Filling the Void

In the era of lan centers during the Counter Strike (CS) days circa (2003-2007), you were likely to be using 8 to 12 megabyte hard drives on home PCs that were barely capable of sending instant messages. Most of them did not have the hardware to handle any serious gaming as people would flock to these PC arcades to play Counter Strike, Maple Story, Warcraft, and Gunbound.

Gunbound had little to no marketing, yet it was a staple in any lan center. It was one of the many new releases featured on newgrounds.com where people searched endlessly for browser or client-based games. Most players share similarly fond memories of the game as well as nostalgic sorrow that they derive from the game’s tragic decline from immense popularity.

Gunbound was a Worms artillery shooter modification, that focused on unique characters and tanks, with unique ammunition. The game garnered universal appeal among teenagers and elementary kids and had a relatively unisex aesthetic as far as the character tanks and avatar cosmetics were concerned. For anyone that played it, they would agree that it just naturally cliqued as a repeatable and enjoyable experience.

Gameplay was simple and very easy to pick up.
Players had a wide selection of cute and awesome characters to choose from.
Avatars were well-designed(aesthetically) and customizable.
They all shoot special rockets and ammo at each other with interesting effects.
The damage visuals from landing hard shots were extremely satisfying.
Every character / tank was uniquely powerful and had some form of learning curve.
Players were able to hammer their opponents within a matter of seconds.
The game did not take long to reach the highest level of skillful battle.

It was THE casual & competitive dream of a game.

Gunbound is likely one of the largest active player bases today, had it not deteriorate due to the combination of hackers coupled with aggressive pay-to-win matchmaking.

Anti-cheat systems were not commonplace around that time in the early 2000s and so players would often find scripters who deployed aimbots that would land perfect shots which diminished the skill / dexterity component of targeting. Second, the avatar skins that players purchased ended up compromising the integrity of fair play and competition when the developers made the fatal decision to incentivize pay-to-win. Most players in Gunbound were quite displeased when fresh account noobies either consistently land shots from use of a game script or dishing out twice the amount of damage while only receiving half of any incoming damage of shots hurled at them regardless of one’s skill. Once fair play ceased to exist, the game entered into an inevitable death spiral. The rest was history.

Modern Gunbound is a mere shadow of its former glory. It was built with little attention to the many key components of the original game that players initially fell in love with. More than half of the characters are not competitively viable. Most of the maps are annoying AF to navigate or to plan shots around. Last but not least, their power-up items system is shallow and uninspiring.

To sum it up from a player's perspective, one may conflate Gunbound and Modern Gunbound, to Godfather and Godfather II. For others, it is the difference between using Windows 7 and Windows 10.

There has yet to be a competent Gunbound successor. There currently isn’t a massively popular PewPew Kingdom type of game and that’s what makes the project interesting and worth building. We are taking the best parts of a proven genre and enhancing the game by adding clever mechanics from modern era multiplayer titles that would make sense for a turn-based game, perhaps making PewPew Kingdom that much more engaging than Gunbound ever was!

Not only are we passionate about getting the tokenomics right, we seek to build a proper and open economy that would create meaningful ownership of in-game assets. NFTs should be designed around the game and not vice versa. We didn't launch a set of jpeg pfps or an overhyped project. We elected to design a system around a fun-to-play game first and foremost. We built a working demo in order to showcase our ability to ship. Only then did we began the NFT design process by carefully crafting the assets and their utility around the game to be functional, collectible, and valuable. We care about building good sh!t.

PewPew Kingdom will be an ongoing development endeavor well after its full launch as the greatest moat that any game can have is a well-treated community and a youthful team that simply refuses to grow up, while electing to endlessly iterate on what the "better" experience could be. There are no finish lines, only fast lanes.