Let us just directly start with the bad news… unfortunately we are not going to be able and release the Waxel World this month 🙁
We will have to postpone it into Q2 2022. Of course we are aiming for April as we personally want to get the game out ASAP, but this depends on many factors and the quality of the game is the most important part for us!
I (Ryu) will just quote one of the most influential people in the whole gaming industry, Shigeru Miyamoto:
“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
We are deeply sorry and want to apologise for that, but we had some bad luck here and there and want to go in detail what happend:
- There was a misunderstanding between the first 2 developers we hired and us
- Initially it was discussed that they are going to do the whole development of the Waxel World, which included the smart contracts part and the UI in Unity part, but they thought it will just be about the smart contracts
- They underestimated the work on the smart contract side, put hundreds of hours in it and on top of that created the initial UI you know from this and this video, so we still had a good base for the first tests
- We asked them if they could also do the complete new UI, but they wanted to work on their own project now, so we had to search for new developers
- A new developer was needed
- We have searched for a new developer and after a couple of days we finally found one early this month (it is pretty hard to find any good developers in this space!)
- He had really good reviews, the interview went great and so we hired him
- We introduced him to everything, he looked at our documentation, all the concepts, formulas etc., was very active in communicating with us and started working on connecting the smart contracts part with the new UI I was working on
- Last week it started getting pretty quiet around him, he didn’t respond to any of our messages for 2-3 days and we got very worried because he lives in the Ukraine
- So CoinCobra contacted him with an anonymous account and he answered after a couple of minutes…
- CoinCobra then asked him why he is not responding to our messages from the accounts belonging to our team, but he came up with some very strange excuses
- As trust and transparency is one of the most important things to us we didn’t have any other way and had to cut the connection with him!
- So we are now again on the search for another developer, will need to introduce him / her to the whole concept behind Waxel World, he / she has to get familiar with the current code etc. and this will take a couple days
- We already have some promising candidates and do everything to get someone hired ASAP
- The new pixel art UI
- I am a trained QA engineer for over 10 years and know how to develop stuff, but I never developed a game and worked with Unity
- It takes a while to learn all of that, but I’m getting more and more familiar with it every day and faster
- You already got a glimpse of how the new UI will look like and work in this video and a live presentation during the AMA with some not even shown stuff in the video
- The whole team was / is sick
- Earlier this month I caught a pretty bad cold that did last for over a week which didn’t let me work on anything on Waxel and specifically on the UI for the Waxel World
- Last week Frittchen and CoinCobra got Covid so they couldn’t work much on Waxel and I had to do the majority of tasks for the project which stopped me from working 100% on the UI
These are not excuses in any kind of way!
We just want to be transparent with you as we have always been from the first day on. All these things just added up to each other and forced us to postpone the release of the Waxel World.
Current development status
- Smart contracts: 99% finished – According to the first developers and tests we have been able to do so far with the initial basic UI
- New pixel art UI: ~50% finished – Login screen, ingame map with animated characters, Town Hall screen, Camp screen, Logout popup and several other popups are finished
- The darker parts in this image show the already finished new pixel art UI elements:
- Connecting smart contracts with new pixel art UI: 0% finished – This is something the new hired developer should have been working on for over 1 week and if he would have done it, we would be at ~30% finished
Next steps
- Getting a new developer ASAP!
- I will take a step back from Discord and completely focus on getting the UI 100% finished until early April
- Tomorrow we are going to announce our 3 new mods in order to take care of the Discord
- We will keep you updated about the development status in our #sneak-peeks channel in Discord and global announcements
- The complete Waxel World ingame soundtrack will be released
Again we want to apologise for the delay and do our very best to release the Waxel World as soon as possible!
The release of the Waxel World will be just the beginning of a LONG journey 🙂
