State of Aurory - December 2022 - Year in Review
State of Aurory - December 2022 - Year in Review
The nature of web3 is for trends and new developments to happen at a much faster pace than most other industries. Mix in a bear market, caused by major meltdowns, and one year can feel like five. In this special edition of the State of Aurory Address, we’d like to revisit some of the highlights and milestones throughout 2022, despite all of the external turmoil battering the broader ecosystem. When considering normal game development timelines, the past year has definitely felt like five after all that we have shipped!
12 months ago, nothing was live. We were growing the team, working on both Aurory Tactics and Adventure, sharing sneak peeks, but we were still waiting on our first web3 release.
In January, we launched our first large community event, called ‘Design a Nefty’. The community chose Krystalo from Jimmycoolice, as the winner. Claire Chibi, our Art Director, helped to polish the concept. Now Krystalo will be one of the many Nefties that are planned to be released in 2023!
To celebrate the Chinese New Year, we airdropped a Munch Moon and Midnight Munch Moon to our holders!
In February, we shared footage of Max (formerly known as Sam) walking on a map from Aurory Adventure.
But most importantly, we gave everyone a good read with our Manifesto, which touches on game mechanics, economy, and lore. This was the moment that it all clicked for many of our community members, as it showed how deep the vision for the Aurory ecosystem really goes.
After many requests from our community to provide more insight into game development and progress, we decided to release our first monthly update in March, known as the “State of Aurory Address”. We filled it with insights on how to build a game, with many alpha nuggets and sneak peeks. They were so well received by the community that we’ve never stopped writing them!
We were also featured in the Solana booth at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), and the Vampire Helios was acquired for 4400 $SOL!
Aurorians on Expedition was deployed in April, as our first official web3 product. This would bring added utility to Aurorians by allowing users to acquire $AURY, collectibles, and eggs, which could then be used to hatch Nefties that would be playable in our games! We intend to continue polishing the experience in 2023 by adding some fun new features and mechanics after some of the great feedback that’s been provided by our community.
We kept the momentum up during May, with the releases of our native open-sourced marketplace, and 10,000 Aurorian avatars playable in the Nexus! It was a huge milestone for us, and the community reaction on Discord voice chat was priceless!
Although the original purpose for the Nexus may be changing, it can still be accessed from Kitty’s Tavern. We plan to create a new version in 2023, with the intention of adding more utility for assets, among other fun and interactive features.
May was also the month that the locked staking pool ended. We took that opportunity to airdrop one egg and a Dipking Lockheart to our stakers!
Before the month could end, we released the first playable version of Aurory Tactics to a closed early access group of our holders, followed by the deployment of the Incubator.
As June came along, we immediately began working on our first patch that deployed 80+ improvements based on the feedback we received from our alpha testers.
Our artists also had some fun sharing a sneak peek of Vampire Helios running on an Aurory Adventure map with a bat trail VFX.
We are proud to say that Aurory Tactics is a game that we’ve been building with the core members of our community since the beginning. Our team reads all of the community feedback, and we take it into consideration when balancing and designing.
Continuing in this fashion of listening to our community, in July we began using our Twitter account more actively. Until then, we had always used Twitter as a platform to share only major updates or content with a lot of love, and we were using Discord to share sneak peaks and more WIP content, but after some valid feedback from our community, we began posting a lot more frequently and have seen great results!
Even with some Canadian team members on vacation, August was a busy month. We deployed the leaderboard as well as the player profile feature! Then, we opened the gates to Tactics for a limited time, in partnership with Kucoin. And, to top the month off, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of our mint, with a Hollywood quality video in collaboration with Invisible North!
Oh, and our co-founder, Sym, teased an art upgrade for Aurorians! We also received some great feedback on the desired art direction from our community and are excited to share some more sneak peeks in 2023!
During September, we reminded everyone of what was coming with a nice hype/teaser video.
And, as you can see, many of these things have already happened!
We also enjoyed seeing Brycent test out Aurory Tactics for the first time, and we partnered with Solana Spaces to be featured in their brand new Miami store with a playable Tactics demo, an Aurorian gallery, and some merch!
The Aurory team came into Q4 at full speed, with the release of the 0.2.7 patch in October, which deployed the first version of our economy loop! In tandem with this massive update, we introduced our game-changing, in-house infra, called SyncSpace!
After doing another airdrop, this time to celebrate Halloween, we announced that we’d be attending Solana Breakpoint, ahead of what was going to be the craziest month of the year…
November started in the best possible way, with some of our team members attending Breakpoint in Lisbon. Then the FTX collapse happened, and we’re pretty sure you all know the rest.
We kept our heads up and kept building, teasing a new biome and explaining SyncSpace in a thread.
This brings us to the last month of the year, and our last push. In December, we finally opened Aurory Tactics to the public with our 0.2.8 patch!
In addition to Tactics opening to the public, we launched an in-game tutorial and social logins to create a smoother onboarding experience for new users. We also deployed the highly requested features of rank-based matchmaking and rewards!
In the spirit of the holiday, we added some limited-time holiday skins to Aurorians on Expeditions and airdropped a holiday skin to all Aurorians and holders of 250+ $AURY.
After a successful deployment of 0.2.8, our team members wrapped up their end-of-year tasks before taking some much-needed time off for the holidays to recharge our batteries.
2022 was a one for the books, no doubt. We shipped some awesome stuff and are immensely grateful for the thriving community we have by our side through all of the ups and downs.
We hope you’re all ready for the awesome stuff that we’ve got planned for 2023. Happy New Year, Aurory fam!
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