Paws Arena — A Twist for the Future
ICKitties In-game Assets and Reaching a Wider Audience
As many of you saw in our Supernova entry (which concluded with a 4th place award), the kitties did not have any in-game assets, regardless of which ICKitty the player owned. Of course, the ICKitties owners would have loved to use their NFTs to their fullest potential, and we would have run into many problems if we did not give our users what they wanted (and deserved). This was an issue we had to address in the early stages of development and make the wisest decision for the future.
After a series of discussions with our entire team and racking our brains on how to add ICKitties assets to Paws Arena (which up until this point was a pixel-art style game), we decided to redo the entire design from scratch. We figured that the pixel-art style would limit our freedom a lot and we wouldn’t have the time, resources, and our users’ patience to constantly fix a broken car all the time, so we decided to break away from the 8-bit genre for Paws Arena.
Although we are die-hard fans of the pixel-art style, because that is what we grew up with, we decided to go for a more modern style since we want Paws Arena to succeed and appeal to as many people as possible (not just us). We believe that this was the next obvious step that would allow us to go mainstream.
Of course, in addition to the game backgrounds, terrain and menus, we had to redraw the entire ICKitties collection and animate all the assets for the in-game version. This allows for more detailed and rich designs that will improve the overall experience and will be appealing to a wider audience which is used to playing modern mainstream games that do not have an 80s look.
All of these changes will benefit us in the future and make our workflow much more efficient and less time-consuming, allowing us to fully focus on other aspects of our project as well.
We are looking forward to showing you the new and improved gameplay! Stay tuned.
