's just have a relaxed fun time on this on the space and love to learn a lot more about you
Thanks, we're excited. Take your time.
Alright, let's do it. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Thanks everyone for tuning in today. Today is going to, so this space is going to be recorded. So hopefully we can pull some alpha out of fallen baby here. And we can, we can share that with everybody. Welcome guys. Feel free to give you yourselves out.
And intro to yourself and wild card and we'll kind of just take your fun there and then I'll introduce myself as well Kate why don't you go first and this time talk a little bit about your career you never talk about your career We just came from another space and we had a very short amount of time and Paul was like you just say anything
anything about yourself. I'm Katie and I am the co-founder of Wildcard. We are, well, I, Paul really loves it when I say all of this, but we are a PVP collectible card based MOBA. Thank you. My background, thank you. My background is not
from traditional gaming, I come out of a linear media background and actually mental health of all things. And I have focused more on storytellers in linear media format, primarily film, but also books and television, things like that.
When I met Paul, I had been one of those kids whose parents had said, "You can watch PBS or go outside." So my experience with gaming had been minimal, probably, Super Mario on the old school Nintendo.
Paul kind of opened my eyes to it because he's been doing it since he was a kid. And when we got married, he was working at Ensemble Studios, home of the age franchise, and had been a programmer there for like 10 years, I think, at that point. But there was a part of him that really was driven to tell stories and I read
recognize that and I was like, "Mm." So, you know, I actually asked this a lot of people. If you ever meet Finn who does our Web 3 collab and marketing, he originally came to be like a community director and when I met him I was like, "Is that what you really want to do?" And he was like, "No."
actually I want to do marketing. And so with Paul, I did the same thing. I was like, what do you really want to do? And he wanted to make his own games. He and his brother had always talked about starting a game company. But when iPhone came out, he took one look at it and one look at his non-game or wife and thought, Oh, that's
That's a game boy that my wife is going to carry around. And that's kind of the beginning of what I saw of his desire to make sure that everyone can consider themselves a gamer. This is, we've been, you know, partnered on things for a long time, married for like 15 years.
But not really in twine this deeply in one specific project before and Wildcard was built to be something that people could really, really enjoy watching and could find ways to be engaged in even if they weren't a competitive hardcore gamer.
And it was really exciting to me to have some project that I felt like I could bring something to. And so when we were given the opportunity to work with Paradise, I think it was a no-brainer for us to try and throw ourselves together and throw our specific strong
and weaknesses together to try and make something that was bigger than what traditional opportunities in gaming were giving. Hi, I'm Paul. I'm the husband. I have been making games for 25 years. Now I, as Katie mentioned, I joined
I came out here to Dallas joined a small studio called Ensemble Studios just as we were finishing up Age of Empires 1. Shipped that game, shipped the expansion pack, which was called Rise of Rome for you guys to remember that. And then Age 2, which is I think really the pinnacle of that franchise that we all agree.
This is the one that is most popular still today. I worked on age three. I worked on age mythology, which has a special place in many of our hearts in that franchise. We sold the company to Microsoft and became Microsoft Game Studios and worked on the Halo Wars games, which is a strategy game for the Xbox.
also helped build what is now known as Xbox Live. Back then was called Ensemble Studios Online. And we left that studio in, I guess it was 2007 or 2008, to start an iPhone game company. Before anyone thought that was a good idea.
So it all sounds like an obvious thing right now, but I swear at the time, most of my game development colleagues thought that it was a really bad idea because phone games were kind of a joke at that point. But like Katie's mentioning, I saw what I thought was the potential to reach a new audience.
and to make something in video games that could really change what games were and reach a much larger mass audience. At least that's what I hoped. So we started this small studio and we started working on a bunch of games. Actually the first game we worked on was a strategy prototype because
because we had just come off age vampires, so it seemed like the obvious thing. Let's just go build a strategy game on the iPhone. But I think what immediately occurred to us was, you know, this isn't really what we're here for. Like if we're making games for this device, this much more casual way to play games on a phone, then sure we could make a strategy game
But I think that what we should be thinking about is how do we reach this other audience? Like how do we make a game that fits into someone's life in the same way that the other things they're already doing on their phone, like text messaging or email or social media? And that fundamentally changed what we were trying to build at that time.
went from building a strategy game prototype to instead getting excited about bringing a social kind of board game like experience to a much larger casual audience with our first iPhone game. We ended up creating a franchise and a game called Words with Friends, which went on to be
One of the top probably three or four mobile games of all time now in terms of the number of players. Over half a billion people have played words of friends. It was a complete social phenomenon for a while, especially here in the West. So that was a crazy ride. We sold that company to Zingga just a couple years after we founded it and went on to IP
for $10 billion in, I think it was $2,000,000, or $11 or something like that. And was by an order of magnitude the largest entertainment product that I'd ever worked on. I mean, age vampires I think has reached, you know, 50 million players or something like that. And words
friends is 500 million. So just an incredible opportunity and during that time really fell in love with this idea of doing that kind of thing, which is where we identify new technology or an emerging aspect of the games industry
And then we figure out what it means to build a game on that kind of disruptive technology frontier. So after that, we started this studio, the parent company, which is called Playful Studios. We built a virtual reality game with Oculus. That was one of the first very successful VR games called Lucky's Tale, which
actually shipped with the Oculus Rift that was sold to Meta or Facebook as you guys remember. And then in 2017 we started working on this game Wildcard and we had a vision to build a game again on a technology frontier, a place where video games were evolving.
and changing. In this case, our dream with Wildcard was to reach an audience of people that weren't just the people that were competing in the game, not just the people who installed the game who were playing it, although those are the most important, always will. Like all the stuff that you're going to hear me talk about today that we're going to talk about today, none of it
If Wildcard is in a great game, so I just need to put that caveat in there like that has to be true But but our dream but what we saw happening and this is when we started working on wildcard back in 2017 is we saw that there was already beginning to be this audience of people That were enjoying our games without necessarily playing them and this
were these were the people that were tuning in on platforms like Twitch and YouTube to enjoy video games in a new way. And I kind of fell in love with that idea. I felt like here's another, here's here's again this opportunity to redefine what a game is because a lot of these games that are popular on streaming platforms even
today, they were actually built before streaming was a thing like they were built. Yeah, my answer to that was why? Why are people watching if they're not players? And Paul was like, well, there's not a good reason yet, but they're good, but they're could be like that was like, because like, because that was the thing is like I looked at that opportunity.
and Katie was like, "Yeah, but I don't get it." I would be like, "Come on, let's watch this League of Legends game." I could be watching basketball. And I think what that really kind of sent a shock wave through me because I was like, "Well, what would it look like?"
like to build a game that was meant to be enjoyed by an enormous audience of people that were tuning in to watch because it was so exciting and fun to watch not just to be a competitor in the game. And that's that's what launched this journey. So that was back in 2017 when the first wildcard prototypes began to get built. We were just it was just a small
team in one of the tiny offices in our building. And they had this vision and they what we wanted to do was we wanted to create this amazing video game spectator sport, something that would be incredible to play, but also incredible to show up as a spectator and as a fan where those people who were tuning in, whether they're coming in
like this on a Twitter space or discord or YouTube or Twitch or wherever it was could actually show up and be a part of that experience while they were tuning in even if they didn't have the game installed. We had this vision of building a game that was kind of like Pokemon come to life like the the the sport of of
of champions, summoning creatures and fighting together on a battlefield has been a game that we have loved since we were kids. I mean, like I said, going all the way back to Pokemon, but even collectible card games like Magic the Gathering or Digimon or Yugiho or like all these kinds of games, but they're mostly represented as kind of slow turn-based
Kind of thoughtful games and we thought you know this would be the ultimate genre to bring to life to make it feel like it was an actual sport You were watching rather than this kind of slow turn-based abstract thing And so we took all those ideas and we started working on these prototypes It took us several years to find the fun of wow
card if I'm completely honest because it turns out it's really hard to combine the collectible card and collectibility aspects of a game like Magic the Athery or Pokémon or Hearthstone together with the action of a game like Overwatch or Rocket League or you know one of these games that's much more about you know the the
controllability of your character and doing these things in real time as an action game. I mean, let's be fair, it's also very expensive. Yes. We just collectible card creation is in and of itself a lot of work. And then the action battle
arena pieces are also a lot of work. So putting those together and making sure that you're not kind of playing them off of each other in a way that makes it not fun for one specific devotee of a certain kind of gaming to play while the other person is enjoying it is also a lot
of work. But then you want to add in the piece that we were most excited about, which was connecting content creators with their fans in a way that they had pretty much had to have an entire tech stack between them and their fans for so long that they were barely able to make a
fraction of the value that they were bringing with their audience. And so then you have to also figure out how to do that and pre-blockchain and Web3 and NFTs in general. We weren't really sure how to do that. We would, we went to a lot of different people, Twitch, Mixer at the time, YouTube,
tube. And you know, it wasn't their top priority. And so we realized that in order to find a way to connect these streamers, these true entertainers with their fans, without all of the extractive value, we were going to have to create something. And when Paul coded that for
smart contract and he saw how it kind of was able to cut through some of the middlemen. It was like a light went off. Yeah, I, I, it's, it all sounds, you know, we were speaking earlier to some folks about this and it's kind of like when you hear the story, it sounds like it's too good to be true or too perfect.
or whatever, but the reality of it is, we put millions of our own dollars coming off of boards of friends successfully into this game on our own. And you know, we weren't doing that willy nilly. I mean, like I mentioned, we kind of had this vision of building a different kind of game studio where we would put
our money into ideas and then those ideas could grow without having to necessarily give away a lot of that value to a publisher, which would kind of be the more traditional model. But that's what we did. We put millions of our own dollars into wildcard to find the fun of it and to try to, you know, like Katie was saying, I think if we had hindsight,
like we might have realized how expensive a game like this can be because you're sort of taking all of the content that's required in a trading card game and you're bringing it all to life, right? So creating a new creature for wild card isn't just a matter of creating a card and some card art. Like these are full creatures that come to life in the battlefield and are exciting and
animated and fully realized 3D assets in this game, AAA quality. The combination of those two things was more expensive than we originally anticipated. But we stuck with it. We kept pouring our own money into it with the belief that we were really onto something in terms of this form.
because it was a game that was already starting to prove that it was fun and it was new, it was unique, it wasn't, it wasn't, and isn't like something that you've played before. And throughout that process, as Katie mentioned, we discovered that the technology that we were looking for to enable Wildcard to be something that, that,
could be enjoyed not just by the competitors, but by owners, by holders, by fans, by spectators, that Web3 was the answer to that problem. Like I said, I know it sounds like it's too convenient, but that's honestly how it worked. It did take a lot of risk on our part to get to that point. But then finally, in 2019, actually,
No, sorry, 2021. We had an opportunity to connect with somebody who's now a friend of ours at Paradigm, and we weren't trying to raise money. We were actually just trying to talk to them about Web 3 in general, but they asked to play the game, and we said, "Sure, yeah, it's playable. We've been working on it for a while."
And we had a term sheet 12 hours later and we ended up raising $46 million because they saw the opportunity of Wildcard to be one of Web3's first truly great games. And I'll just say that the reason that is is just because we have been working so hard on this team is working so hard on for years.
For a game like this and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise, it takes years to really find the fun. These are not the kinds of things. If you're looking for the next rocket league or the next League of Legends or whatever, these are not the kinds of games that happen overnight. Most of these games, even the ones that Fortnite,
They grew organically over the course of years before they finally hit that point. So the good news about Wildcard is we've already been working on it for six years and it has passed that threshold where it is fun. And my favorite moment now is when we get a chance to have folks like hopefully some of the folks in this community in the spaces right now with us that can join our discord
and playtest the game and we'll put our money where our mouth is. We let the game speak for itself because that's ultimately all that matters. And what we've heard is that people are just, they have a blast with it, it's a ton of fun. So that's a great place to be. We still have a lot of work left to do to get it finished and create all that content, but it's really exciting where we're at today.#
Absolutely. That was a great introduction from both of you and a great introduction and a great story behind Wildcard. There's definitely a lot to touch on that whole introduction there.
who's listening or most of the people that are listening have played a lot of those games that you had mentioned, you know, works with friends, age of empires, even that the Halo strategy game. That was something that that I had like in
in the back end of my video games and I hadn't really seen it before and I was like, "I have to play this. This looks really cool." And I ended up playing it for hours and hours and hours, day after day. So that was a lot of fun.
And am I the only one that can't hear him? Yeah, probably a little over the wrong part of the phone. Can you guys hear me now? Okay, so what I'm gonna say is like what I realized now I didn't realize it at the time but like
with hindsight. If I look back onto what we were really trying to do with age vampires, we weren't satisfied to just make another video game. We wanted to try to, and I think this is where I first kind of fell in love with this approach, and I've been trying to do it since then. We wanted to expand the audience. We wanted to
find people that wouldn't necessarily play a game and see if we could convince them to be a part of this great entertainment that we were creating. And so in the case of Age of Empires, the way that we did that was we decided to make the game historical instead of like fantasy or sci-fi, like most video games were or are
the time. And we decided to really put a lot of effort into making the user interface, something that people could, you know, if you could use windows, you could play the game, and we tried to make the art very bright and colorful and inviting. And just these things that like, now they seem obvious, but at the time they felt like
they were like we were kind of bucking the trend a little bit. And then that that step that you're mentioning with Halo Wars, the vision was what if we could bring the joy of a strategy game to a console to somebody who maybe they don't have a gaming PC because it's too expensive or too complicated, but they have an Xbox
and they'll pick up a controller and they're used to playing these more casual games. Can we map the real-time strategy genre into that? And I'm really happy with where we ended up there and we were able to expand the audience and it was, it is a game that you can play without a mouse and keyboard, which was a big milestone for us building
a strategy game. And Wildcard is like, it's like this ongoing journey that we started back then where we're taking this concept of real-time strategy action and just trying to make it more and more accessible. And I think Wildcard is like the ultimate version of that for us so far with what we've created.
Yeah, that's great. And I feel like Web 3 is definitely the space to do it because how you mentioned that you were talking about like going into streaming and how you weren't really understanding how, you know, streaming was all that popular, like how many so many people were watching these games that weren't really meant for viewers.
players. I felt the same way, but sometimes I get sucked into some streams and I start watching them and I stay there for a while and keep watching them. I think it's more so on the competitive nature of it, but I think it's
It's a great move to kind of bring the community and the viewers into the matches. And I think it's a great idea to build something around that within Web3 to where holders of NFTs are, you know, just innately attached to their NFTs in
their assets. So having them, you know, feel like that attachment, feel like a member of the audience within the game and supporting those players is I think perfect for what they do. I love to hear you say that. One of the reasons I'm so excited about that generally is that to be told
probably honest, we have so much value to share. If you look at the economics of a successful competitive video game, it's like they print money. You can go look at quarterly reports from companies like Activision Blizzard that are public companies.
And you can see how much money these franchises that are successful generate for these companies. It's tremendously successful. It's like where the profit margins are enormous. Like the amount of cost that they still have large teams that support these games. But still, the revenue that they're able to generate is huge.
What our hypothesis is for wildcard generally is if we're willing to share more of that value with our community and especially to your point with our content creators, then it creates this like virtuous cycle which benefits everyone.
that are hugely popular and have content creators and are streaming them all day long, the majority of the value that those content creators get is just through advertising from these platforms. As Katie was saying earlier, it's just generally a tiny fraction of the value they're actually creating. And I think what we realized
And I think that's why we, as a game developer, are in a position to provide, fundamentally provide more value to those content creators who usually benefit our business, who usually benefit the game and the ecosystem. Because they're the ones who are using the game to entertain millions of people every day on these platforms.
And our hypothesis is if we're willing to share more of that value with those creators and with those communities that that will Magnify the success that wildcard would have otherwise like again as I mentioned at the beginning has to start with it being a great game no matter what I think if we don't
don't have a great game, even if we were directly just paying streamers to play it. In fact, we've seen this formula play out with other games that have tried this formula, other companies. If you don't have a great game, it won't matter. The streamers have to go to where their audience wants them to go and where the game is entertaining on its own.
If and when we were successful at that, if we then use that opportunity to share more value with content creators and create an ecosystem that's more successful for them, then they will help the game itself be more successful. And that virtuous cycle is like, I mean, just we get really, really excited about it.
because it means that wildcard can become more than just a game. It can really become a platform for these amazing content creators who are building businesses on top of games, especially if we're willing to be a part of sharing in that value rather than just having it be Twitch ad dollars or whatever.
Definitely, and I feel like that that keeps you from being put in a box because I feel like during this era of gaming, you know, gaming is obviously every evolving and we've seen, you know, New genres coming, or getting really popular like with Fortnite and the Battle Royale with like Debra
or something, with extraction shooters. And now we're kind of seeing this new movement of games taking on an approach where they don't want to be put in the box of a genre. They want, you know, multiple genres. They want to fit it within and be kind of fluid between those genres and make something truly unique and creative.
to where like somebody can look at this and be like, this is simply completely unique. You know, it fits within like the TCGs that I usually love, but there's also an aspect of excitement. And I think that's definitely valuable because you can not only reach those people who love
TCGs or just love you know RPGs something or action RPGs You can reach both of those markets and a lot of people are gonna love watching that Thank you. That is not a lot of it. That is so much what we're trying and you know real-time strategy games Have continued to evolve in that direction like if you go back and you play a game like in
age of empires too. I still love it dearly. But it's a lot more complex and involved than where kind of the genres that have come after that, which like for instance MOBAs, auto-battles, you've seen this progression of strategy games
towards more and more accessibility where like the depth of them and especially the meta is still there, but getting in and playing is even easier than it was before for the genres that inspired these genres. And I think the reason that's happening is because like we've always known that with built
a game like this, we're focused on two ends of the spectrum at the same time. We might have heard this before. Easy to play, but can take a lifetime to master. That's the mantra that we would always try to live by with age of empires when we were working on it. And what we meant is the kind of game that somebody can just like immediately get into and start having fun, even if they don't
understand at all all of the depth and strategic choice that's actually there. But then the more they get into it, the more they discover that that depth exists. And it just is like this journey that once you're on it and you're hooked on it, it's like, you're just like, oh, this is so good. And I think that what I might know that what we're trying to do with wild cars
We're trying to push both ends of that spectrum. So wildcard, more than even the strategy games we've worked on before, is easier to pick up and play. Like, you can just pick up a controller and immediately just start casting and summoning monsters and they do stuff and you're like, feeling like you're successful already. You're like, this is cool. I'm creating an army and they're doing damage and I'm winning.
and you know, but then as you continue to play as you come back for your second game, your third game, your fourth game, you begin to see that depth and that strategy and we've had people say that it, that the combination of elements in, in wildcard creates some of the richest meta that they've experienced because it's
It's not just the deck that you build that you bring into the match, it's also the champion that you choose. And then on top of that, it's your performance in real time, the way you play the champion from an action perspective in the arena. And the combination of those things creates tremendously high skill ceiling, but something where it hopefully, I'm not
I think this is where we're at now and we're going to continue to build towards this. You want to have that feeling of like even if you lose, you're like, "Oh, just one more game. I'm just going to try one more thing." I'm going to change just one card out in my deck or I'm going to do this thing slightly differently in the second round or whatever. That's the magic that we're looking for with this kind#
I think that's a great segue into going into the gameplay of Wildcard. I know we've been seeing a lot of content over the past few days and this past week of people playing at play testing and just having a lot of fun playing some matches within Wildcard. I'd love to get a brief overview of
what can players in its current stage what can players expect when they first enter a match or when they first get ready for a match. Yeah, great question. So luckily for now people do not need to be worrying about the deck and building their deck and managing their meta and their collectible cards because we are still in alpha
which means we're using pre-constructed decks. So we are choosing on behalf of our playtesters what deck you're playing with. You don't have to worry about that yet. That of course will be a very crucial part of the eventual meta and strategy of the game when the deck builder goes live. But for now, we usually hand you either a pre-constructed deck or a selection of
decks. That's actually coming in a build soon, where as a player, the first things you're choosing is you're choosing which champion you want to play with and what pre-constructed deck you want to use. There are currently two champions that are in the build that people are playing right now. There's Locke, who is part of the faction called Kronus, and then there's Bulgar, who is part
of the faction called Love Above. The one way to think about these factions is like the colors and magic. They kind of have their own unique playstyle, their own unique way of using their champions abilities and their card abilities on the battlefield. You will be able in the event in the game that when the deckbuilder is
live to mix and match. So you can you can have multi-colored decks. You can have cards that are from a different faction as the champions. There will likely be, I mean, we're playing with this idea now. There will likely be cards that are that have the keyword loyal, which means they can only be paired with the champion of the house that they're from. But I think up most cards will be
I'm dropping some alphas. There's a whole keyword system there that go along with the cards and allow people to build the same strategies that you would have in a game like Matches Gathering. But anyway, once you show up in the arena, you've got your deck, you've got your champion, and the game is
primarily about summoning creatures, sending them across the battlefield to destroy your enemies base. There's three lanes. The lanes all function differently. They work at different speeds. They have different features to them that are unique per lane. And what we see
see initially when people play is kind of just spamming, like make sure you use all your power, your mana to summon cards, don't ever like sit there at the mana cap. If you're familiar with a game like Clash Royale, you're going to be able to jump into Wildcard pretty easily. But what you'll find right away is that your flexibility and capability
a player is far greater than than clash because you're not just summoning creatures you're also using your champions ability abilities actually. So the game is really about managing the the army that you're summoning the creatures that you're summoning down on the fields your team effectively your roster characters as well as
managing your champion to support them. So what it ends up feeling like when you're playing is kind of this back and forth between, okay, I'm focusing on summoning creatures in the right locations. Okay, now I've spent all my mana, now I'm going to re-engage as my champion and I'm going to run around the field and support
my creatures, my summons, with the abilities that my champion has. And the better players are the ones that are able to balance that in multiple locations on the battlefield at the same time. It can kind of feel like almost like a micro MOBA or whatever, like just like a snapshot or a slight
of a MOBA, but I think that's what ends up creating that feeling where it's really easy to play. There's less to deal with. You're just having to look at one battlefield, but then as you play, you discover there's so much depth in the way that the creatures themselves synergize and together with your champion and the creatures are all so different. You know, there are creatures that stay put
where you place them and defend their location, their creatures that do area of effect damage, their creatures that rush the other person's goal. There's all sorts of different behaviors. And so how you use those behaviors in the right ways in real time together with a champion is what makes the difference between winners and the losers in the game.
Amazing. Yeah, and I told you we were gonna be pulling some alpha out of you guys today. Yeah, that keyword is not hard. A couple alpha out of Paul Benner. He loves it. I just. Oh, you got to finger over that thing again. I don't know what you do after calls like this. I get to go back
on to our Slack and keep working with our team and all the stuff that we're working on right now on the next build. And one of those things is that keyword system that I was mentioning. Like we really want, we love that in games like Magic and Hearthstone and you can kind of, you don't have to like, like not every card is a complete unique thing that has its own set of mechanics.
Like in a lot of cases, there are these keywords that let you understand the systems that you're playing with when you think about how certain cards operate in the meta. And so we love that idea. We want that to be a part of the cards and wild card. And so we already have several keywords that we're working on right now, things like knockback, for instance.
which is a unique keyword that has to do with creatures that can push other creatures around on the battlefield. And then what we get really excited about is how those keywords interact, you know, and how like certain certain cards and certain keywords can have advantages against other ones. And so it's all about how you build your deck in reverse
If we're very successful at this, then we define success as having a rich, broad and meta where there's not a single strategy that can win. If we're lucky or successful, people are still discovering new strategies in the game.
After we shipped it just like is the case for age vampires Yeah, that's amazing and for those for those keywords kind of touch on that one more time. I know that they That kind of reminds me of like the play styles So when you were talking about like the knockback, I kind of gave me the idea of like an aggressive play style versus like
a control play style. And that's what I was kind of imagining when you meant like the keywords of what those cards like what those cards exactly right. And of course there are keywords that were certain factions are better at those keywords are more known for those keywords than others.
It's like this combination of what factions are you playing, which defines your deck style, which champion are you playing, which defines the abilities that you can use as your summon creatures and you're supporting them. And those two things, the way that they interplay is where the real fascinating stuff comes from.
If you play a deck that has certain keywords and then you play a champion that really synergizes well with those keywords, then you can reach a new level of strategy and competitive ability in the game that you only can get to if you're being thoughtful. You can't just button that your way to it. You really gotta think about how you're
mixing and matching and that's what we're really trying to get to. When players can feel inventive with their strategies, that's the most fun that you can have in a game like this, especially as you're managing a deck of cards and thinking about that feeling of like, "Oh, just let me try one more time. I'm going to change this one card out for this other one and see what happens," which is where we're aiming for.
Absolutely. Yeah, and I love to take, you know, just a quick step back and take a look at those summons and I know that's an integral part of the game and love to kind of take just a little quick deep dive on those ones and, you know, just your personal favorites of which ones you would like to go through. Okay, I recently
Actually, I want to hear Katie's favorite because this changes too. So Katie, if you're still with us, what's your favorite summon today? Okay, look, I was an OG fan of sport and I'm such a grumpy little shit. Okay, but he wasn't in the beginning. Well, it depends on what you're doing.
talking about right? Exactly. So here's what's so funny is that coming into the game space and watching the iteration of our amazing artists from concept to where they're moving forward and sport, one of the earliest kind of iterations of sport was so cute.
And then all of a sudden, sport had to be used on a battlefield. So cute, sport. I mean, you can only have so many that are really cute and then turn into a full-on nightmare when you throw the card. And so, sport can...
Sport multiplies. So I would have to say that my favorites are tend to be the ones that give me a lot to work with when it comes to storytelling and Sport like having little teeny sports that come from him is a really exciting. You can actually see the cute sport we posted a
We put them in some of our content, but I will say that like a prime example of one of the things that's not technically a summon is acorns tea stuffing cheeks.
look at Bulgar. He has a log on his back that burr his bear sits on top of the log and inside the log is a tiny squirrel. And that tiny squirrel, like I make up stories about that. It really of all cuteness, but it always
think of like the killer rabbits, like coming for the jugular. I really want to see a quarantine stuff in cheeks turn into like an attack. Oh, but he's way too cute for that. We can't. I know he's so freaking cute. Sorry. I think my favorite. I just want to check it. Yeah, you can see him.
in the like on your website there you can see the little squirrel Pokemon set out. That is a fully modeled character like not just like window. I want to stuffy. Character is rigged. You're going to see that character showing up all over. Like we said. And then I would say yeah.
I would say that I'm a really big fan of Simbler as well. There you go. There's the cute sport. Look at that. That's what I was talking about. See, I love a good cute character, which is not how everybody sees it, but Paul, what are you making?
I've had trouble with people asking me why. She's just a gentle giant. She's so powerful. And in the match, you will. Exactly. When I'm able, I've won most of my matches with multiple slow calls attacking the goal.
thing is just this thing where you like you tend to focus on other creatures and then slow-close just build up and when they finally do show up at your base it's it's real trouble if they're on your goal they just do a ton of damage with their swipes even though even though she's really slow about it but I just I kind of like that I like that slow build so yeah slow-close my favorite at the moment
Kacha, I want to take a look at you know, you mentioned the art and how you've had a lot of different iterations of these characters in the summons themselves. You know, where's that inspiration coming from just their art style and the individual summons and characters themselves? Well, I mean, I would say that
that our art team is just there. One thing to note is that our head of studio, Dave Kubalak, he comes from art. That's when he worked at Playful, he was head of the art department. And so I think we
have a certain subset of people who are always paying attention to that particular piece of it, but you add in kind of our desire to have a lot of different groups of people have a way in to the IP. So, you know, there's a subset of people who are going to want kind of more overwatch
style characters and I think our team is really good at trying to to find ways to integrate styles that everyone would like. I am famous for hating Bulgi-eyed sun. Every game like we have a game called Creativerse from Playful. There are some of them in Lucky's Tale like Bulgi-eyed characters.
I just can't only get them new little I forget what they're called and I probably should make a game but like I am sure the art team made them specifically so that Katie would hate them. Oh, yeah, those are they're really cool though. They're kind of like like little rims from from an unannounced faction so
don't drop that alpha yet. No more conversation there. But you can just drop their names. We'll be. We'll be able to. Just call them the Gremlins for now. They will not be called their little Gremlins. They're the eyes just the bulldoork. There are certain people that come in and
do, you know, their concept arts, but I mean our art team is just, they're just insane in their creativity. And they're always looking for what, how are they telling who this summit is, just by visuals alone, and then how they can deliver on what you as a
game player expect the summon to do based on what you're seeing in the summon and it's just a it's a really another example of a bunch of people who have worked together multiple times that have a way of connecting that just takes time to create it's not something you can throw it in. I love that you brought that up.
because that's really at the heart of this. It's one thing to make great looking art, but you gotta realize these creatures, especially the ones that we're talking about, the summons, they actually have this really important job that they have to do, which is they have to communicate the gameplay intent on the battlefield. So when you see a given creature
even if you've never encountered that creature before because again wildcard's gonna have lots and lots of summons so there's a lot of variety there you need to be able to like intuitively tell like oh I think this creature is probably gonna do that kind of thing or you know I might expect this sort of behavior from it and this actually goes all the way back
age vampires. For you guys who are age vampires fans in the audience, remember the trebuchets? This is my favorite example of where art where form needs function because those things needed to look like they could cause a lot of damage but also that they were basically built out of toothpicks.
If any creature, if any, sorry, if any other unit in age like came up on a trebuchet, like it's going to die right away because it's, it's very vulnerable. It looks, it looks spindly. It looks like it can get destroyed really easily. And working on those games, and again, this is the same team like Katie sang. So, so Dave Kublai, the head of the studio, was on the age of#
with me. That's how long we've been working together. And we've learned those lessons building those games that it wasn't just about an artist saying, wouldn't it be cool if this creature looked like this or this? They had to have a respect for that creature's function in the design and in the meta so that it communicated its intent as importantly as it
communicated how cool it looked. And I think that we sort of naturally do that now as a team because we've been working on these kind of games for a long time. And so when we build things, there's this collaboration that happens between our artists and our designers that inherently happens without even having to tell people like, hey, you need to go make sure you ask a designer
what they think about this. Like I was just looking at a creative brief this morning that came across our desk from one of our designers who was pitching a brand new type of creature to our artists. And it's all like written up in a format that where the artist who's going to go work on the concept for this can know the role that that creature is supposed to have without without over defining it. Like we don't want our design
designers being concept artists, but we want our designers to provide just enough inspiration to our artists so that they get the role and then they can come up with some amazing delightful, surprising visual representation for that thing. And that's what happens with the creature designs in Wild Card. And it's a lot of work. There's many steps to it, but I'm glad that you like the end result.
Yeah, definitely and as we get kind of get closer to the top of the hour I There's these two sets of questions that I always love to ask founders and projects It's a two-part question. So the first part is you know What are you most excited about in terms of milestones and the inevitable that's going to be coming within the next
next six months. And the other part is, you know, what is something that you guys kind of have a vision for in the next five years, you know, instead of six months, what is the next vision for five years from now? Where do you see Wildcard? And is there going to be a new game or is Wildcard just going to, you know, captivate your attention for the next five years? All right, Kate.
We have two very different answers for those things. So I think we can each answer those ourselves. So for me, and in the next, did you say six months? In the next six months, I think we have a specific way of recording.
stats for for people who are connected into this universe that I think is is really interesting and I'm very excited to get that into a playable state so that people can start using it. I think that's going to really open up a lot of people to to start connecting around things and then for
the like five years from now, I mean I wouldn't I wouldn't be who I am if I didn't say that I fully plan on there being television series and web series and film and graphic novels because the whole idea of this is there is an
entire universe that can be created, harnessed, and built around this really fun competitive game that has great gameplay because having been in both kind of subsets of the industries, I can tell you that making games fun is
harder than making movies watchable. And so if we build all of the rest of the stuff around an already really fun game, there's no way that it doesn't take the world by storm. And totally definitely my answer to this is I just want to make my wife's dreams come true. So.
So I gotta go make sure that I make this amazingly fun game so that she can build the like all the Netflix shows. - Don't mess it up, man. - Yeah, exactly. So that's my goal. I just wanna make my wife happy. - Okay, but what about six in the next month? And he's not kidding. You guys, I mean.
The people that know him are like these. So in the next six months, what I'm most excited about is taking advantage of this incredible thing that we have that so few other projects in the space have, which is a really fun game.
I can count, not quite on two hands, but like the amount of people that have actually gotten the chance to play Wildcard had this experience seen how fun the game is already. It's so tiny compared to the size of even the Web 3 audience. So in the next six months, what I'm most excited, I keep telling our team is I'm like, we have all this great stuff.
Like great art great community already an amazing discord lots and lots of people on our Twitter. It's all growing. It's all great But let's never forget that the one thing we have that almost no one else has is a really fun game So so for me the next six months is about is about getting that to be more well
understood more more visibility and and I I'm really looking forward to ramping up our play tests I'm really looking forward to more people getting a chance to just this is his way of saying Katie this is what you need to make it. Well, because the game the game speaks for itself like I you know I can do this thing that that every other web three founder is doing and get on spaces
and talk about it, talk about the vision, but I just feel like the game pulls harder than anything I could possibly say at this point. And so we have people who say, I love it. It looks so good. And they play and they're like, I had no idea that happens over and over again. So, it just falls favor. Yeah, I just I just want to see the
that happened more and more over the next six months. And the stuff that Katie mentioned that we're building is about, is about enabling that to happen, and especially for wild pass holders, which is the mint that we have coming up. So yeah, absolutely. And I think this is, that's a great segue into, into, like, I guess the closing announcements and maybe just answering some quick questions.
I feel like we've been seeing a few. There's just one right here. Maybe we can answer that one really quick. One person had asked, "Can you talk about any challenges or obstacles you faced while developing the game?" And I know development within games is super complex and there's a lot of setbacks, but six years, what do you
think was like the biggest. I want to talk about two different ones there, which is I mean the global pandemic. No, that was it's whatever. Yeah, that sucks for everyone. But uniquely to wild card, the hardest thing during the first couple years was was making the core formula of a collectible card game.
work together with a real-time action strategy game. It was so hard. It turns out that this specific formula, which to your point earlier, it's unique, it's new, and that's our favorite thing is that we have, at the end of the day, we have made something that doesn't exist yet.
haven't cloned in the existing game, we've created something new. The hardest part of that was balancing the differences between the thoughtful exercise of like choosing your cards, having a hand in front of you of cards that you're looking at and the strategic choices that come from deck management and real-time
looking at your hand, together with the action elements of controlling a champion and third person and running around and doing all these abilities and managing the battlefield, that initially was so overwhelming to players that we would either, we would just see them get paralyzed in one direction or the other, either they would just stop moving and
they would be nothing but looking at their cards and thinking about their hand. And we'd be like, "You stop moving. You're just standing there." And again, I'm just trying to decide what card to use or whatever. And then if we dialed it in the other direction, we would see people running around and punching everything with their champion or whatever, and they would ignore their cards. And so finding
that balance was probably the hardest part of wild cards development. It turns out that that balance is very delicate. Like if we add one more card to your hand, it's overwhelming again and suddenly people are spending too much time looking and choosing their cards or whatever. So there's all these special, there's these kind of specific variables that have ended up defining
what works for this specific genre, this kind of new summon MOBA genre that we've invented I guess. So, but, and finding that was the hardest thing. I can say though that we have found that part. We did solve that problem. That fun is there, and I'm not saying because I think it's great. I'm saying it because I get to watch every day
We run a new play test with people haven't played the game before and the experience is always the same It's easy to get in and play and they're immediately having fun and then they begin to discover the depth of that and the choices they can make and then they're like really hooked on like oh wait Let me play one more time I want to try this thing that I didn't try before so and that's always the the thing that we're looking
looking to hear is that kind of feedback. And then the second part of my answer is recently the problem, the challenge of how to make Wildcard not just a great game, but a great Web 3 game is a super new unique
challenge that it reminds me of the work that we've done on previous games like you were mentioning Halo Wars so when we had to like figure out how to make that game it wasn't just hey we need to make a great strategy game like of course we had to do that too but the unique problem was well yeah but now we're making a real-time strategy game for a controller so how do we do that that's that's
to do that's hard. That's something we've never figured out before. In the case of Wildcard, that question is now, how do we build a game that is truly compelling to web3 users, to users who want to, for instance, acquire NFTs and have that be a part of what they define as their fun that they get of
this experience. And that new challenge is the new hardest thing that we're figuring out. But I will say that from my experience working with this team now, because we've thrown ourselves at that kind of challenge, even though it wasn't Web 3, in the past, it was, how do we make a strategy game work on a controller, or how do we make a platform or work in VR?
That was the thing that we were doing with Lucky Stale. We've done this thing over and over again where we've wandered into the space that is brand new, that has a new type of challenge that we've never encountered before. We just roll up our sleeves and we're like, "Well, if there's one thing we know, it's that we don't know what we don't know yet." We don't, we understand.
And there's going to be some things that are fundamentally brand new about what it means to make a great Web 3 game that are not things we ever encountered before when we were working on games before this. And so our job is to figure that out and to get that right. And we're on that journey now. But I think it's the hardest thing of what we're currently doing.
Awesome. That was a great answer to that. It's a great way to set away into this next part. It's been amazing partnering with Wildcard as a ready player, Dall, and getting the setup and getting prepared for this mint. It's been a really fun
week. This AMA was great. We have a live bounty for anyone that's going to play wild card for anyone who gets the privilege to play. I actually haven't even played it yet, but I've been watching a lot of content. I know. I'm hoping to
jump on with Ali, I don't know if it's a mouth or there too. Hopefully, hoping to jump on with one of our creators in rich and jump in there and get some gameplay and I've been watching a lot of content in preparation. So I have a pretty good
I'm just gonna explain the question about as a new player, what should I know? How do I beat my opponent? He's like, "Hmm, what are your favorite summits?" Actually, sport is really good right now, so I would focus on that from a gameplay perspective.
But the thing about sport is you got to keep him alive because that's when he that's when he duplicates. That's when you get a whole army of sports. But if he dies right away, he won't get that advantage. So be careful with him. Yeah, exactly. How do I win? Good. Good. There you go.
That's great to hear. Well, yeah, it was amazing having both of you on here. I think, you know, just to close this off, you know, for the for anyone listening whoever's still here, I'd love to, you know, give them an intro into what they can do to get into one of these play tests and how they can get involved with the mint happening on 420. Well, that's the deal, right? Is.
uh join our discord get on the allow there are still opportunities um although i think i mean we're getting you know what now we're getting to the end of that part but the mint is happening in two days on magic edans front page it's 44 matic um i'm
sure there will be opportunities to get your own wild pass soon after the mince. So take, you know, keep your eyes on those. The wild pass, we're minting 4,444 of them. It's happening on April 20th, just in a couple days. It starts at noon. I know you want to say for 20. Yes, and it's happening
new and on 420, you in eastern time there will be a handful of different phases including a public phase that are happening and I mean that's the third phase so I don't know if there'll be any left by that point but but there will of course be
opportunities for people to get their hands on them in the secondary market. And the thing about I want people to know about the wild passes, we look at this as the kind of genesis like value within the wildcard ecosystem like this. This is our most early adopters, our most engaged audience, our most special people that were
here from the beginning and that's what this asset represents to us is this like incredibly valuable tight knit part of the wildcard community that we then can work with going forward to grow value together with them and with this game over building. So if you want, if you like what you hear, if you're excited about wildcard
And you want to be a part of what we're building. The wild pass is your way, is your ticket to that opportunity. So yeah, I really look forward to meeting those folks who are our wild pass holders on 420. Thank you so much for having us on this. Yeah, it was a blast.
Work the rail to see all of the kind of what the bounty brings and the content that comes out of that It's really exciting to work with people that are innovating and content creator side and we're just really We're huge fans of Ready Player Dial we have been for for a while now, so it's so much fun to find
they have this point where we're working together. So thank you. Absolutely and this is a great kickoff to a long partnership. So glad that we were able to you know connect and get started within for this for this mint launch. You know very exciting stuff and it's always it's always refreshing to have a partner
like this where we you know they're content creators and a project that really values the content creators. To where there's just you know a mutual understanding of how important these players in this community is. So yeah I appreciate you both for jumping on here and like Paul had said go jump in the discord go jump in the community follow
their Twitter, you know, keep an eye out for their giveaways. We just had our giveaway too, so we're going to be announcing those. We can announce those winners after this, I believe. So we can get you all in there. But yeah, like Paul said, there's going to be some more opportunities. So
Go jump in there, go play the game, and keep an eye out for some more play tests and content coming out. There's going to be a lot of content coming out, and we're going to be playing it some more. So thank you both for joining us. Great talking to you, connecting to the end. - Our pleasure. - Thanks so much for having us. We'll see you guys with the next one. Take care.