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Ever wanted to meet your NFT "frens" in a Bored Ape Yacht Club-inspired swamp?
Another World is a metaverse game in which players can flex their Bored Apes (BAYC), Clone X, OnChainMonkey, and Azuki NFTs in a 3D environment that pays homage to both the Apes’ swampy homelands and Azuki’s red arches and Japanese anime-inspired aesthetic. The game is not officially tied to any of those projects, however.
“People are always imagining what it would be like to live inside those Web3 worlds,” Another World creator and ScienceVR founder Jackie Lee told Decrypt in an interview. Lee makes up half of Another World’s dev team and is the only developer working full-time on the project.
Testing an in-game wearable item @apecoin pic.twitter.com/FekJX9ilWd
— jackie.eth (@JackieLeeETH) March 28, 2023
Another World, which Decrypt playtested in an early stage, is built using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5—a software toolkit used by many major game studios—and will be released on the Epic Games Store. Lee, who is a graduate of MIT, told Decrypt that he also received a grant from the Optimism Foundation to develop the NFT-centric experience.
Another World will not sell any in-game NFTs or crypto, but players will be able to connect their crypto wallets using a Tokenproof integration which appears as a QR code board in-game.
Currently supporting sign-in with @tokenproof to load @ensdomains as username pic.twitter.com/rzVMNKDLqe
— Another World (@anotherworlddao) March 22, 2023
There are also plans to provide different digital wearables for players’ avatars based on what they hold in their wallets. Lee said that players will automatically see certain wearables appear in their in-game inventory based on what coins they own in their connected wallet.
Those wearables will be free NFTs minted on Ethereum scaling network Optimism. For example, players will get a blue ApeCoin hoodie if they hold over 42 APE, the Bored Ape-themed cryptocurrency, in their wallets.
Copyright infringement claims are still a concern, said Lee, despite some NFT projects like the Bored Apes offering expansive commercial use rights for NFT owners. For instance, he’s trying to gain permission to use BAYC logos in Another World’s Ape-inspired swamplands.
“I’m still talking to them to see if I can properly use the logo,” Lee said of BAYC creators Yuga Labs. “Very likely, it’s not going to be easy.”
Testing energy shields in the PVP zone #web3 #gamedev @UnrealEngine pic.twitter.com/kzdNCJXvBY
— Another World (@anotherworlddao) April 30, 2023
Lee also revealed plans to offer a Pepe-themed frog wearable mask for those who own a substantial amount of the frog-inspired meme token, PEPE.
But Another World won’t just be a metaverse to explore and chat in with a handful of token-gated regions—there will also be a player-versus-player (PVP) mode in which NFT avatars can battle each other. Lee shared that there will be NFTs for players to acquire in the PVP zone.
Its first season will have a $100,000 prize pool sponsored by a grant from the Optimism Foundation, and winners will be determined by whomever has earned the most high-value NFTs by the end of the season.
While Another World is still in development, it’s a promising tease at the long-promised idea of interoperability in the metaverse—a way for users to bring their NFT and crypto assets into other spaces, and in this case, further benefit from them as well.
Another World will join the growing number of NFT project-spanning metaverse offerings like Worldwide Webb and Ready Player Me, which allow players to enjoy games as their NFT avatars.