3D gaming metaverse Nifty Island has published a new dev roadmap focusing on the short-term and long-term future plans that are planned to be integrated into the web3 platform. The long-term milestones are still subject to change, while the short-term ones are more set in stone. Let’s find out more about what’s likely to happen in the next 6 months before diving into the ecosystem’s longer-term goals.
What’s Included in Nifty Island’s Short-Term Roadmap?
The short-term roadmap features 6 milestones that the developers plan to achieve in the following 3-6 months. Achieving these plans will help make this blockchain gaming platform more enjoyable and rewarding to spend time in.
The 6 development tracks the team is actively focused on include the following:
- UGC/Sandbox – General Logical Hooks & Animation UGC Support
- Rewards – live $ISLAND Token earnings & UGC Quests
- Progression & World – details TBA
- Playground Games – more playground game options via gameplay plugins, custom Playground Game logic, new playground game, Spectate Mode
- Web App Improvements – chat functionality, enhanced marketplace discoverability
- Bug fixes, optimizations, and quality of life improvements
UGC/Sandbox
The first listed milestone is focused on adding more features to enhance the UGC side of the platform. To make the content creation experience more accessible to everyone and help creators deliver more engaging and interactive web3 gaming experiences, the developers are focused on introducing input-output events that are referred to as General Logical Hooks. This system will make it easy to set up many different interactive elements, such as setting up a button to open up a door, activating an animation, using NFTs to unlock doors, and so on.
Speaking of animations, the team is also working on delivering animation UGC support, meaning you’ll be able to attach custom animations to models submitted to the Forge in order to bring various objects to life.
Rewards
For the second milestone, the developers are focused on integrating reward-related features to give players more opportunities to win prizes. This includes integrating the play to earn system with Palm NFT perks to enable live $ISLAND token earnings after the token’s airdrop and TGE take place on November 1st, 2024. With this system, anyone will be able to claim $ISLAND tokens periodically by converting the in-game Blooms currency at a dynamic rate. Blooms can already be earned through gameplay and quest completion. Speaking of quests, further fueling the play and earn experience will be the introduction of UGC Quests, allowing you to host your own quests featuring engaging custom gameplay and prizes for players to compete for, incentivizing them to spend time on your island.
Progression & World
The 3rd milestone is all about player progression and making this metaverse feel more alive by having numerous tasks and experiences to enjoy across various user islands, moving ”beyond game-fueled objectives to a more robust, living ecosystem.” Details on what’s exactly planned will be revealed in the months ahead.
Playground Games
In the 4th milestone, players can look forward to seeing more options for Playground Games, the mini-game modes that you can enjoy on various islands. To add more variety to these mini-games, the team is introducing a gameplay plugin system in which you can add plugins that alter gameplay mechanics, such as abilities, to help you create unique games. Further helping you deliver more quality games will be the addition of a system that allows you to develop custom playground game logic, meaning you will be able to place special abilities to teams, set up your own win conditions, and much more, enabling the community to develop “infinitely diverse gameplay experiences.”
Next to all these new creator tools, you can look forward to seeing a new pre-made playground game mode launch in the coming months, with the game said to be made with community feedback in mind. Another community-requested addition coming soon is Spectate Mode, a highly-requested feature that lets players watch competitive matches, paving the way for more competitive gaming by making it easier to host tournaments and stream events.
Web App & Overall Improvements
With the 5th milestone, it’s all about improving the platform’s web app. Specifically, this means adding chat functionality to make it easier to continue chatting with other players while improving marketplace discoverability by categorizing assets by artists “and other metrics” to make it simple to follow your favorite creators and find quality assets.
Last but not least is a development track focused purely on making bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and optimizations for a more accessible and polished metaverse gaming experience. The team states that they “aren’t committing to specifics,” but that reducing loading times is one of the improvements they’d like to make in the near future.
What Are Nifty Island’s Long-Term Goals?
The longer-term plans include making the world of Nifty Island more accessible to a wider gaming audience by launching on the Epic Games Store as well as on mobile devices while adding in-game content creation tools that will encourage players to share their experiences in this metaverse on social media platforms, leading to more visibility.
Next to enhancing the ecosystem’s organic growth, there are also plans to add in new systems for island creation, which may include destructible environments, vehicles, or other new gameplay mechanics to give creators more freedom to create engaging web3 gaming experiences. Alongside new systems for island creation, the developers would also like to completely open up playground games to UGC to turn this ecosystem into “a fully-fledged UGC-driven world” where anyone can develop their own unique single-player and multiplayer playground games.
There are also long-term plans to help make Nifty Island the “go-to destination in web3 for prize-based gaming.” To do this, the team wants to introduce more social gaming experiences that might represent high-stakes and risk to earn games such as poker and roulette. They’re also looking into bringing larger third-party token rewards to make it possible for other web3 projects and protocols to integrate into this social gaming ecosystem, which in turn could help them drive engagement to their projects.
You can check out the new dev roadmap for Nifty Island yourself by heading to the official guidebook, which also contains details on $ISLAND token utility, Legends NFTs, and play to airdrop token distribution. The final wave of the Nifty Island play to airdrop campaign ends on November 1st, so you still have a bit of time to jump in and potentially win your share of the $ISLAND token airdrop.
