Key Points
We’re thrilled to announce our latest game studio partner on Ronin: award-winning developer Zillion Whales. They’re building Wild Forest – a real-time strategy (RTS) game, featuring fast-paced PvP battles and card-collecting mechanics.
Wild Forest will undergo phased integrations with Sky Mavis accounts, Ronin wallets, a seasonal leaderboard system, and in-app purchases.
Mystic Axie holders and select creators will be granted exclusive early access to the game.
We’re thrilled to announce our latest game studio partner on Ronin: award-winning developer Zillion Whales! They’re building Wild Forest – an RTS featuring fast-paced PvP battles and card-collecting elements. In March of 2023, we revealed the first five game studios building on Ronin. Today, we welcome our sixth official partner as Ronin fulfills its destiny of becoming the premiere gaming blockchain in the world. Here’s everything you need to know:
What is Wild Forest?
Wild Forest is a real-time strategy (RTS) game for mobile devices featuring fast-paced PvP battles and card-collecting elements. In WildForest, your mission is to destroy your opponent’s castle before they can destroy yours. The battlefield is contained to a single screen, which is different from RTS games like Age of Empires where you have to scroll through massive swaths of land. Gameplay is easy to understand, and hard to master: spawn units, generate resources, attack your enemy – and repeat until victory. Games are fast-paced, which means a battle can be lost with one wrong click.
Wild Forest is free to play and all players will be able to earn rewards by competing in seasonal leaderboards while experiencing the pure, old-school exhilaration of RTS games. In the future, you’ll be able to trade in-game assets like Unit and Skin NFTs, $WF tokens, and more on the secondary market. The game is currently in alpha with invite-only access. It will be made publicly available on the Play Store, AppStore, and Mavis Hub as development progresses. Here’s how it works:
Preparing for Battle: Building a Deck
Each player builds a deck of cards before the battle begins. This deck will determine the types of units you’re able to deploy. For example, the default deck starts players off with a balanced mix of close-range infantry, long-range archers, a modest air force, powerful artillery… You get the idea. These are called units, and they have punchy names like Wolf the Knight, Fox the Sniper, and Turtle the Tank. Our alpha-testers found the piglet archers and Fox the Sniper to be a deadly combo, but that’s all the strategy we’ll give away for now!
As players earn experience points and gold from battle, they can start reinforcing their decks. For example, all units start at Level 1. After a handful of battles, players can upgrade their piglet archers to Level 2 and accumulate gold. This lends itself well to blockchain-based digital ownership: imagine people trading whole or parts of decks and piles of gold on a secondary market.
How Territories Work
Once a player has finished building their deck, they enter a match against an opponent. Alpha testers have had to play against bots in the Beta version because there are so few players online, but it’s easy to picture a similar matching experience to Axie Infinity: Origins once the leaderboard gets going and players start to rally around the rewards.
When the battle begins, territories on the map are unclaimed except for your and your opponent’s bases. You start with one unit who you can send to claim these neutral areas, after which point you can start building on them. The maps are simple, and the territory outlines were fixed with one or two sections that can accommodate buildings. That means it’s different from other RTS games like Roller Coaster Tycoon where you can build anywhere you want. As you claim your territories, your opponent is claiming theirs. You can claim enemy territory as your own by placing a unit inside the outline of their territory. However, it’s never that easy
The Importance of Buildings
Players can create three types of buildings: Towers, Mines, and Barracks. Towers are defensive fortifications that fire at enemy units within range – level them up to increase range and damage dealt. Mines generate energy which enables players to do things like spawn units, place buildings, and upgrade them for more power. Barracks are where you spawn all new units. Together, players have to manage their buildings while waging war against their opponent. This means you’re either building, attacking, or losing!
PvP Battle
Battles are fast-paced, and the tides of fortune can change in an instant. As soon as the timer starts, players can claim territory and attack each other. Our alpha-testers found that building Barracks as soon as possible was a good strategy: it allowed them to spawn units to protect the territories they claimed in the first 15 seconds of the match. Players might consider placing towers on the outer limits of their territory while building more Barracks and Mines closer to their castles. This grants the ability to defend against early attacks while growing the capacity to spawn units and upgrade buildings.
How to Get Access to Wild Forest
We’ve started to roll out access to Mystic axie holders and select Axie/Ronin creators. If you’d like to get early access, follow the Wild Forest Twitter (X) account, join their Discord server, and fill out the form below to receive your exclusive invite.
Meet Zillion Whales
Zillion Whales was founded in 2013 by a small group of RTS fans. They went on to release four critically acclaimed strategy games including the award-winning Mushroom Wars 2. Their mission is to bring exceptional RTS gaming experiences to modern mobile platforms and onboard traditional gamers to Web3. They understand the importance of a sustainable economy that ensures equal competition between paying and non-paying players in blockchain gaming.
“We are thrilled to join the Ronin family and admire the warm welcome and support from Sky Mavis. We are excited to bring our strategy games expertise we forged for years to Web3.”
- CEO Andrey Korotkov
Final Thoughts
We’re excited to bring a new genre of game onto Ronin and support Zillion Whales as they grow their community. Ronin is fast-becoming a blockchain for gamers and builders of all kinds. Thank you to our stalwart community for sharing our vision and forging ahead alongside us. We’ve come a long way together and we’re just getting started.
