Can You Reach Your Final Form™?

Ex Populus
6 min readSep 17, 2022

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Final Form will soon be in early-access and Ex Populus is just as excited as you are. In this post we are pleased to share some more information on what you should expect from early access and more information on the journey the Ex Populus team has been on the past few months. For all the ways to stay up-to-date, check here: https://expopulus.com/games/final-form

Evolution

Since the release of the first Ex Populus trading cards earlier this year, the Ex Populus team has been thinking of ways to expand upon the trading cards with a gaming experience targeted to collectors and trading card fans around the world. Core-to-the-spirit of many trading card systems is the idea of evolution. Evolution typically includes increasing your card or character’s power level as a result of some effort, sacrifice or similar mechanism.

The key focus and feature of the first early access release is giving you everything you need to increase the power and rarity of your trading cards through the process of evolution. Here’s how it works:

When you enter the game, you must pledge your cards to “The God’s Tooth”, a strange obelisk on an alien planet with a storied, “multi-versal” history. As a result of your pledge the Obelisk will extract a substance from your trading card called Chromos. Chromos is important, because this is the substance you need to evolve your trading cards and to eventually reach your Final Form. The amount of Chromos you receive, to start, will be based on the rarity tier of the card you pledge (common, rare, epic, legendary). The higher the tier of your card, the more Chromos you will receive.

Once you have enough Chromos, you may evolve your cards. Evolution requires a specific amount of Chromos for each tier (rare, epic, and legendary) and four cards, one of each house that you are ready to BURN. For example, if you want to evolve a rare card, you will need four common cards, one of each house (Man, Machine, Beast and God) and enough Chromos to fuel the evolution. In the process, all of your Chromos and your four common cards are burned, “gone forever like the snows of yesteryear,” and you receive your single, rarer, higher tiered card. Evolution as a result requires patience and sacrifice.

Incremental Experience Meets Gacha

Incremental games have become a beloved genre in the game industry over the past decade. Incremental games “make fun” of the meta-systems implemented in traditional MMOs where players are asked to do similar things over-and-over again, but with exponentially increasing difficulty and rewards. Each step-up is a new “increment”. In Final Form the incremental experience centers around the production of Chromos, the fuel required for evolution. The first early access release of the game relies exclusively on Ex Populus trading cards (DAGs and Iron Pigeons soon after) to climb the increments of Chromos production that fuels your evolution. As you pledge your cards and evolve them, you climb the incremental tiers of the game until you eventually reach Legendary.

Gacha is a known game mechanic that is leveraged in Final Form’s design. Gacha is a reference to many games that require players to complete sets of items to achieve a specific goal. Most recently, Genshin Impact has become well known for leveraging Gacha system in its game design. In Final Form, the Gacha system is simple; players need to collect one card from each house (Man, Machine, Beast and God) of the same tier (common, rare, epic) in order to have what they need to evolve into a card of the next tier up. When you evolve, your completed Gacha set and Chromos evolutionary fuel is burned and gone forever. Your new, higher tiered card remains.

What you should expect from the first early-access release is to pledge your cards, extract Chromos as a result of the pledge and burning your Chromos and completed sets of cards to evolve a single card of a higher tier.

Early Access & LiveOps

Early access means the game is still under heavy development. Like most games today, we consider Final Form a service. Our team of professional designers, creatives, developers and production staff (and professionals from other companies and groups) will work to expand the game beyond its core functionality. How the game is expanded is based on what we see in analytics, your direct feedback and our own vision and expertise. The plan is to provide frequent, but small updates to the Final Form game experience beyond the initial, core functionality that is released initially. We are excited to bring you an entertaining experience!

Mike Tyson’s Iron Pigeons

We are also excited to announce a few short day’s after Final Form’s release, Mike Tyson will drop his Iron Pigeons trading card set that will be fully compatible with Final Form. Just a few short days after Final Form’s release, you will be able to evolve your Pigeons in Final Form, including cross evolution with Decentralized Automous GigaUnits!

Final Form Development

Final form is the result of world-class professionals with game-design, game production, animated film and other related backgrounds coming together to create an early access game experience over a relatively short time-frame. Many of the game and animated film projects this team has worked on have taken years to complete. Dave LeRiche, Final Form’s producer worked on titles at Wargaming, Ubisoft and Blizzard that took several years to complete. Mark Harris, the game’s creative director is the supervising animator on many Pixar films which also take years to finish.

Ex Populus CEO Tobias Batton came to the team with a specific request — let’s get the Ex Populus community and collectors an experience they can interact within a few months. As the goals of the project were discussed, all acknowledged that the key to delivering something of quality in a short time frame would be to reduce the scope and feature set of the project. Despite this, as the team crafted a vision for the game that was focused on collectible rarity and evolution — they realized the scope of the vision had quickly grown into a potential multi-year project. The team decided early on that the core, critical functionality of the project was the ability for players to evolve their trading cards and that this functionality should be the target of an early access release. With this approach, the players would not have to wait years and could enjoy an early, core experience much sooner.

As early development began, the team decided that it wanted the game’s logic to be completed decentralized and available for everyone to see on the Blockchain. Prior to this decision, the game’s logic was running partially on the blockchain, partially on traditional servers and partially in the game’s client. Moving everything completely to the blockchain meant changing some of the design of the game to stay in-line with the new goal of full decentralization. At this critical stage of development the company realized that it had lost ~2 months of development given the strategic shift, but that despite this loss of progress, the ‘fully-decentralized’ early-access release was just around the corner (whew!).

Building games in Web3 is a new paradigm with many challenges and hurdles that developers in traditional gaming don’t face. Its been an incredible learning experience for the team at Ex Populus. We are excited and proud to share Final Form with you and your fellow collectors! Want to get ready to play Final Form?

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Ex Populus

To bring joy to people around the globe with the world’s most compelling games and entertainment at the highest level possible.