Caveworld Progress Update #1

Caveworld
7 min readJan 2, 2022

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Dear fellow Cavemen,

Welcome to the first, of many, Caveworld development updates! This blog post is a small window into what the Cave Team has been up to for the past few weeks/months. We hope these details make you as excited as they make us, and provide some assurance that Caveworld is set to be one of the most incredible Play-to-Earn experiences around! Let’s begin.

Cave Team Expansion (only the beginning)

Quickly after the Crypto Cavemen Club found themselves in thousands of wallets, and CAVE coin dropped soon after, the team has been inundated with interest from potential investors, partners, and collaborators. After opening up our first Seed Round, which will be announced upon its completion, we’ve been working hard to expand the Cave Team.

This hiring process has been ongoing for 6–8 weeks, and has been accompanied by dozens (and dozens) of interviews with candidates. Our team has been seeking exceptional talent, and we won’t settle for anything less. Despite the challenging labor landscape, Caveworld has found itself with some amazing new team members. The search is not over, but we’re excited to mention some of our new talents throughout this post.

Caveworld Development Team:

Believe it or not, Unreal Engine developers are extremely hard to find, especially during a time when people around the globe are spending more time at home, and even more time gaming! This growth in popularity is great for Caveworld’s future, but makes hiring much more challenging! That didn’t stop us, however, because we’re happy to announce the addition of TWO incredible game developers! Let’s meet them!

Firstly, we’d like to introduce Sergey, a Senior Unreal Engine Developer. Sergey has worked as graphics programmer for OVER 20 YEARS! Over the past few years he’s been busy building an impressive suite of products for apartment and interior design and creating VR/AR experiences for global museums, banks, airports, etc. Over his career, however, he built some incredible 3D games and algorithms that won an award from Nvidia and were world-renowned for their popularity. We cannot understate how skilled Sergey is in this space, and we are honored that he has joined the Caveworld team full-time.

Next, let’s meet Michael, our newest Technical Game Artist! She prides herself in her abilities to utilize math and geometry to conjure up incredible 3D assets that perfectly simulate things we see in the natural world. She specializes in asset pipelines, optimizations, and lighting/material synthesis. If you don’t know what that means, not to worry! You can just trust us that she’s absolutely incredible at what she does and is vital to making Caveworld a reality!

During our hiring process, we asked interviewees to complete some tasks that would require skill, but also be doable in a short amount of time. We shared this video on our Discord, but figured we’d include it here. This was the test that Michael submitted! We know you are all wondering whether Cavemen will be able to shoot fireballs, and that answer is no, for now. However, we can confirm you will all be equally as happy with the abilities we have planned for Cavemen!

A technical test done by Michael, one of our new Technicians, during the hiring process!

Game Design & Testing Team

The data-flow for every aspect of Caveworld, beginning at Wallet Connection.

At first glance, you would think a game needs only artists and developers. Well, that’s not the case. In fact, game dynamics and testing is the most crucial part of a successful experience! With that, we’re happy to announce our game design and testing team has grown! We now have a systems/technicals designer, responsible for designing and running our testing system on machinations, as well as collecting data to see where improvements can be made. Then, we brought on a game designer, responsible for supporting the filtering out our testing data and balancing every aspect of Caveworld’s complexities.

Over the past few weeks, we have focused heavily on testing the 3 main classes: Warriors, Assassins, and Rangers. Warriors come with muscle and hefty armor, Assassins specialize in moves and come with normal armor, and Rangers use their brains to outsmart the others! Additionally, we are running tests on raw cavemen, without weapons or items. This is a crucial step to understanding how the base battle mechanics interact with one another. When it comes to our environment, we are close to finalizing the arena grid and movement systems with the development team, which is incredibly exciting!

To provide a bit of graphical context, this core diagram is utilized to run tests for Caveworld’s game mechanics. As you can see, it certainly isn’t simple! Unfortunately, due to the nature of the design process, it’s blurred out, for now!

A complex game-dynamics diagram, blurred due to being a continued work-in-progress

Art Department:

Perhaps the most exciting growth we’ve seen comes from the art department, which has been hiring more Illustrators, Environment Designers, Animators, Graphic Designers, and more. For example, the image below is just a sneak peek at some of the work of our new illustrator!

Cavemen enjoying some live music, potions, and fresh mammoth meat around the fire.

One of the most exciting developments for Caveworld is our partnership with Funkeyz Animation, a studio with remarkable talent and experience creating teasers and trailers for games like Crash Bandicoot! Check out their site to view some examples of their work: https://www.funkeyzanimation.com/. We look forward to showing you all what they’ve been working on for us very soon! Additionally, in an effort to translate our art content into visual experiences, such as with our recent logo reveal, we have brought on an unbelievably skilled motion graphics professional!

Our marketing materials are not the only things being worked on, however. We have continued working with our core artists, who developed the incredible Cavemen Club, to produce tons of new in-game items. Below is a photo of our newest armor set. This one is called the “Stone Set”!

A Crypto Caveman wearing a full stone-armor set.

Core Team Spotlight: Tarkan Anlar

When it comes to our core team, we’ve added a new member who’s experience we’ve shared with you all already, but we refuse to let you forget! Let’s hear from our Copper Miner, Tarkan Anlar, in his own words.

I am an entrepreneur at heart and have always loved creating new startups and scaling ideas into viable businesses!

When I was 20 years old, I built a browser-based online game called Kapitalist Online that grew to 20,000 daily players. Some time after that, I built a blogging service named Blogaritma, before Blogger came out, and defined the space as a whole. Then, I co-founded a video streaming SaaS company, before ultimately moving on to my latest venture, Scotty.

In this new venture, I went on to raise $20M from VCs and angels from around the world, and turned Scotty from an idea into a company valued at around $100M dollars!

I met Danny [Caveworld’s Head Developer] when we co-founded a live streaming company together. Although the venture didn’t work out, it lead us to build a great friendship that’s ongoing to this day! When I heard about Caveworld, I shared my excitement about the future of Web3. First, he offered me to join the weekly team meeting. Then, after meeting the team, I was amazed by the quality of the discussions and knowledge and knew I had to be part of this team! It’s such a dynamic team to be a part of because all the co-founders are incredibly smart and bring incredible experience and ability.

I know that Caveworld will achieve incredible things!

What’s Coming Soon?

With our rebranding complete, it’s time for game content to start flowing. This includes things like infographics, game assets, illustrations, and more. Plus, we’ll continue to update you all on the high-level partnerships we’ve been forming lately, like the recent one with Fractal!

As our new website, designed by https://estudionk.com, remains a work in progress, we plan to continue our work on redesigning the whitepaper, encyclopedia, and team tab, so that this new website is the ultimate resource for our players!

If you are not a part of our Discord community, we highly recommend it, as we are constantly dropping great alpha to our community. Simply visit discord.gg/caveworld to join, it’s free! For other important links, simply visit http://linktr.ee/Caveworld for the master list of resources!

Finally, look out for our first, of many, teaser trailers within a week or two! You’ll get to see some Cavemen in their natural habitat!

As always, thank you to every Caveman who has remained on this journey with us. This family is one like no other, and we are so excited to continue building Caveworld for all of you!

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Caveworld

A Play-to-Earn project built for true gamers. Built by the Crypto Cavemen Club on Solana.