The Birth of NewPangea
NOTORIOUS FROGS MARCH ON
The Notorious Frogs of Frogland have been warped into the metaverse: 10,000 unique, collectible NFT Frogs were finished, polished to pixel perfection, and set aglow with personality, ready to have fun and come to life with the help of their hodlers.
The architects of the NewPangea Metaverse are, of course, thrilled with the reception, and, after a few days of wonder and catching up on Z’s, immediately hit the ground running because the Notorious Frogs were never meant to stop at being born. The Frogs are the first step toward the establishment of Frogland, the first of many districts in the NewPangea Metaverse.
NEWPANGEA RISING
The Notorious Frog team has already begun working with our development partners at Dream Reality Interactive to build the NewPangea metaverse. The wizards at DRI have been hard at work bringing in the right talent to build this project and this past week we officially kicked off development with the leadership teams on both sides. We can’t even tell you how excited we are for this team! The Notorious Frogs creatives are working closely with the creative team at the studio to ensure that the design and buildout of Frogland — the central plateau of NewPangea — retains all the charm, wit, and idiosyncrasy evident in each Notorious Frog, and that their beauty, air of mystery, and potential for danger is reflected in every aspect of the metaverse’s design.
MORE THAN A PLACE. AN EXPERIENCE.
The design of Frogland is not just about its look and feel. Metaverse aesthetics go beyond the sense of sight and the creation of a space. NewPangea is being built to be much more than a place to visit, it is a place to have unique experiences, to discover ways that the presence of others will change the experience, and even alter the course of events throughout the entire metaverse. Our metaverse is being architected with bespoke quests, games, and challenges that take place at sites and scenes that are being composed now in the Frogland discord.
Fun and dramatics, potions and galleries, everything to tickle the senses and to trigger wonder and curiosity is being constructed out in the open with feedback directly from the community. Today’s audience wants a story that is a game and a game that is a story. Today’s audience doesn’t want to just sit in seats, but to walk and talk their way into discovery and trouble and victory and transformation. Today’s audience is not an abstract group, it includes the Frogland Dream Interactive teams, and we all want to be part of an experience where we do all the above, and that reflects how we affect others along the way.
COMMUNITY MATTERS
In order to deliver that promise, the Notorious Frog team knows that it takes more than having the wide-range of talents of their entire team and of the game studio’s staff. Giving our audience what it wants requires community input and participation. The Frogland.io Discord server began hopping weeks before the release and it continues to drive the project forward in ways that are unique in the NFT space.
Right off the bat, community members wanted to start playing the game so they initiated an F-RPG (Frog Role Playing Game) led by an experienced RPG dungeon master. The core team was approached and “Murder at the Dragonfly Social Club” was born as the first of many quests to be composed as a collaboration between the core team and the community. Our Frogland head writer, Bugs, sketched the basic outline of a murder mystery that acted as the seed for this community initiative. Criminal rap sheets that had been submitted by individual community members during the presale were then curated to find potential cast members. We had an absolute blast reading them and reached out to some of our favorites to participate, and received an overwhelming “YES!!”.
The game’s character set-up included ten most-wanted ‘usual suspects’, two newspaper reporters, a radio reporter, investigators, a psychic and a spiritualist. All the characters/players were members of the community. The project’s community programming squad developed a dice roll script. A tabloid newspaper article sensationalizing the murder was published, the rap sheets of the usual suspects were leaked to the community, rival reporters began issuing their own take on the events and in little time the game was afoot. Twice-weekly game sessions began with a concurrent radio voice channel broadcasting the play-by-play, acting out the drama in addition to reporting it.
Frogland’s first RPG will arrive at its season finale reveal just a few days after publishing this article. In addition to being fun for the players and entertainment for the community, the game is a model for developing new content to bring into the NewPangea metaverse. The RPG has already bootstrapped new concepts in discord that are prime contenders for real locations in the 3D world including the Casino, The Stash House and other settings in Frogland where camaraderie and opportunity await those enterprising individuals ready to try their luck at destiny. The game’s “Vision Master” — a member of the community — has added his own inventive elements to the base story through the course of the game, artifacts, landscapes and characters that will now become part of the metaverse’s roadmap and design specification. Even the core team doesn’t know the outcome!
CO-CREATION OF THE METAVERSE
The Murder at the Dragonfly Social Club has established a framework that the Frogland and NewPangea architects are using as a core development tool to curate community input and content into the world being built. Essentially, the game’s coherence and experience has been a proving ground that addresses a big question that new members and the growing number of Frogland observers ask: “Wen Metaverse?”
The Frogland project is the gateway to the NewPangea metaverse, and now that the first gate has been passed, the paths to the next ones are open and the requirements to pass the gates ahead are clear. There has been a Roadmap (Toadmap!) since the project’s inception and the physical buildout, now underway, will have a lot of transparency for the community. Live streams and live conversations with the creative and dev teams from both Frogland and the game studio will begin for the Frogland community in the coming weeks, and the flow of concept art materials will begin as well. The purpose of the transparency is to ensure that the vision and experience of the metaverse is built on a solid foundation, informed by our top-flight designers and by the wisdom and desires of the community.
So, if anyone asks you “Wen Metaverse?” The answer is “Right Here! Right now!”
