State of Aurory Address - March 2023
State of Aurory Address - March 2023
In this edition of our monthly development update, we’re excited to share some of the progress that we saw on many fronts. As we’ve mentioned recently, our primary focus as of late has been on Aurory Adventures, our upcoming JRPG, where players will follow a rich storyline as they travel across the worlds of Tokane and Antiq, completing quests and defeating enemies in order to save Aurory from invading forces. We’re expecting to ship the first chapter of this game (The Village: Prologue to Adventures) in early access for Aurorians first by the end of April! Don't worry if you don't have an Aurorian though; there will be more ways to gain access soon after the initial launch.
Alongside the active sprint towards the initial launch of Adventures, we also had the pleasure of attending the Game Developers Conference (GDC). We managed to secure a last-minute booth that allowed us to have a space where potential/existing partners, fellow developers, and gaming enthusiasts could demo Tactics and learn more about our latest plans and innovations. We also co-sponsored a Web3 gaming-themed event with MagicEden, in celebration of the launch of their brand-new gaming page.
But that's not all—we've made lots of other exciting progress that we can't wait to share with you. So join us as we dive right in!
DESIGN
Due to our hyper-focus on Adventures, Tactics has not been able to receive as much love and regular updates as some would like. Despite this, we were happy to push out 0.2.9 in March, our first Tactics patch since opening to the public in December.
One of the biggest updates that came with 0.2.9 was in-game text localization for five new languages (Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese), which will further reinforce our efforts to create onboarding features that are essential to growing a global player base. Along with that, 0.2.9 brought more tweaks and bug fixes, as well as the lowering of the default Neftie stats to 10%.
You can read the full 0.2.9 patch notes on our website!
Another big change that happened this month, which also contributed to the decision to lower the default Neftie stats to 10%, was the launch of our new Incubator 2.0 and Rarity System. We invite you to read the Substack article we’ve written about it. In summary, the goal is to keep the ecosystem sustainable in the long run, and an update was required to make sure that higher rarity Nefties were not becoming too common!
We’ve also made some tweaks to our Tactics Season Structure! Following feedback received from players, seasons will now be longer (approximately 3 months) in order to give our team ample time to launch new seasons with additional content, patches, and rewards!
With almost everything ready for The Village: Prologue to Adventures, the Design team is already working on the next big Adventures patch, including talks around Neftie leveling, lands, general scope, lore, and more!
The team is also continuing to explore and validate designs for a revamped version of Aurorians on Expedition. We understand that it has been a large pain point for some of our holders, and we are working hard to create something much more engaging and satisfying in the V2 version.
On the UIX Design side, the following Adventures-related tasks were of the highest priority:
Inventory integration.
Heads-up display integration.
Dialog system integration.
Animation and motion design alignment.
Framing and VFX.
And secondarily, the following web ecosystem tasks:
Adventure integration.
Aurorians on Expeditions V2.
Player profile page.
ART
Our talented Environmental Art team continued their work on polishing and optimizing various Village elements while also working on various biomes in Adventures.
The Character Art team worked on some concept art for new Nefties, various consumables, and the artwork for our new Expedition rewards! They’ve also created some awesome new banner artwork that will bring some much-needed freshness to our website and socials!
On the 3D modeling side, our artists have spent some time the past few weeks working on the new Trainer NPCs, as well as some Neftie variations (Wooltail, Dodorex), and Halloween Zombie Nefties skins.
With all of the surprise appearances that’ll be found within the Village and Speed Blitz, our Rigging team has had a production line of characters needing some bones that will allow our animators to bring them to life. We’re happy to report that Kitty and our Trainers are ready to go!
Animation
Just like our rigging team, our Animators have had lots to work on and have been bringing our characters to life one by one. Some of these include new animations for Nefties (Blockchoy, Axobubble, N9, and Shiba), as well as multiple emotes for Max/Aurorians and even Helios!
Audio
Our gifted Audio team has been pouring their hearts into new music and SFX that we can’t wait for you to hear in The Village. We think that your ears will really like what they hear!
Throughout March, these audio-related tasks have consisted more specifically of:
Integration of music in the game.
Integration of SFX in the game.
Sketching and production of the Speed Blitz music.
TECH
It’s always a busy month for the Tech team, especially when there are multiple releases! March started out with the release of our new homepage for our website, and it ended with the release of 0.2.9.
The department-specific tasks that were tackled by our Tech team consisted of the following:
Web3:
Releases:
Integrating SOL into SyncSpace.
Landing page support.
Integrating NFT Support in SyncSpace.
Backpack gaming support.
Nefty rarity support.
Adventures UX
Defining requirement constraints.
Landing page support.
Upgrading to OpenAPI and React Query.
Bug fixes.
Backend:
Gameplay
Blitz / Adventure
Support for full E2E integration and testing
Production readiness.
Addressing unexpected bugs for L1 flow and L2 features.
Neftie selection and integration support.
Configuration - elemental matrix and ability load.
Platform and Economy
NFTs
Preparing the Prairie egg for release.
Marketplace V2 implementation.
Planning and kick-off for cross-chain initiative.
Refund bet flow for Blitz on SyncSpace - cancel match or error cases.
Infrastructure:
Aurory Tactics
0.2.9 release.
Planning connectivity improvements (gameserver graceful shutdown, global accelerator, join in progress).
Adventures
Gitlab pipeline configuration and deployment
Adventures build deployment.
Adventures autoscaling implementation.
MARKETING
On the marketing side, as we mentioned earlier, the big event of the month was the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco! The team had a lot of great meetings with existing and potential partners, as well as some journalists! It was a pleasure to showcase Aurory Tactics to a mixed crowd of Web3/Web2 gamers and professionals.
We were delighted to be one of the launch partners with Magic Eden for their push into gaming with their new Magic Eden games page. Our event we sponsored with them was a real treat, and we can’t wait to push more of the Web3 gaming narrative with them!
We were also happy to collaborate with the Dialect team, who are building what could be compared to the Whatsapp of Web3. The collaboration consisted of them giving early access to our holders, as well as a few other communities (Claynosaurz, FFF, DAA, and Geckos) that we are close with, to get access to a mintable Aurory-themed NFT sticker pack that will be usable in various chats on Dialect.
As we look to push for more IP-integration partnerships with fellow builders in the ecosystem, we’ve been in some early talks with GamingBigBrain at Papu SuperStars about potential collaborations and were able to secure whitelist spots for our holders of the free mint they held in early March!
We are continuing to push on merch and shared a few sneak peeks on Twitter. Some good feedback was shared on Discord, and we’ll be gathering more from the community as we look to lock in our first round of production very soon.
To recap, March was another strong month. For those who may have missed it in our recent announcement, we officially pushed back the release date of The Village: Prologue to Adventures to the end of April in order to give our team a bit more time to polish and debug so that we can give players the best first experience possible!
Although we may have missed our initial target of delivering this first Adventures experience by the end of Q1, we feel that we are going into Q2 with some good momentum that won’t be slowing down anytime soon!
Let the countdown to Adventures begin!
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