Collider Craftworks is a studio with a professional team of artists and creators based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with 5 years of experience developing characters for iconic games like Mortal Kombat X/11 and Assassin’s Creed, and Injustice II.
They now seek to put their tools, experience, and expertise together into the “metaverse,” with their first NFT collection, called Cypher, which is scheduled to drop in 2022.
Cypher stands out among the sea of gaming-related NFT projects because of Collider Craftworks’ actual experience in developing characters for AAA games and game studios and they are putting that talent behind the project as well as working on creating a game, called the Moshpit, where you can import their NFTs into the game to play.
Aside from this, they are creating a “visual wallet,” where they aim to make the NFTs viewable in full 3D and have them be fully customizable with different gear and accessories. This combination of AAA game industry experience and the features to be released along with this NFT make the whole project unique and somewhat of a rarity in the NFT industry.
HackerNoon talked with Studio Director Daniel Gómez Cortés about the history of the studio, the Cypher NFT, the tools and games they are developing, why they decided to jump into the NFT space, and what the studio is doing to usher in a new era in the NFT space in terms of quality and usability.
So we basically started off as a very small team with the objective of being one of the best teams that could build characters for AAA titles.
We were four people plus myself, so we were five in total, and basically, we set out to really build a strong team that could be one of the best in the world when it came to building characters for AAA titles.
From then on, we just went to work on some games like Injustice. We’ve actually done a variety of projects, but some of the bigger and more noticeable ones were Injustice as a team altogether.
On Injustice, we did thousands of pieces of gears, and I think we got close to like about a hundred characters with skins, and we really learned a lot about complex customization systems.
Then from there worked during all of Mortal Kombat 11 as being probably one of the main teams working on characters on that project.
That’s kind of our origin story, you know, as a team working on these big AAA titles with a lot of content, just tons of content and really high-quality demands.
The majority of our team, or more like 80% of our team, is still working on other projects that are going to be coming out over the next couple of years for AAA titles, and we have around 20% or so of our team working on Collider Craftworks and basically this, this drop that’s going to be coming up.
The visual wall is basically a launchpad for games or experiences, and it’s also going to be a marketplace. So it’s a place where you’re going to be able to visualize your avatar.
And it’s also going to be a place where you can interchange assets like helmets and gears and weapons. And then it also serves as a launchpad into our games, but not only our game.
Since it’s being built on the Unreal Engine, the idea is to build this visual wallet as a launchpad for other experiences.
So let’s say somebody wants to make a virtual concert or wants to make a music video or wants to make some sort of a game, some sort of experience, we’ll be able to make it and plug it into the visual wallet.
And then that will allow users to jump in. And then you can do all sorts of super fun things.
Let’s say somebody makes a horror game, and you go, oh, you can only jump into these horror games if you’re a holder of the horror collection. So there could be a lot of fun things which will also give the assets a lot of utilities. So there’s going to be a lot of, a lot of cool opportunities.
Check out a detailed video on the visual wallet here.
You can also head here for more details on the Visual Wallet.
Can we get an idea about any release targets? Can we get a sneak peek at the game?
We’re going to be announcing the supply. We’re going to be announcing the mint date and the mint price once the project is complete. So we’re going to have like, progress bars for each one of these things. So like modeling the material and texturing integration and metadata, like all the big chunks of production so you can actually see how far along we are in each one of these.
As soon as you see everything complete, then that’s when we’re gonna announce the date. And the reason we’re doing this is that we want to actually really see the whole collection before announcing how large it’s going to be, which we think is the responsible way of doing it.
The important thing is not the supply, the importance is on the quality of the collection, and that’s going to be our main focus.
I think they’re completely different kinds of value propositions. On the one hand, you have a AAA title that will cost you, you know, $60 or $70.
On the other hand, you have an NFT that will cost you 0.2 ETH or 0.5 ETH or whatever it is, or if you’re going to buy it off of the floor, maybe 3-5 ETH. They’re just completely different kinds of mechanisms and appreciation of value.
I think that’s going to be really interesting for gamers to get their head around, especially because a lot of developers have really abused these relationships that they have with their games with loot boxes and the like, and I think gamers are just really concerned about NFTs to really just turn into more abuse from the developer side.
There are companies that have a damaged reputation, so, you know, it’s not surprising that gamers would distrust them.
I also think another aspect is that once games introduce NFTs, it’s not going to be a real NFT. It’s going to be something that’s going to still live inside the server of the developer.
Like, I have a hard time believing developers are going to give you access to your character or your guns, or your weapons outside of their interface, and you can’t just do whatever you want with them. Some might, I think, a lot won’t, so what you’re gonna end up happening is you’re gonna end up having like this fake NFT.
And I think that’s what gamers are really concerned about. So that’s a problem for the big established developers who have abused their relationship with users. And that’s their problem.
I think on our side, what we need to do is really focus on what we do best, which is create amazing characters, make sure they live outside of our ecosystem so you can grab them, pull them from the server and just put them into a game that’s connected to your wallet, and you can do whatever you want with it.
So if we’re blown off the face of the earth, you’ll be able to use your character regardless. You could use it for whatever you want, and you can make games with it. I think that the first step is already going to be great.
And then as we build out experiences and as we actually create a really immersive and exciting and rich ecosystem, I think it’s going to be attractive for gamers to know that they can go play games, collect content, even if it’s more expensive than what they’re used to, but it’s actually theirs, and they own it.
So I would rather pay more, but it’s mine. It doesn’t just live on a server. And then, all of a sudden, the developer, for whatever reason, confiscates it. I think that the balance needs to be well done, and we need to build our community from the ground up.
And once gamers see that there’s a community that trusts a brand and they have a rich and immersive ecosystem, I think that’s going to be very attractive.
