Following the release of Seekers of Tokane early access, we are implementing a significant change regarding our economy with our latest Amber patch. These changes involve adjustments to the reward loop specifically relating to the distribution of our two off-chain sub-currencies (OKA and TOKE).

OKA, TOKE AND CRYSTALS DISTRIBUTION

OKA is still the sub-currency rewarding players for winning PVP battles.
Nefties with OKAnergy (prime Nefties have 5 okanergy per day):

• Earn OKA for winning in Tactics (the amount depends on player ranking, see this article).

• Earn OKA for winning in Blitz PvP (150 OKA per win, expected to change with our ranking system rollout).

TOKE will now be used as a sub-currency to reward players for spending $AURY in the shop and Incubator. All players can:

• Earn TOKE by hatching prime eggs using the Incubator (400 TOKE per hatch).

• Earn TOKE by purchasing crystals in the shop (number of TOKE = USDC price * 10).

As of now, both OKA and TOKE each represent 50% of the weekly $AURY pool. This ratio is subject to change, as well as the opportunities to earn OKA/TOKE. For more details on the weekly $AURY pool, refer to this article.

Players can also earn Crystals, the off-chain currency used for Standard assets (non-NFT). All players can:

• Earn Crystals for battling in Blitz PvP (2 crystals for losing, 15 crystals for winning ; expected to change with our ranking system rollout).

• Earn Crystals in land gameplay for winning against wild Nefties (30 crystals per win), and by collecting Crystals Plants (between 2 and 6 crystals for each plant).

These adjustments are designed to reward players actively participating in the ecosystem, taking a step further in preventing bots from earning $AURY. We are also providing a form of cashback to players using $AURY in our ecosystem, through TOKE.

For an in depth breakdown of the Amber release, check out the video below featuring our Executive Producer, Johnny and our Gameplay Producer, Yat-Chi who explain it all in further detail!

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Here’s what you can expect:

• Standard Nefties will continue to have a scroll background.

• Prime Nefties will continue to have a background that reflects the Biome they originate from.

• *NEW!* Subspecies: We will introduce a new system called subspecies (more details to come). With over a dozen subspecies planned to be released in the future, this system will allow us to introduce many new Nefties. Currently, all Nefties in circulation are part of the “Primal” subspecies group. This might change in the future, and subspecies could be randomly attributed to existing Nefties.

• *NEW!* Rarity Color System: A new rarity system on card frames will also be making its way into SoT, with the five different rarities being: 

  - One Star (Common) - Grey Frame
  - Two Star (Uncommon) - Green Frame
  - Three Star (Rare) - Blue Frame
  - Four Star (Epic) - Purple Frame
  - Five Star (Legendary) - Orange Frame

• *NEW!* Elemental System: Now that elements play a big part in SoT, we needed to include them on the Neftie cards themselves. As a reminder, below are the six elements currently available, along with arrows indicating the elements that they are strong against:

This will be the first of multiple updates that we’re excited to deploy before the end of the year. Stay tuned for our upcoming Amber release, which will bring additional polishing and new features to our economy, Nefties, expeditions, matchmaking, game hub, and more!

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Before we dive into this update, we’d like to lead off by mentioning that this is possibly our last written State of Aurory Address. We’re exploring alternative ways to present these updates in a short video format which will have more of a focus on sneak-peeks and gameplay!

DESIGN

Our Design team has been incredibly busy this year, with one final push before SoT is released. Here is what they’ve been working on:

• Onboarding: Your experience will begin with seamless onboarding. Dialogues and in-game screens will ensure that every step of your journey feels immersive and inviting.

• Tweaks and Balancing: A great PvP game's balance is essential, and the team has fine-tuned every detail, from Blitz abilities to Neftie stats, land spawning to gameplay flow, and the complexity of combat logs. Of course, as players discover the game and provide feedback, more balancing will happen!

• Economy: They’ve taken a closer look at the cost of avatar customization, amplifying, and the global reward system within Blitz. Some changes will be made to the OKA/TOKE reward pools as well; more information on this will follow in November.

The UI/X Design team also had a lot on its plate with multiple upcoming releases.

• Amplifier web page.

• Seekers of Tokane web page.

• Promo banners.

• Marketplace updates (Neftie Grades).

• In-game success/failure screens.

ART

In the first version of Seekers of Tokane, you’ll be able to explore two immersive biomes, and our Environmental Team has been hard at work polishing them to perfection. But the adventure doesn't stop there; multiple other biomes are already in production, featuring vibrant flowers, mysterious mushrooms, magical gates, and various other elements designed to make your adventures even more exciting!

The Character Art team is getting all our existing Neftie chromas ready in 3D, and a new Merchant NPC is on its way to Tokane as well.

On the Animation side, the focus has been on full Blitz Battles with existing and upcoming Nefties. Just wait until you see these epic animations in game!

Tech

Web3:

• Integration of new features to be released with Seekers of Tokane (Amplifier, Avatar Customization, Crystals, Starter Eggs, Redeem page).

• SoT Neftie Stats Integration.

• 1Kin Campaign.

• Rank decay mechanism.

• SEO Support.

Infrastructure/Backend:

• Preparing Breakpoint build.

• Introduction of Server-Side Rendering (SSR) infrastructure for the frontend.

• Enhanced security with updated headers on the frontend.

• Integrated Mixpanel workflow with the 1Kin campaign.

Backend:

• Economy, including testing and stabilization of the Crystal Shop and Amplifiers, and introducing Centralized Match History.

• Optimization of the Blitz PvP reward loop and standard egg hatching.

• Enabling invite codes for early access to SoT.

Gameplay:

• Stabilizing Blitz mode with bug fixes and optimizations.

• Ensuring avatar stability.

• Preparing for the introduction of PvE Lands and new reward features.

• Blitz PvP matchmaking and ranking features.

• Avatar Shop for customization options.

• Supporting lands and the reward flow to make the gameplay experience seamless.

MARKETING

As we approach the end of the year, our Marketing department is gearing up for a flurry of news and releases. Stay tuned for an action-packed calendar ahead!

On the collab front, we partnered with DeQuest in October and also participated in a few Twitter Spaces hosted by XBorgHQ, Orca, and Stoned Ape Crew. The collaborations don't stop here though. Stay tuned for more exciting partnerships and events in the coming weeks.

At the time of writing, we are now back from Breakpoint, which was an incredible success. We couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve been showing, and the feedback we’ve been receiving!

On top of the bustling booth we had at Breakpoint, we also participated in a few exciting events last week, including a Yacht Party on Halloween and the Big Brain Super League football tournament. We also teamed up with the Stoned Ape Crew for an adventurous treasure hunt at the Breakpoint venue!

We shared a ton of alpha with community members in attendance and were able to bring a lot of awareness to others outside of our community. You can find some behind the scenes footage on our Twitter account, as well as a wrap-up interview by Johnny!

We plan to keep this great momentum going as we gear up for an epic November. So strap in for the ride!

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DESIGN

The Design team has some big projects on their hands that have carried through the last few months and are reaching a more advanced stage now:

• Full Blitz Optimization: The development and UI teams have optimized Blitz Battles to ensure that the experience is not only fast-paced and exhilarating but also player-friendly.

• Enhanced Onboarding Experience: As we’re polishing our UI elements and tutorials, we’re making Aurory more intuitive and captivating than ever in preparation for an influx of new players.

• Inventory Management: Our UI team has been mapping out flows for our inventory system that will ensure that your items and gear will be easily accessible at any time.

• Procedural Land Generation: Our world is vast while its landscapes are unique, hence the need for perfect land generation and spawning!

• Intuitive Avatar Customization: Players will have the option to create and customize a base avatar with various outfits.

• Story Dialogue: All great games need immersive dialogue to deliver a captivating player experience.

• New Reward System: A new reward system is being fleshed out with the goal of accommodating multiple games while rewarding our ecosystem’s biggest contributors and deterring abuse and farming.

Our Design team has also been working to revamp our web ecosystem with a new game hub, notification system, profile progression system, and Amplifier. The profile progression system will be a key feature for our ecosystem by allowing users to level up their account while playing games, completing tasks, and more. The Amplifier will also serve as an important feature that allows players to level up Nefties, bringing additional utility to low-stat Nefties and $AURY.

As we move forward, we're committed to pushing boundaries and ensuring that every aspect of Aurory is a testament to our values and player satisfaction.

ART

Our Environmental Art team has continued their amazing work of redifining the visual landscapes of Aurory. In this effort, they’ve conceptualized new portals, polished Blitz arenas, and created captivating elements that will enrich the various biomes.

Our Character Art team’s main tasks consisted of working on the base avatars and their outfits while polishing the various Blitz Battle icons.

The Rig team has had a busy month, with the new Portal, Shibark, and a mysterious machine all needing to be prepped to be brought to life.

Animation

Our Animation team is never short on tasks. They’ve continued creating various Blitz-related animations for our full roster of Nefties and also spent time working on new environmental props that players will find scattered throughout Tokane.

Motion Design/VFX

Blitz, Blitz, and more Blitz was on the menu for the VFX team as they worked on ranged attacks, melee attacks, shields, and more!

MARKETING

Our Marketing department has been focused on preparing for upcoming releases and events. We’ll be proudly representing Aurory at Breakpoint in Amsterdam, with a booth at the conference, as well as co-hosting an IRL event on the 31st of October. Let us know on Discord if you’ll be around, and we’ll make sure you get an invite! We’ve also been hosting holders-only tournaments in Aurory Tactics, and are planning to have at least one each month with different rules every time.

In conclusion, September has been a month of great progress as we make our way closer to the next highly anticipated content update of Aurory Adventures. We expect Q4 to be packed with fun surprises, and we look forward to sharing more information soon about what players can expect from our next releases.

Thank you all for your continuous support. Let’s keep pushing!

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When it comes to Aurorians, everyone knows that they are a central part of our ecosystem, but they aren’t just NFTs for the sake of being NFTs. They represent some of our most die-hard community members who believe in the vision of Aurory. With the trust they’ve put in us, we feel a responsibility to deliver the best experiences for them. Throughout these past few summer months, our team has continued working hard around the clock in order to deliver everything we have planned on our short/medium term roadmap. Among these objectives, one of the biggest is the art upgrade, which will give Aurorians a major makeover, solidifying them among some of the top collections in Web3.

Here’s a teaser we posted on our X account to celebrate two years of Aurorians 👇

We’ll also be selecting one lucky person to win an Aurorian next week. The details on how to enter can be found here.

DESIGN

After releasing our new, condensed whitepaper, our Design team got right back to its biggest priorities:

• Blitz Evolution - A refined battle experience is on the way with the full Blitz combat system.

• Avatar Customization - 10,000 Aurorians won’t be enough for all the players we expect to have, so we’ll have a base avatar with a degree of customization for non-holders!

  

• Procedural Lands - We want you to feel immersed with every step you take in-game, from diverse landscapes to endless exploration of levels that always feel fresh.

• Amplifier - The design of this new feature has been completed, and now it’s making its way to the tech and UIX implementation phases.

• Tactics Design - We’ve assigned a couple of our designers to perform R&D on ways to improve the Tactics experience, from the overall game design to how we distribute rewards. Expect some announcements soon around updates we will be looking to make!

For our UI/X Design team, their focus was on creating or improving the following elements:

• Full Blitz Battle Screens/UI.

• Standard/Prime Neftie Visual Indicators.

• Game Hub Player Profile and Navigation.

• Amplifier Web Tool.

• Rank Decay Notification System.

• SyncSpace Frontend.

ART

Our Environmental team has been putting in some serious work to craft the biomes that you will be exploring in the next version of Adventures. This has consisted mainly of the creation of various elements for the Swamp, and Ice biomes, but work has already begun on additional biomes as well. There is a lot more that we can’t share teasers of just yet (Portals, Amplifier Kiosk), but here’s some of their work from the past month!

We can’t get enough of the incredible work that our Character Artists continue to churn out. Of course, the Aurorian art upgrade is of top priority at the moment, with efforts led by our co-founder and Art Director, Yann. He is tasked with the tricky objective of reimagining the art direction of each of the many traits in an aesthetically pleasing manner while keeping everything cohesive when layered with other traits. So far, he has continued to impress us with his ability to adapt the collection, and we are just as excited as you all are to see our precious Aurorians elevated to their best selves!

Our other Character Artist, Claire, has been tackling the task of creating the various outfits that will be available as a customization option for base characters (non-Aurorians). In addition to this, she’s worked on some concept art for new Neftie variations, as well as new in-game icons and concept art for a starter egg.

We’ve seen a lot of new Blitz animations this past month internally, but we’re going to keep most of those to ourselves a bit longer until we can share more polished versions that give you a real sense of the action that is Blitz battles. Here are a few small ones that we are able to share though. Don’t tell the devs!

During August, Dracurve paid a visit to our Rigger, who also began working on one of the first environmental landmarks that will be found in the Swamp biome of Adventures.

Motion Design/VFX

We are getting closer to having visual effects for Glitched and Shimmering Nefties in the game thanks to our talented VFX team.

Aside from this, they also worked on creating effects for the following scenarios throughout August:

• Blitz Battle Ranged Attacks.

• Blitz Battle Shield Elements.

• Door Portals.

• Crystal Collecting.

AUDIO

If you’ve ever wondered how our Audio team works their magic, here’s a short video that reveals what goes into music and SFX production. It’s an intriguing process to watch, and we’d highly recommend checking it out!

In terms of objectives for the month of August, the Audio team tackled the following:

• Blitz Battle Music and SFX.

• Crystal Fruit SFX.

• Swamp Biome Ambient and Miscellaneous SFX Integration

• Ice Biome Audio Track.

TECH

Following a July packed with deployments, the big release in August was one that finally brought custom matchmaking to Tactics! After that, it was back to business as usual for our Tech team.

Their tasks this month also consisted of the following:

Web:

• Game Hub Planning.

  • Navigation.

  • SyncSpace page.

• Quantum Egg.

• FAQ Page Updates.

• Bug Fixes and Optimizations.

• SyncSpace Improvements.

• Site Translations.

Backend:

• Gameplay

  • Implementation of the Full Blitz combat system.

  • Implementation of base avatars.

• Platform and Economy

  • Quantum Egg and Chocomint releases.

  • SyncSpace observability and alerting improvements.

  • Adding metrics for new applications migrated during cross-chain.

  • Standard item (non-NFT) feature design and planning.

  • Amplifier and Expeditions 1.5.

  • 1Kin support.

Game:

• Adventures

  • Full Blitz system.

  • Land system.

  • Base Avatar system.

  • Village activities R&D.

MARKETING

We started out August with a week-long event in Blanche to celebrate our expansion to Arbitrum. A lot of lessons were taken out of this event, which had the village packed for 7 days straight!

Following this event, we successfully hosted our first bracket-style mini-tournament exclusively for Aurorian holders, using the new Tactics custom matchmaking feature. We're already in the process of planning more tournaments, this time with distinct rules designed to appeal to more players. Stay tuned for more details!

As the month drew to a close, we commemorated the two-year journey of Aurorians with a teaser for the upcoming art upgrade, paired with an Aurorian giveaway that will be announcing a winner next week on Thursday! Details on how to enter can be found here.

Looking ahead, we are already gearing up for an exciting week during Breakpoint in Amsterdam this year. If you're planning to be in the area, do let us know! We’ll have team members present at the conference, as well as various side events where Breakpoint tickets won't be a requirement!

August has been a relatively calmer month as we close out the summer after an incredibly busy June and July. Regardless, our team has continued pushing forward with full force to deliver the best experiences for our community. We appreciate each and every one of you who have stuck with us on this journey. The best is yet to come!

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Aside from our Arbitrum launch, we also released a long-awaited Tactics patch that brought with it a new Neftie and some much-needed balancing to the meta. With this patch, we really took in a lot of feedback and made sure that player needs were addressed. This brought significant improvements to the Tactics, to the point where we can confidently say that the game has never been more fun, now with quicker battles and more diversity in team comps and strategies. There is still more work to be done to deliver the full Tactics experience, and this has been ongoing in the background while we focus on Adventures. We expect to share some more positive Tactics news with our community very soon!

DESIGN

July was business as usual for the Design team, with the following tasks taking priority:

• Whitepaper v2 - We are thrilled to announce that our updated Whitepaper v2 is finally complete! This new version is carefully condensed, making it the go-to resource for anyone eager to delve into the world of Aurory. Keep an eye out for its release in the near term!

• Status Effect from Abilities - The team is refining the Status Effect system tied to abilities. If you’re not familiar with Tactics, this is a feature that enhances the strategic aspect of the game and adds layers of depth to battles.

• Story - Our narrative designers continue to work on captivating storylines to immerse players further into the Aurory universe. Everything Aurory-related will be tied together! To quote our designers: ‘‘It will be like a movie’’.

• Amplifier - Neftie merging is coming. We will be sharing more specifics on this mechanic soon!

• Web3 Progression/VIP Score - A system that rewards loyalty and honest players is a much-needed feature that our designers have begun exploring ideas for.

• Adventures Reward System - From crystals to off-chain eggs, TOKE/OKA, and more. Adventures will be a rewarding game for players!

• Avatar Customization - With only 10k Aurorians, a new type of playable character will be born. Our designers have been working out details for a customizable base avatar for non-holders.

• Procedural Lands - This tech will ensure that players have a fresh, rogue-like experience when exploring lands.

The UIX Design team also had a busy month, tackling the following tasks:

• Full Blitz Flow.

• Full Blitz UI.

• Arbitrum UI Integration.

• Game-Hub Revamp.

• Galxe Event Page.

• Amplifier UI Mockups.

• Avatar Customization Flow.

ART

Much of the current focus of the Environmental Art team continues to be on the research and development of new elements for each biome that will be fed into our procedural land system to generate random levels for each biome. The current biomes being mainly worked on are the ice and swamp biomes.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any new NPCs to share from our Character Art team this month, but we did recently leak a preview of another v2 Aurorian from the upcoming art upgrade! Every attribute will now be tied to the universe of our games.

Our team is still working on final concepts and modeling for the customizable base avatar, but here’s an early preview of some of the outfit art direction!

Our Concept Artists have also continued their work on creating the visual representations for consumable items. Below you’ll find some of the 3D versions of special potions, along with artwork for other various in-game items!

Animations for Nefties such as Dracurve, Beeblock, and Bloomtail have been worked on to prepare them for release in Tactics and Blitz. They are looking fearless, and we can’t wait to see some of their moves on the battlefield!

Wassie, Raccoin, and Frostbyte had appointments in our Rigging department this past month to receive their facial animations!

Motion Design/VFX

In the Motion Design and VFX department, the team worked on shader optimization for various effects, tested night and day cycles, Blitz battle effects, and environmental effects.

AUDIO

July was another melodious month for our Audio team, with the following objectives being tackled:

• Swamp biome audio track production.

• Swamp biome ambiance and miscellaneous SFX.

• Swamp biome floor surface SFX.

• Ice biome audio track, first production pass.

• Blitz Battle music research.

• Iterating on shield, buff/debuff, and projectile SFX for Blitz Battles.

TECH

We have our amazing Tech team to thank for the smooth deployment of our latest Tactics patch and the Arbitrum integration. These two releases took a majority of their bandwidth throughout the past month.

More specifically, their focus in July was on the following tasks:

Web3:

• Arbitrum Integration.

  • Final QA tests.

  • Arbitrum event page.

• New game hub planning.

• Tactics v2.10 patch notes page.

• Backpack app copy updates.

Backend:

• Gameplay.

  • ADV 0.3.0.

    • Full Blitz combat implementation.

    • Land for the Unity application.

    • Standalone build support.

  • Planning and implementation of base avatars.

• Platform and Economy

  • EVM / Arbitrum Initiative.

    • Production readiness.

      • E2E testing and integration support.

      • Standing by for bug fixes or changes as necessary.

      • Setting up additional Galxe tasks for live ops and preparing for production.

  • Adjust the OKA / TOKE -> AURY conversion ratio.

  • Kicking off the rank decay feature.

  • Kicking off the freemium item feature.

• Preparing the migration of Aurorians on Expedition to SyncSpace.

Infrastructure:

• Adventures

  • Refactoring game server deployment for multi-platform support.

  • Update on the design CI pipeline for Adventures.

  • Start of the backend avatar implementation.

• Backend

  • Staging CDN setup for the frontend.

  • Kubernetes gitlab runners for services.

  • Tactics 0.2.10 deployment.

Game:

• Adventures

  • Full Blitz.

    • Microservice update following backend team directions.

    • Implementation of the Unity frontend side.

• Lands

  • Procedural land implementation.

  • Spawning System.

• Village activities R&D.

• Avatar and inventory selection.

MARKETING

In mid-July, we had two of our team members head to San Diego to represent Aurory at PlayGG! This event saw talented builders come together to showcase some of the amazing games being built in the Solana ecosystem. It was an honor for our team to be in attendance!

In addition to this, our beloved in-house content wizard, Rafikey, spent some time this past month traveling in Canada and had the opportunity to meet with and film many of our team members. Some great footage was captured, and the community should expect to see more behind-the-scenes footage from his trip in the coming weeks!

With our expansion to Arbitrum, a significant marketing push naturally came along with it. We’re excited about the momentum being built and hope to carry it well into August with the week-long event we’re hosting in partnership with Galxe! To learn more about this event, which is happening this week and ending on August 8th, go to https://app.aurory.io/events.

We’ve also partnered with Camelot, an Arbitrum DEX, where we created a pool with $1M in liquidity. Additional co-marketing is being planned to promote $AURY on Arbitrum!

In conclusion, July was a truly memorable month for Aurory, which demonstrates our commitment to enriching the gaming experience and driving widespread adoption. We look forward to continuing to deliver for our community and are now setting our sights on the next Adventures update, the Aurorian art upgrade, Solana Breakpoint, and lots more in between! Stay tuned!

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Why take Aurory cross-platform?

One word — accessibility. Different platforms have their own vibrant communities and user bases. Expanding Aurory to multiple blockchains allows us to tap into these diverse communities, creating frictionless onramps to our platform from these communities. This broader reach can drive adoption, create network effects, and foster a more vibrant ecosystem around our games by allowing players to interact with our platform on their native blockchain. The same can be said for traditional gaming distribution platforms, which can have restrictions around blockchain mechanics. Using SyncSpace, we have the opportunity to tap into these audiences by creating versions of our games that are compliant with certain web2 platforms while having minimal implications for the web3 side of our games.

Our vision of a cross-platform future for Aurory is one that is rooted in the idea that players should be able to easily discover Aurory with minimal friction. Ultimately, it is this approach that we believe will allow us to reach millions of users around the world.

Is Aurory leaving Solana? 

Aurory isn’t leaving Solana. We’ve always been an open platform where users can try our games even without having a crypto wallet. This integration can be viewed as similar to the deployment of the social login feature when SyncSpace was first released. Cross-chain integrations simply open up new onramps for users to interact with our platform from their native blockchain. We have plans to integrate with additional blockchains in the future.

What assets can be transferred between the Arbitrum and Solana blockchains?

All on-chain Aurory assets ($AURY, Aurorians, Nefties, Eggs, Collectibles, Skins).

How do I switch back and forth between the Solana and Arbitrum chains?

Our native infrastructure, SyncSpace, allows you to freely move your assets from one chain to the other.

Watch the short video below for a tutorial on how to move assets around using our platform:

How do I know if my assets are in SyncSpace, on Solana, or on Arbitrum? 

When viewing items in your inventory, they will each have a corresponding SyncSpace, Solana, or Arbitrum logo in the corner of the image to let you know where the asset is. 

With this new integration, what changes for Solana users? 

SyncSpace is now the new entry point for all users to interact with nearly all experiences on the Aurory platform.

What this means:

• Nefties need to be in SyncSpace in order to play with them.

• In order to make an offer on the marketplace, you’ll need to have $AURY in SyncSpace.

• In order to list items on the marketplace, they need to be in SyncSpace first.

• In order to hatch a Neftie egg, you’ll need to have the egg and $AURY in SyncSpace.

Can I do Aurorians on Expeditions on Arbitrum? 

Not yet. You’ll be able to do them once Expeditions are fully migrated to SyncSpace. For now, Aurorians need to be on Solana to send them on Expeditions.

Can I buy $AURY on Arbitrum? 

Yes, you can. You’ll need to deposit USDC from Arbitrum into SyncSpace, and you’ll be able to buy $AURY directly from our website. Arbitrum DEX pools will be setup soon as well for buying/selling $AURY.

If you have any further questions or encounter any issues, please reach out to our team on Discord.

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We’ve also shared a sneak peek of our upcoming art upgrade, something we know that our holders cannot wait for. The focus will be on creating new Aurorian character art that is more closely tied to our lore and developing a smooth upgrade process for those who decide to transform their Aurorian.

In other news, the conclusion of our first-ever, 3-month season has provided valuable insights that the team will be addressing. We plan to work on implementing a rank decay mechanism to incentivize leaderboard activity throughout the season and will be exploring ways to prevent last-minute climbing with alt-accounts. Once again, congrats to everyone who made it to the top 100 this season! The next step for Aurory Tactics will be the release of patch 0.2.10, with a new Neftie on the way!

DESIGN

With our next Tactics patch almost ready to be deployed, most of the focus of the Design team has been on Aurory Adventures and general improvements:

• Full Blitz Battles - We want the battles to be intense, providing players with an experience they can’t find anywhere else in Web3.

• Whitepaper V2 - Our new, updated, whitepaper is almost ready to be published. This new version will be leaner, easily adaptable and way more accessible.

• Progression System - As a critical aspect for any returning player and a decisive element in player retention, we want players to unlock achievements and be able to showcase their prowess!

• Economy and Monetization - Since we want to have more usecases for $AURY and want to be listed on different Web2 gaming platforms, we have to refine some economy aspects.

• Consumables - This goes with our previous point; consumables will add depth and variety to the in-game experience.

Other points of focus for our Game Design team:

• Procedural Lands.

• Combat Moves.

• Incubator Egg Distribution.

• Narrative Tweaks.

The UIX Design team worked on the following:

• Full Blitz Flow.

• Game-Hub Revamp (app.aurory.io).

• Expeditions V2.

• Incubator Updates.

• Inventory UI.

ART

Our Environmental team has continued working on diverse biome elements that will work as the puzzle pieces that fuel our procedural land generation system. Everything is starting to come together nicely, and we are incredibly excited to share more about this system with you all later this summer.

It was a busy month for our Character Art team, which is mainly made up of our co-founder Yann, and Lead Concept Artist Claire, who have been making sure to continue feasting your eyes with new characters and concept art for consumable items. We are working on some base character models that will allow players who don’t own an Aurorian to customize a character using cosmetics.

In addition to this, Claire has continued her work in coming up with new Neftie variations, as well as new chromas for each of them!

Our Rigging team gave life to a Neftie that might look like one you already know…meet Dinotusk!

Motion Design/VFX

A little bit of extra love can go a long way toward making certain game elements really pop. Being our Motion Design and VFX team’s specialty, they put that into practice this month with some new Neftie shadows for selection screens and various Blitz Battle VFX elements.

AUDIO

With a new Neftie on the way, our Audio team has been integrating and testing its dedicated audio. Another part of this month's work consisted of revising existing Neftie animation SFX as well as creating new SFX for Blitz Battles.

Hit play on the video below to hear what we’re talking about! 💢👇

And if you were wondering how the music in Aurory is actually created, here’s a little BTS video for you! https://twitter.com/AuroryProject/status/1674772513719746565

TECH

Going cross-chain is a big deal and requires a lot of manpower. The bulk of the workload naturally falls on our Tech team, as they look to ensure that everything is ready for a smooth deployment.

The following Tech-related tasks have been worked on throughout June:

Web3:

• SyncSpace.

  • Migrated Swap and Incubator.

  • Integrating Marketplace v2.

• Cross-Chain.

  • Adding faucet support for the new chain.

  • Ability to deposit USDC from the new chain to Syncspace.

• Translations.

Backend:

• Gameplay.

  • Blitz matchmaking support for rarity matchmaking and non-wagering mode.

  • Support for full combat, time limits, and turn processing.

  • Tooling to help with customized configuration and local testing of Blitz.

  • Support for multiple matchmaking rulesets for each game.

• Platform and Economy.

  • Crosschain Initiative.

    • Investigating UI solutions for Aurorynet EVM transaction lookup.

    • Modifications to SyncSpace to support the movement of assets.

    • Inventory update to support on-chain lookup of EVM assets.

    • Testing EVM smart contract integration E2E and implementing fixes.

  • Analytics support.

Infrastructure:

• Adventures.

  • Web2 Game Launcher iterations.

  • Android build experimentation.

  • PoC to visualize players coordinates.

  • Full Blitz microservices.

  • Village activities.

• Tactics.

  • Debugging the new Neftie.

• Tech.

  • Deployment of the Eventbridge asynchronous communication system to facilitate inter-domain communication.

  • Implementation of the new Neftie burning and leveling system.

MARKETING

In collaboration with the DAOry, Aurory has been maintaining a solid presence on Twitter and even at IRL events this month.

We’ve attended multiple spaces on Twitter with Lazysoccer, GameSwift, MagicEden, Fableborne, and even did an AMA on OKX Telegram. We plan to keep this trend of being more involved with various communities through Spaces, AMAs, and more!

Another area we plan to continue exploring more of is direct collaboration with partners we align with. Our wonderfully talented artist, Claire, worked on a high-quality art piece for a special NFT drop we did alongside our friends at the Degen Ape Academy, which was directly dropped to DRiP.haus users, ultimately reaching over a thousand wallets!

As for IRL events, a few of our team members made their way to LA in early June for the first ever 3XP event, which ended up being a huge success with lots of new fans of Tactics, and a nice turnout for a small tournament we hosted at our booth.

We also took the opportunity to highlight some of the talented Content Creators we have in our community who continue to bring entertainment and value to Aurory fans. We feel incredibly grateful to everyone who uses their platform to amplify our project, and we plan to work closely with these creators to continue supporting them as they build out their brand.

In short, there is a lot cooking behind the scenes at Aurory. Our first cross-chain integration is just around the corner, Adventures is in full development, and we’re in a new Tactics season with a new patch and new Neftie on the way. We are looking forward to another eventful month in July as we set our sights toward PlayGG in San Diego and look to share more art upgrade sneak peeks, among other surprises! We thank you all for your remarkable support in this journey to revolutionize the crypto gaming landscape. Don’t go anywhere, for the best is yet to come in the world of Aurory!

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory 🕹️

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In this early pre-alpha phase of Adventures, Aurorians can immerse themselves in the vibrant village of Blanche and challenge each other in Speed Blitz battles. For more detailed information, be sure to refer to our Adventures Guide!

The Prologue was well received by our community, with the graphics receiving the highest praise. Players have also particularly enjoyed the interactive chat box as well as the in-game emotes, both of which add an extra layer of engagement to Blanche. Speed Blitz, with its fast-paced combat and unpredictable outcomes, offers a refreshing alternative to Aurory Tactics.

However, we quickly saw that, as expected in a pre-alpha, some additional key components to incentivize players to return to Blanche on a daily basis are needed. As we have previously expressed, our decision to release early gameplay was aimed at establishing a solid foundation upon which we will continue to build. Releasing a full game is not something that will happen overnight, and it is for this reason that we are planning to take the live-ops development route with game content and features being deployed in various stages. If you haven’t seen it already, we’d highly encourage you to check out our Adventure page for a more detailed roadmap into the additional features and content that we have planned. Some of these upcoming additions include procedural lands, Neftie progression, and the highly anticipated full Blitz mode!

Speaking of new features, let’s kick off this monthly recap with our Design team!

DESIGN

Following the latest balancing and testing in order to release the Prologue to Adventures, our Design team has continued working on new platform and game features, spanning from the upcoming Tactics patch to the “Aurory: Welcome to Tokane!” release.

These mainly consisted of the following:

• Progression System Designs.

• Web Ecosystem Improvements.

• Neftie Merging Mechanics Design.

• Incubator Improvements.

• Testing Economy Balancing Features.

• Procedural Lands Implementation.

• Narrative Tweaks.

• Full Blitz Combat System Testing.

• Neftie DNA System for Adventures.

Even if we’re a team of more than 60 people, balancing resources between two games isn’t always the easiest task, but rest assured, we aren’t forgetting about Tactics. The Design team has noted recent player feedback and has been working on improvements and changes for a new patch that we intend to deploy by the end of this Tactics season.

Furthermore, the UIX Design team has had their plate full with Adventures in-game UI tasks, along with tasks related to the new web ecosystem UI that’s required for the launch of our first cross-chain experience.

ART

You’ve seen their work in Blanche — the Environmental Art team won’t stop delivering this level of quality. They are now back to working on the production of unique biome elements for procedural lands, ensuring a diverse world for Aurorians to explore in Adventures.

Following an internal discussion last month around the implementation of Neftie chromas, the Character Art team gave some love to the new chromas design documentation and began to put it into practice with various Nefties.

Many of you have already met the first NPCs in Blanche, and more are on the way! A new character in the works who we’ll be introducing through more teasers is the Village Merchant. This NPC was drawn by our co-founder, Yann, who is overseeing new character art direction while simultaneously working on the art upgrade for Aurorians.

Other art tasks have been tackled by Claire, our Lead Character Concept Artist. These have included the creation of element icons to be shown in Blitz Battles, as well as concept art for food consumable items that will be introduced in the future. Claire also worked on an amazing teaser for our first cross-chain integration. Can you guess which blockchain it will be?!

The Rigging team worked on reskinned Neftie models of Znix, Dodorex, and Dinotusk.

ANIMATION

The Animation team worked on The Prologue to Adventures all the way up until the release! Their current focus is now on finishing all of the animations for the new v2 Neftie models, which will be required for the full version of Blitz.

Motion Design/VFX

The VFX team implemented some incredible new VFX for every Helios so they can play Adventures in style. Additionally, they worked on testing out various effects to bring liveliness to Adventures environments, while the Motion Design side added some effects with the same goal for in-game UI elements.

AUDIO

The response that we’ve gotten to the music and SFX in Blanche has been nothing but love, and we’re so happy you all are enjoying it as much as us! We’re incredibly grateful for our talented Audio team, and we have to thank you all for the positive vibes that you’ve shown towards their work. The Audio team is now working on creating new music tracks and SFX for land exploration in Adventures, as well as SFX for new Nefties in the pipeline.

TECH

As you can expect, most of the work of our Tech team this month was making sure that the release of our Prologue to Adventures went smoothly. And that it did, thanks to every department in the team making sure that the following bases were covered:

Web3:

• Adventure mode UX.

  • Requirements constraints.

  • Landing page optimization and deployment.

  • Marketplace adventure toggle feature.

• Bug fixes.

• Adding site-wide search to the landing page.

Backend:

• Gameplay.

  • Blitz/Adventures.

    • Full Blitz combat system integration.

    • Matchmaking improvements & fixes.

    • Support for lands & designing configuration workflows.

  • VIP list functionality for the Prologue.

  • Neftie XP system testing.

• Platform & Economy.

  • Cross-chain.

    • SyncSpace marketplace integration.

    • SyncSpace swap mechanism integration.

    • Investigating EVM tokens (NFTs, SFTs, etc.)

  • SyncSpace improvements and stability.

Infrastructure

• Adventures.

  • Prologue deployment support.

• Tactics.

  • Anti-farming measures.

MARKETING

May was a month full of polished videos and in-game footage in order to tease the Prologue to Adventures. You can check out some of these posts here: teaser video, release video, and tutorial videos!

We’re gearing up to announce a collaboration with IndiGG, the largest gaming DAO in India, in an effort to bring some new players to try out Tactics!

Our holders got the opportunity to mint our animated sticker pack in Dialect! Will you collect them all?

We were also happy to announce that you can now play Aurory games through two new platforms: Gameswift and Odyn. Partnerships like this will be essential going forward as we continue our efforts to ensure that Aurory games show up everywhere online as well as offline. Speaking of which, we will be attending 3XP on June 8th-9th, where we will have our own booth to showcase our games and meet with other gaming enthusiasts. This precedes the next event, which we will be attending in San Diego next month (PlayGG), hosted by Solana Games.

In conclusion, it has been an eventful month for Aurory, filled with incredible strides and major releases. It has been amazing to watch our ecosystem evolve and grow, thanks to the continuous support and feedback from our community. But the excitement doesn't end here! As we step into June, we have even more exciting announcements and releases around the corner. We can't wait to share more details with you all very soon. Stay tuned!

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory 🕹️

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Aside from that, we were also very pleased with our first live-ops event, the Easter Eggstravaganza. The event was a real success, with more than 1,700 eggs hatched and more than 100 players hatching for the first time ever!

April is also the month that saw the birth of Ice Helios! Following the FTX debacle, we made the call, with the blessings of the other 9 Helios owners, to burn the two FTX Aurorians owned by Bardstocks in order to mint a new Helios.

With his artistic talent on full display in this new Helios reveal and after spending much of the last six months working on the artwork for Mad Lads, we are happy to announce that our co-founder and Art Director, Yann, is back full-time working on Aurory. His first order of business is to start drafting more concepts for the Aurorian art upgrade. Our desire is for the upgrade to feel highly intentional by making sure that the new styles fit well with our lore while making each piece of art amazing. We can’t wait to start sharing some more sneak peeks with everyone very soon!

As we mentioned, the rest of the month was fully focused on Prologue to Adventures. Let’'s dive into the recap now!

DESIGN

A notable highlight from the Design team was the new name reveal of the village (Blanche) where the Prologue to Adventures will be taking place. With the village in its last phases of production before launch, our Design team wasted no time and is already working on the next phase of Adventures, which will add lots of new features and mechanics. Some of these new features are still under discussion, but others, such as player progression, Neftie progression, and Neftie variations, are already design-ready!

On the Tactics side, we deployed the first hotfix following the release of 0.2.9, which aimed to address some of the matchmaking issues players had been facing. We are now noticing that the fix we deployed is resulting in players seeing longer wait times, which is not ideal either. Although our team has been heavily focused on Adventures, we have been monitoring feedback closely, and we are looking to deploy another hotfix after the release of Prologue to Adventures. This hotfix will aim to improve the matchmaking system while also addressing the increase in abusers that has been noted recently. Please rest assured that we are collecting all of your Discord feedback and want to continue to improve Tactics. We would encourage you to go and fill out this survey so we can have a better idea of Tactics players sentiments, which will allow us to know what else we can start looking to improve for future patches.

The UIX Design team has spent much of their time throughout April tweaking and polishing all of the in-game UI that will tie together every player's interaction in Blanche. Here are a few examples of those:

When they weren’t working on UI for Blitz, they were spending some time mapping out new wireframes for Expeditions V2, as well as new UX for various elements on the Aurory platform that will need to be slightly reimagined in order to accommodate new cross-chain initiatives we have coming up. Stay tuned for more announcements on that front fairly soon!

ART

We’re incredibly excited for all of the talent that we have in our art team to really shine through in our product over the following weeks as people play in Blanche for the first time. On the Environment Art side, polishing of various elements in Blanche was ongoing throughout April, with some last-minute tweaks to different elements like the spawn point, stands around the arena, and lighting adjustments. Aside from that, work has resumed on biome production for the next iteration of Adventures.

The Character Art team has been spending some time working with the Design team on documentation of how chromas will be implemented in our ecosystem. Along with this, they have been working on various elemental icons and consumable icons for adventures. Other miscellaneous tasks included working on new Neftie facial expressions and the completion of the Halloween 3D models for zombie skins and seasonal/Battle Bash reward skins.

We had a couple of Nefties make their way to the rigging department this month. Their tasks included the following:

Rigging

• Rigging Beeblock

• Rigging Chocorex

• Unikirin rigging

• Dodorex skinning

• Znix skinning

ANIMATION

The Animation team was tasked with making sure that Blanche felt lively and that all Speed Blitz animations were ready for integration. Along with this, they integrated some fun Aurorian emotes that players will be able to use in Blanche and worked on adapting the rest of our v2 Neftie models for Tactics.

AUDIO

Our Audio team has been a great help with enhancing our marketing content lately. Some of the music they created can be heard in various sneak peeks on our Twitter account. Apart from that, throughout April they worked on integrating music and SFX in Blanche and have already begun working on music for the next phase of Adventures!

TECH

With a release as big as the Prologue to Adventures, all hands need to be onboard in our Tech department for a smooth and timely deployment. Never shying away from a challenge, they really showed up in April to make sure that we get the Prologue over the finish line and deliver a good experience for our players.

The following tasks made up most of their days:

Web3:

• Adventures UX Integration

  • Identifying requirement constraints.

  • Landing page integration.

  • Marketplace adventure toggle.

• Translations.

• Cross-chain planning.

• Testing out new tools to speed up development.

• Adding site-wide search to the landing page.

• Bug fixes.

Backend:

• Gameplay

  • Blitz / Adventures:

    • Stability and support as needed for V0.

    • V0.5.0 features planning.

    • Matchmaking improvements.

• Platform and Economy

  • Cross-chain support:

    • Design and planning for a SyncSpace-backed marketplace.

    • Crafting service (Incubator functionality in SyncSpace).

    • Supporting USDC in SyncSpace for more on-ramp options for cross-chain users.

    • Finishing authentication.

• Support for closing out the Easter event.

• Support for Blitz / Adventures.

Infrastructure

• Adventures:

  • Prodtest deployment.

• Planning:

  • Tactics join in progress.

  • Standalone builds.

MARKETING

We kicked off April with an Easter hatching event that exceeded our expectations in terms of engagement. We were very pleased with the outcome and would like to continue hosting similar types of live-ops events that reward our community and create fun ways to highlight various mechanisms on our platform.

Much of the rest of our marketing team’s efforts throughout April went towards planning communications for the Prologue to Adventures. With the help of the Design team, a big thread around Blanche was shared on Twitter last week. You can expect more of these types of threads as we go deeper into the lore of Aurory with the progression of Adventures. This thread was in addition to some sneak peeks we shared in various forms (images, gifs, and videos) throughout the last few weeks in order to build some hype around the soft release of the Prologue to Adventures.

We are also in preparation for our next event appearance at 3XP in Pasadena CA, next month! If you are planning to attend, please let us know on Discord, as we will have a booth where we’d love to meet some of you!

All in all, April was another great month in the books. Our team made some big strides on Adventures, and we can’t wait to release The Prologue for our holders to play next week!

Make sure your notifications are turned on for our Twitter account, as you don’t want to miss the teaser we have planned 🔔

See you in Blanche everyone!

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory Tactics 🕹️

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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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In this article, we’ll explain everything you’ll want to know about the old Incubator system, why these tweaks are necessary, and a bit about how these updates are laying the groundwork for additional mechanics and features yet to come. So let’s dive in!

The Old Incubator

To put it simply, the old system was not ideal long term. This was mainly due to the fact that the way it would work in our system when players would hatch a new Neftie is that first the stats were generated, and then a hypothetical rarity was assigned based on the total average of the random stats generated. What this resulted in was a higher number of rare Nefties being hatched than what you’d ideally want to maintain a good economic/rarity balance long term.

We know that this may come as a bit of a shock to some who feel they haven’t seen the most success with Neftie hatching, but our goal is to start to shift the perception of what have been viewed as “Common” Nefties to rather “Uncommon” and “Rare”. Truth be told, if you have been hatching eggs through our old system, you have actually been receiving much higher odds of hatching a better Neftie than what players can expect going forward. So congrats to all of our early supporters who hatched using the old system! Due to this however, expectations have maybe been set a bit too high. Another contributing factor to this perception has been the 40% average stats for free Nefties. So in order to help recalibrate expectations on Neftie stats, we will be lowering that number to 10% for now.

The New Incubator

Our new Incubator system will directly address the skew in rarity distribution by using a controlled-random formula to first decide the rarity of the Nefty being hatched and then generate a random combination of stats within that rarity range. This same system will also be used for generating items in-game that have rarities associated with them.

New Rarity System

With the deployment of our new Incubator system, we are also introducing a Neftie rarity system based on a one-to-five star scale. The table below shows the rarity terms/number of stars associated, stat ranges, and probability of hatching a Neftie of that rarity.

One of the first things you might think when looking at this table, is that the probability to hatch a “Common” Neftie with [0;20[ average stats is fairly high compared to the default Nefties statistics (40% average). However, these probabilities are modeled similarly to other popular games, and as we mentioned, we will balance Aurory Tactics by lowering the default Neftie statistics to 10% for now (we may change this again depending on the data we observe after implementing).

A few things to keep in mind: Aurory Tactics is a game of skill. A good player who really studies the game will still be able to beat an averagely invested player, even while playing with free Nefties. With more users playing Tactics and hatching eggs, we expect that Nefties that have been viewed as “Common” will quickly become “Uncommon” or “Rare” as intended, and the Neftie supply will be diluted with true “Commons”, which will bring us back to a more healthy balance again.

Star System

Your Neftie will have a visual representation of rarity on its NFT card in the form of stars that can range from one to five. The number of stars that a Neftie has displayed on its NFT card will represent the average stat range of that Neftie as well as the percentage of chances that players will have to hatch a Neftie within that range.

Rarity will play an important factor in the future with the additional mechanics that are planned. Our Design Team is still polishing the exact form that these mechanics will take, but it is safe to say that rare Nefties will come in extra handy, although common Nefties will have a purpose as well!

Another thing you might be asking yourself is: what about Glitched/Shimmering Nefties?

Glitched and Shimmering Nefties will be assigned retrospectively to your Nefties once we have the full flow (NFT and in-game apparence) ready.

All in all, we understand that this is a big change that may concern some players who have grown accustomed to the old system. However, we believe that these changes are in the best interest of us all, to keep our economy balanced and to make your Nefties have even more perceived value. We appreciate you all trusting us to make the best decisions for Aurory and all of its players. Having said that, please keep in mind that Aurory Tactics is still in alpha, which means that there are still hypotheses to test and things to balance. We will continue to collect players’ feedback and monitor data as we have been doing in order to make informed decisions about our platform’s development. Cheers everyone!

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory Tactics 🕹️

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Overall, February came and went quickly with all that happened! Let’s jump into some of the more gritty details on what else our team worked on throughout the past few weeks.

DESIGN

The Design team worked on building out a new dashboard displaying quantitative in-game statistics. This data will help us work towards the perfect in-game balance, as it helps us understand more about users behaviors’ as it relates to matters like the types of Nefties used most and the win rates of those particular Nefties. We will also be conducting a voluntary survey with our community soon to gain more insights into player feedback as it relates to specific Nefties.

The Design team also grew in February with the arrival of Jessy, who came from Nvizzio Creations, where he worked as a Game Designer and then an Economic Game Designer. With his arrival, he’ll be joining our current Economic Designers in making sure we keep Aurory sustainable and fun for all.

Apart from that, the bulk of our designers’ time went towards tasks related to creating the various ingredients that will make up The Village: Prologue to Adventures (our new title for Adventures v0) and Speed Blitz (our new title for Blitz Auto Battles).

These tasks included things like:

• Completing design of The Village layout.

• Locking core design for Speed Blitz.

• Designing the Neftie selection screen for Speed Blitz.

• Designing the results screens for Speed Blitz.

• Neftie stat design updates.

• Village kiosk integrations.

• Dialogue design.

• Inventory system mockups.

• Speed Blitz UI design.

In parallel with the development of Adventures, Tactics is still a focus and will continue to receive periodic patches and updates. A new camera has been developed and released by the Design team that will allow our marketing team and content creators to capture Tactics footage using more dynamic camera angles, significantly raising the production quality of Tactics videos to come!

Along with hosting our first Battle Bash, we also released the first version of our referral program, which allows referees to earn bonuses on their referrals’ weekly earnings! You can read more about it here.

Our team is also beginning to work on a type of Neftiedex tool (for lack of a better name at the moment). It will serve as a useful tool for both Adventures and Tactics. More information will be released on this soon.

The VFX team pushed a lot of new visual effects for the first versions of Adventures and Speed Blitz that we’ll be releasing soon. These consisted of:

• Battle dust integration for Speed Blitz

• Snowy biome pass.

• Plains biome pass.

• Speed Blitz celebration VFX.

• VFX for snowy village Speed Blitz matches.

• Kitty’s flame VFX.

• Glitched Neftie VFX.

  

ART

The Environmental team has continued with the production and polishing of assets for the various biomes in Adventures, with the Villages being the highest priority.

We shared a first video sneak peek last week of multiple Aurorians running around in the snowy village. In addition to showcasing the impressive level art in the village, this was a teaser of the social aspect of the village, which will allow players to meet up and challenge each other to a Speed Blitz fight! As stated, what was shown in the teaser is still very much WIP, and there will be a lot more polishing done before the public release.

The Character Art team brought us new Neftie variations with the concept art for Dodorex and Wooltail! They also worked on bringing new facial expressions to N9, Znix, and Dinotusk, and created concept art for some new Neftie trainer NPCs that you’ll soon meet in the village!

The Rigging team worked on the new v2 model of everyone’s favorite vegetable, Blockchoy, and the goodest boi of them all, Shiba. Kitty also finally got her bones, so we can bring her to life!

Animation

The highlight of this month for our animation team was the release of the Blitz trailer. A ton of work and collaboration across many departments went on behind the scenes to bring this trailer to the public, but it really could not have been pulled off if it weren’t for our expert animators. The reactions and feedback it received were overwhelmingly positive, and people seem really hyped about Blitz and Adventures after seeing the trailer. We can’t wait to start delivering the first versions of Blitz to eventually bring you all full-blown battles, similar to what was shown in that trailer!

Aside from working on the Blitz trailer, the animation team continued with animating the new v2 Neftie models and various creatures and NPCs that we’ll find scattered across the village!

Audio

With multiple biomes, each with their own ambiance, Speed Blitz SFX, and new NPCs with SFX needs…our Audio team is looking forward to a busy year ahead and continuing to bring joy to our ears!

Throughout February, some of the work on their end has consisted of:

• Finalizing music and SFX for the Blitz trailer.

• Sketch and research for Snow Village and Speed Blitz.

• Battle Dust Cloud and Generic Nefties Dash SFX.

• Speed Blitz music.

• Snow Village music.

• SFX for Snow Village .

• SFX for v2 Nefties.

• SFX design for NPCs.

TECH

With two sprints over the last month, our Tech team covered some serious ground.

Each department’s work consisted of the following:

Web3

• Referral system deployment.

• Enabling support for SOL in SyncSpace.

• Marketplace rarity and filter integration.

• Battle Bash event page deployment (web and mobile).

• Aurory.io home page revamp.

• Migration to a new nest-based backend API.

• Miscellaneous bug fixing.

Backend

• Gameplay

  • Creation of public API for Unity Clients to prepare for Speed Blitz.

  • Betting implementation for PVP Speed Blitz.

  • Design/planning (with Unity) on handling Speed Blitz matches/game logic.

  • Testing Tactics Season 3 rollout (with QA support).

  • Supporting the release of improved/refactored matchmaking system.

• Platform and Economy

  • Marketplace service V2 implementation.

  • Locker/SyncSpace updates to support Adventures and Blitz.

  • Rarity system - stabilization and testing

  • Planning and early explorations for new expeditions flows.

  • Referral system integration support.

  • Battle Bash Support.

  • Analytics tracking.

Infrastructure

• Implementing infrastructure metrics scraped by Prometheus.

• Implementing basic alerts on infrastructure (disk space on databases, ratio of errors on load balancer).

• Implementing Gitlab runners in Kubernetes.

• Adventure connectivity support.

• Implementation of the new reputation system.

Game Tech

• Establishing full Village/ Speed Blitz prototype-quality loop.

• Implementing multiplayer Aurorians village feature.

• Implementing audio feature so the team can integrate and polish it as of the next sprint.

• Scoping next releases.

• Kicking off live ops working group to improve live ops events.

• Establishing the final content and release window for Tactics 0.2.9.

MARKETING

The marketing team had some big pushes this past month with the release of the Blitz trailer. Aside from that, February was mostly centered around the Battle Bash. In order to bring additional attention to Aurory and the Battle Bash, we announced a giveaway for a gaming PC with VastGG that is still going. Make sure to enter if you haven’t already! We also hosted two live streams on our YouTube channel and shared some tip videos to help players improve their gameplay during the Battle Bash!

Other marketing-related activities we have in the works include a booth that we’ll be hosting at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco later this month. During that same week, we’ll also be sponsoring an event in partnership with MagicEden and a few other web3 gaming projects. If any of you will be in the area during that week and would like to attend, please reach out to our team on Discord!

For the shortest month of the year, it certainly felt a lot longer than 28 days with all that happened in the Aurory sphere. As always, thanks for everyone’s continued support! We can’t wait to get all of the upcoming releases in your hands, with the planned 0.2.9 Tactics update aimed for the end of this month and the early access of The Village: Prologue to Adventures right after that. Let’s close out Q1 with a bang!

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory Tactics 🕹️

Connect with us on our socials 👇

🤖 Discord | 🐦 Twitter | 📷 Instagram | 💬 Facebook | 📺 YouTube

How Will It Work?

• You need to be an active player (earn at least 1 TOKE or OKA in a distribution period to be eligible for a bonus that week).

• Users can find their invite code on the player profile page.

• If a user visits the website through your invite link and registers for an Aurory account in the next 24 hours, you will be credited for referring that user.

• Users will be able to earn a 10% bonus on referred users’ TOKE/OKA rewards every week. This is the starting rate for this program and is subject to change.

• The current bonus period where referrers can earn weekly 10% bonuses is set at 180 days but is also subject to change.

• In the “TOKE & OKA - History” tab on your Player Profile page, you’ll be able to see the amount of AURY bonuses you received from referred player earnings each week.

  

• An example of how this system will work in practice:

  • Player A is active and eligible to be a referrer (they earn at least 1 TOKE or OKA in a given distribution period).

  • Player A shares their referral link with Player B, who has never played Aurory before.

  • Player B creates an account within 24 hours of visiting our site after using the referral link.

  • Player B then plays Tactics during the same distribution period and earns 10,000 TOKE and 5,000 OKA.

  • Player B gets to keep the full amount of those rewards, and Player A earns a 10% bonus on their referral’s rewards (500 TOKE and 1,000 OKA) for that week.

FAQs

If you have any additional questions that aren’t answered below, please ask them in our Discord, and one of our team members will be happy to answer them for you!

We will continue to add more FAQs here as they come in.

Q: Can I refer multiple players?
A: Yes, you can refer an unlimited number of players.

Q: Can I refer a player who has already played or registered a wallet address that’s been used to play the game?
A: No. Eligible referrals can only come from players who register with a new social account or a new wallet.

Q: When does the 180-day bonus period start and end?
A: Invite codes have no expiration, but the referrer will stop receiving bonuses from a referral 180 days after they have redeemed that code.

Q: Will the referral rewards be distributed from the same pool as the tactics rewards?
A: Yes, the reward pool is the same for both. As a reminder, the more players we have, the bigger the pool will be.

Q: Can I self-refer with an alt account/new wallet?
A: Any instance of multi-accounting for the sole purpose of abusing/farming in-game rewards or referral bonuses goes against our terms of use and warrants the removal of weekly rewards for the period of the offense. We will be monitoring closely for abuse.

Q: Do referrals receive any kind of bonus or incentive for registering through an invite link?
A: Not in this first version, but we plan to add support for this in the future.

Q: Can I get a bonus on my referral’s bonuses? Meaning, if I refer someone, who then refers someone else, and they receive a weekly bonus from that referral, will I earn 10% of that too?
A: No. You can only earn bonuses on your direct referral’s weekly rewards for playing Tactics.

Rules and Restrictions

Eligible users must abide by the Aurory Code of Conduct.

Eligible users must abide by the Aurory Terms of Use.

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory Tactics 🕹️

Connect with us on our socials 👇

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As our team made their way back to work earlier this month after a well-deserved holiday break, they hit the ground running working towards our Q1 release goals. With the help of some of the DAO council members, our Executive Producer, Johnny, presented some of those goals on a livestream during the middle of the month. You can find a summary of this one-hour stream on the AuroryDaily twitter account.

This livestream was the first step in the direction of us trying to be more transparent with the community when it comes to certain stages of development and sharing justifications for why certain decisions are being made. We have always been reachable on Discord, and we have been consistently sharing monthly updates and executive updates to keep that line of communication strong. But we are constantly assessing our approaches and using player sentiment as a metric of how well we’re doing when it comes to that communication and whether they feel included and heard by the team. It can be easy to get sucked into the daily development grind, so we must continue to keep ourselves accountable to you all and do our best to keep everyone in the loop.

On that note, throughout this year, we plan to give the community more access to the team and allow them to get to know us a bit better through more content like team interviews, livestreams, Twitter Spaces, and AMAs. Now, without further ado, let’s jump into this past month’s updates!

DESIGN

Design is where everything starts, and with all that we aim to achieve this year, our Design team will have some major tasks before them. Currently, each of the following topics is being addressed in some capacity on a daily basis:

• Blitz Battle system.

• Aurory Adventures.

• Aurory Tactics optimization.

• Aurorians on Expedition v1.5/v2.

• Lands design.

• Narrative.

• Economy modeling and balancing.

• Web ecosystem design.

As you can see, there’s no shortage of demand for designer input around here. However, as we’ve communicated recently, the highest priority tasks at the moment remain locking in features that will make up the village’s online social hub, which we’ve targeted for an end-of-Q1 release.

Some of the more secondary tasks on the Design front that have been worked on throughout January also include:

• Aurory Adventures’ UX onboarding flow.

• Progression system.

• Anti-cheat measures (reputation/skill points).

• Referral program design.

• Live-ops planning (tournaments, season structuring).

• Nefty rarity system.

In addition to making sure that in-game screens are always looking top-notch, our UIX team has been working to update our web ecosystem with the following tasks:

• Marketplace improvements (Nefty rarity UI).

• aurory.io homepage 2.0.

• Battle Bash event page optimization.

• Player profile page updates.

ART

Aurory Adventures will be where our Environmental Art team gets to shine and really show their talent this year. First impressions are everything, and in a space that can often times value earning potential over graphics/game quality, we plan to be the ones who rewrite playbook for web3 gaming standards. That being said, our artists have been primarily working on concepting and modeling new biomes and polishing level art for the villages to make sure everything is in order for the grand opening!

The Character Art and Rigging teams will both have some work ahead of them in the coming months as we integrate more new Nefties in both Aurory Tactics and Aurory Adventures.

In addition to this, some of you may have seen us tease “v2 Nefties” in the past. For those who aren’t aware of what this means, it’s basically an art upgrade to the Nefty 3D models that are used in-game. Currently, the “v1 Nefty” models used in Tactics are a bit less defined than what is shown on NFT card artwork. The purpose of upgrading to the v2 Nefty models is for them to have more detail and generally look more badass. While cute and bubbly, “v1 Nefties” will be seeing a sunset at some point soon as we will integrate only v2’s in Blitz Battles and will have a patch to transition all Nefties in Tactics to v2 models at some point after that.

Currently, most of the playable Nefties in Tactics have already had a v2 version modeled and are now just awaiting animation and then rigging. Keep an eye out for some videos we’ll be releasing to showcase this major upgrade to our Nefty companions!

For now, you can enjoy the sneak peek below 👇

In addition to the v2 Nefty work, in the past few weeks, our character artists worked on new Nefty variation concept art, Axobubble and N9 facial expressions, as well as the NFT skin reward artwork for our alpha season one leaderboard finalists.

On the rigging side, Dipking and Bloomtail each had a visit to our rig-master in preparation for animation to then be integrated into Blitz and Tactics!

ANIMATION

Throughout the past month, most of the animation team’s time was spent putting in some serious hours to complete the Blitz trailer that we teased two weeks ago. It won’t be much longer until you get to enjoy the full video!

Any extra time available was spent re-animating v2 Nefty models that made it past the rigging process.

AUDIO

Our Audio team is expecting a busy year as well. With new game modes in the works, each with multiple biomes requiring different SFX to create an ambiance, players will truly feel like they are in that world!

Throughout January, they’ve also spent a fair bit of time working on the audio for the Blitz trailer and the matching audio that we’ll be hearing during Blitz battles. We can’t wait to share more of the awesome work this talented department has been putting out!

TECH

Their work isn’t the sexiest, but they’re the backbone of any great project. We know you love them…or at least we hope so!

Throughout January, all of our Tech departments have been hard at work with full task lists.

Starting with the Web3 team, their workload consists of some of the following:

• Improvements to Nefty filtering

• Adding a feature to require users to accept the TOS before playing.

• Running Battle Bash tests tournament on Aurorynet.

• Referral system design and integration.

• Creating support for SOL in SyncSpace.

• Integrating marketplace rarity filter.

• Battle Bash event page optimization.

• Aurory.io home page redesign.

• Bug fixing (UX responsiveness tech debt).

• Data fetching improvements.

• Moving all external services API calls to backend.

The Backend team has been improving our services on multiple levels:

• Gameplay

  • Testing and iterating on a new ticketing system on staging.

  • Configuration center support for multiple projects and other feedback.

• Platform and Economy

  • Cutting over to the new authentication and identity service on staging.

    • Data migration, deployment, and update integrations.

  • Marketplace service release to support Nefty stats filtering.

  • Referral features:

    • Testing, production readiness, and release.

    • Configuring events and metrics.

    • Supporting miscellaneous and ongoing analytics requests.

  • Finishing up the design phase of marketplace service V2 upgrades and kicking off implementation.

On the OPS and Infrastructure side, they were tackling the following:

• CDN for build distribution.

• CDN for websocket connections.

• First iteration of the reputation score system.

• Testing the reputation system in staging.

• On-call notification system setup.

• Assisting on Aurory Adventures’ build and deployment pipeline.

• Iterating on global accelerator for Tactics gameserver.

• Matchmaking refactoring.

And finally, the Game Tech team pushed hotfix 3 for 0.2.8 this month! In addition to this, they assisted in the iteration and testing of the new reputation system we’re working on, which is being designed as another measure to discourage any type of prohibited in-game behavior by players.

Other tasks they supported on were Aurory Adventure related:

• Kicking off the prototyping of procedural lands.

• Dialogue system, integrating playable gym and 3Cs.

MARKETING

With Tactics now open to the public, you can expect the Aurory team’s marketing and business development efforts to be stepped up a notch to test more user acquisition initiatives in the form of more small and large collaborations and partnerships. As an example of some types of initiatives we have in mind, you can look to the $BONK promotion we ran right which saw over 3k unique players in the first week of 2023!

Hosting our first video contest was a lot of fun, and we hope you enjoyed watching some of these submissions as much as we did. We want to give a big thank you to all participants! We hope it gave you the motivation to continue creating content, as we’re working on a content creator program with exclusive benefits for official Aurory ambassadors. Make sure to stay tuned for the results of the video contest!

All in all, we’re kicking things off on a great foot this January. We covered a lot of ground in 2022, but there is still a lot of work to be done and many mountains to climb ahead. We’re confident that we’ll cover twice as much ground this year. As always, we thank you all for your patience and support as we build out more experiences that we know you’re all anxious to get your hands on!

Cheers to 2023; let’s make it a great year!

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory Tactics 🕹️

Connect with us on our socials 👇

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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!

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory Tactics 🕹️

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The launch of the open alpha of Aurory Tactics marked yet another huge milestone for Aurory, and we have been very pleased to see the positive reactions and feedback from our players. We can't wait to show you what’s in store for 2023! With the current build and the growing active player base, we think the time has come to really show the world what Tactics is all about. Therefore, we will be hosting our very first video contest, centered around explaining and/or showcasing Aurory Tactics in video format. Even if you are not a professional content creator, you can still create an exciting video and have the opportunity to win a share of the prize pool. After all, there is an artist inside everyone!

Categories

— Best Overall Video 

Create a video that really captures everything Aurory Tactics has to offer in an exciting and entertaining way.

— Best Explainer Video 

Create a video that explains what Aurory Tactics is, how you can get started, and covers all the elements of the game.

— Most Entertaining Video 

A call for the editing magicians to create a video that’s a blast to watch and really ignites people’s excitement and imagination.

— Most Viral Video 

The winner will be the one who’s video gets the most social engagement. Let’s make Tactics go viral!

— Best Effort

We will select an additional ten entrants for the efforts they put into making their videos.

The Prize Pools:

Best Overall Video: $1,300 + Aurorian NFT

Best Explainer Video: $900 + 3 Everglade eggs

Most Entertaining Video: $900 + 3 Everglade eggs

Most Viral Video: $900 + 3 Everglade eggs

Best Effort:

2 x a $300 prize

3 x a $200 prize

5 x 3 Everglade eggs + 120 $AURY

Note: All the cash prizes will be paid out at 50% in $AURY tokens at the exchange rate when the winners are announced + 50% in USDC. All winning entries will be retweeted by the main Aurory account!

Rules and Requirements:

• Your video should not exceed four minutes.

• Your entry on social media must include the hashtag #AuroryTactics in the caption.

• Submissions must be posted in the #🏆contests channel in our Discord and on your social channels by January 31st, 4pm GMT. Join our Discord here.

• When posting your entry on Discord, include the link(s) to your social media post(s).

• All entries must either be submitted in English or, if in another language, they must include English subtitles.

• Videos that were produced prior to the contest will not be allowed to compete.

• Entrants can only win two prizes in total.

• You are allowed to promote your video(s) as much as you wish.

• Collaborations are allowed. 

• You are allowed to participate in all categories and have as many entries as you like. 

• No copyrighted materials (music, images, video clips, etc.) may be used for this contest unless you own the copyright or have a license to use the material for this contest. 

• The winners will be decided by non-participating moderators and staff.

• Entrants grant Aurory Project the right to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, and/or display the entrant’s video without further compensation or notification to the entrant.

• Entrants agree to be bound by the official contest rules and decisions of the team.

Content must not:

• Promote illegal behavior

• Support racial, religious, sexual, or other invidious prejudice

• Advocate sexual or violent exploitation

• Be otherwise offensive or NSFW

Aurory Content and Press Kit

To create the best possible video(s), we recommend using the information and material from our website, Substack articles, and especially our press kit.

Website: https://aurory.io/

Substack: https://aurory.substack.com/

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/aurory

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AuroryProject

Twitter: https://twitter.com/auroryproject

So, now the time has come to roll up your sleeves and show us your action-packed battle footage, epic victories, Aurorians flexing in the lobby, how to get started, funny moments, players climbing the ranks, rewards, and more!

We wish you the best of luck and can’t wait to see all the entries and your amazing talent. Above all, have fun!

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory Tactics 🕹️

Connect with us on our socials 👇

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Introducing Rank-Based Rewards

With the first iteration of our Tactics reward loop, we implemented the OKA and TOKE reward distribution system, complete with the weekly conversion to $AURY. Based on the positive results that we’ve seen with this mechanism, and how smoothly it’s been working, we are happy to announce that with our next patch, we plan to take another step in the direction imagined more than a year ago.

Going forward, players will notice a new progressive reward system that distributes OKA and TOKE based on the “rating score” of the winning player.

Until now, OKA and TOKE rewards have been fixed for each victory because we have been testing the process of distribution and conversion. Now that we have passed this testing phase, we will be implementing the new rank-based rewards system with the deployment of version 0.2.8. A reward mechanism of this nature, coupled with quality matchmaking, seems essential to us for the proper development of the game.

Addressing Abuse

During our test phase (with fixed OKA and TOKE rewards), we noticed that there would be a risk associated with implementing rank-based matchmaking without also modifying our reward distribution system. The main risk is that players will create new accounts in order to face relatively weaker opponents than with their main account in an attempt to increase their chances of winning. Be aware that with our next patch, this kind of behavior should not be an issue. We are also well aware of certain abuses committed by players who use secondary accounts to quickly reap the rewards intended for all players. We had already foreseen the possibility of such behavior during our test phase, and these players have been sanctioned. Rest assured that we will continue to sanction abuse and work tirelessly to constantly improve the gaming experience.

Finally, we can't prevent players from creating secondary accounts, but multi-accounting will simply no longer be a viable method to farm sub-tokens. Focusing on the progression of a main account will allow players to earn more $AURY every week.

Introducing Rank-Based Matchmaking

With our previous patch (0.2.7) we introduced a ranking system for all players, but thus far, our matchmaking has not taken into the ratings of players into account before matching them together.

Starting with version 0.2.8, this will no longer be the case, as you will notice yourself being matched with players of a similar rating in order to ensure a better experience for all. In order to keep matchmaking times reasonable, our system will relax the matchmaking criteria based on waiting times while players are in queue. As a result, the criteria could be totally dropped during times of lower player activity.

Rank-based matchmaking is expected to have multiple effects on the player experience when combined with increased player activity:

• High-skill players will be matched with players of similar skill levels more frequently, so we can expect more epic battles for leaderboard spots.

• Low-skill players will be matched less frequently with very active high-skill players, giving them a better chance to win and decreasing their frustration when learning the game

• Players attempting to farm rewards with alt-accounts will have more difficulty finding a match against themselves.

The rank-based matchmaking system will be adjusted and optimized based on the auto-analysis of wait times as well as how players are being matched.

Uncertainty

Uncertainty affects players' new ratings after each match. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the variation and movement of scores after each match.

New accounts with few or no games and all accounts after a rank reset will have a high uncertainty, which allows the ratings to converge more quickly to a score that represents their skill.

If outcomes match the system’s expectations, the uncertainty will decrease until it reaches a floor. With 0.2.8, the floor will be set higher to allow for more variation and challenging experiences at the top of the leaderboard.

Rank Reset

To keep the game fair for all players, whether they are seasoned or newcomers, each season will start with a rank reset. This will enable all players to have a better chance of getting to the top of the leaderboard.

The leaderboard of the previous season will be archived and accessible, so everybody can view and share details of their previous performances.

Conclusion

This patch is another big milestone for Aurory and should bring us closer to our goal of having a highly competitive, e-sports-ready PvP game. These changes were expected by the players, and we are glad to provide them to you before the end of 2022!

We are always open to feedback from our community and would love to hear from you through one of the social channels below.

Thanks for reading, and Happy Holidays to all!

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory Tactics 🕹️

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Our thoughts go out to the users and other projects who were affected by this event. For Aurory Project, the blow we took was limited to 15% of our treasury, and although it isn’t a small sum, we are grateful for our co-founders’ foresight earlier this year to move as much of our treasury off of custodial wallets, like FTX, into cold wallets, where they are protected from the unpredictable contagion of events like the LUNA fiasco and now the FTX collapse. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to remove all of our treasury as we needed to leave a certain amount of liquidity for market making. 

Being that Alameda was our market maker, many of you have likely also noticed the thin liquidity on $AURY since they went under. We are planning to add liquidity to DEXs and are already in discussion with three large market makers as well as some T1 exchanges to solve these liquidity issues. However, we are finding that it's not the quickest process to get listed elsewhere at the moment given that the entire market is scrambling due to similar circumstances, on top of many firms having their own liquidity issues due to exposure to FTX and now Genesis. We see all these issues as temporary and, unfortunately, somewhat to be expected after a large player goes down like that.

Regardless, we are doing everything we can to get more liquidity added to the $AURY market as soon as we can while not allowing it to slow down the development progress of our game. The important thing to highlight in all this is that our mission remains unchanged, and we are still in a great position financially, with multiple years of runway left to build, develop, and deliver top-quality Web3 games at our current burn rates. We won’t allow bad actors to waver our enthusiasm, and we continued to work hard throughout November.

Before the FTX fiasco went down, we started the month in the best way possible with Solana Games Day and Breakpoint in Lisbon. For most of the 10 team members who attended, it was the first time meeting each other in person and our first IRL event where we got to meet some of our community members!

We were fortunate to be one of the presenting projects at Solana Games Day, where we went on stage to talk briefly about Aurory before going into a live demonstration of the game where we had eight people (four of them from G2 esports) playing against each other while having their games projected onto a large screen on stage. We also had an Aurory booth at Games Day as well as the main Breakpoint venue for the entire weekend. The one thing that anyone from our team in attendance would surely tell you about the most common feedback we received, its that people were very impressed and would argue that we are one of the highest quality and/or most developed web3 games that they have seen thus far. Receiving this recognition means a lot to us and gives us even more confidence in what we're building! Overall, the vibe that weekend was amazing, and we had a lot of fun showcasing the game!

DESIGN

After the release of the 0.2.7 patch in October, the focus quickly shifted to 0.2.8 in order to be able to release it before Christmas. This patch will mark the opening of Aurory Tactics to the public, meaning the Design team has had a lot on their plate! Most notably, they have been tackling the task of creating an in-game tutorial for onboarding new players, in addition to working on the design of a seasonal ladder ranking system, and player progression mechanics.

While Tactics consumed the majority of the Design team's time this month, some members of the team continued to work on Aurory Adventure-related tasks that we won't reveal just yet. One thing we can spoil without giving too much away is that the we are also planning on reworking the Nexus! This is something we are particularly excited about as a way to keep giving more value and utility to your NFTs!

On the UIX side, they have been tackling multiple tasks to bring you all some exciting new screens and UI elements. With the 0.2.8 patch, you can expect to see new loading screens, new battle end screens, new Nefty selection screens, new in-game icons, and more! In addition to these elements, you may notice some much-needed website design updates as well.

We also pushed some smaller website updates throughout the month, which some of you may have already noticed. This includes a new Patch Notes page, as well as a Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and Code of Conduct. Players should take these new rules and disclaimers into account to be sure that they don’t break any rules and lose their entitlement to rewards.

ART

Aurory Adventure will blow your mind thanks to our incredible Environmental Art team. Throughout November, they have continued with adding finishing touches to The Village, polishing level art for current biomes, and exploring level art for new biomes in the works!

More things are in the works, including Lands, Nexus 2.0, Kitty’s Tavern updates, and some lore around a beloved character! We can't yet share any sneak peeks on those just yet, so we'll leave you with a concept art of a tutorial arena, which will be playable in 0.2.8! 

The Character Art team has continued their work conceptualizing the v2 mini versions of Nefties, along with their attributes. In addition to this, earlier this week we teased a new Nefty that will be introduced in due time. Did you guess its name correctly?

ANIMATION

With the v2 Nefties making their way from conception to the modeling stage, our lead rigger has been reconstructing their “skeletons” in preparation for animation.

Dinobit was first in line for this treatment with our lead rigger, who also found time to work on polishing up the Sam Max rig. Yes, for obvious reasons, our main character is now called Max!

We still aren’t quite ready to tease the new Aurory Adventure battle system yet, but the Animation team has also been hard at work preparing some rad ways to showcase the new game mode soon enough. It will be well worth the wait!

AUDIO

Our Audio team has also been working on new Tactics music as well as new Aurory Adventure battle music, a new Nefty vocalization system, Village ambience, and brasero SFX. Another busy month, as you can tell!

TECH

There’s never a shortage of tasks for our Tech team, which had a huge win last month with the release of SyncSpace. Throughout November, they had their hands full once again.

On the Web3 side, the focus was mainly on 0.2.8-related tasks along with general maintenance tasks and initiatives:

• New authentication schemes.

• Programming the incubation system to hatch new egg types.

• Marketplace Nefty filtering.

• New landing page.

• Error tracking.

• Bug fixing.

• New analytics tracking.

The Backend team worked on:

• Gameplay

  • Implementation of matchmaking v3:

    • Configurable rules.

    • Queue system with status.

    • Updates to configuration service based on the latest feedback.

• Economy

  • 0.2.8 planning:

    • Identity provider selection and implementation.

    • Identity service and authentication service updates.

    • Social login implementation.

    • Design and planning for Nefty stat filtering features.

  • Misc:

    • Support for new eggs.

    • Monitoring reward distribution and related systems.

For the Infrastructure and Operations, the focus was on:

• Ranking tweaks, deployment, and follow-up.

• Migration of the web application firewall logs to new OpenSearch cluster.

• On-call notification setup.

• Single-use game server deployments.

• Matchmaking and game server allocation architecture.

• OpenSearch dashboards setup and training.

• Cheat detection initial dashboards.

Wherever there is an opportunity to earn, there will be some willing to abuse it. We anticipated this unfortunate fact before launching our reward loop and had been working on setting up systems and dashboards to allow us to detect and deter this kind of behavior. With our reward loop having been out for over a month now, our Director of Technical Operations, Julien Pellet, has had time to monitor a lot of this data and come up with plans to address the toxic behavior accordingly.

Here are a few words he had to say on the matter:

“As we started to distribute monetary rewards each week, we saw a new behavior emerging from some players: greed. Some players figured out how to optimize their time to maximize their rewards, doing this at the expense of the other players who actually tried to follow the rules of legitimate gameplay.

These players have a negative impact on many parts of the game:

• As they abuse gameplay mechanics, their opponents will not enjoy playing against them.

• They attempt to maximize end-of-game rewards, which reduces the amount of rewards distributed to legitimate players. 

Luckily, we have some data pipelines in place so we can collect events and metrics from different aspects of the gameplay mechanics. With this data, we were able to spot a huge increase in gameplay abuse during the whole past week. Some players spent a few hours per day trying to farm rewards without playing.

Before the distribution period, we made a list of offenders and counted the rewards they gathered. 26.73% of rewards were collected by players abusing the mechanics.

We unanimously decided to remove rewards for 49 players after peer-reviewing the data and determining who was abusing and who was not. All those rewards were automatically distributed to the rest of the player base, raising the amount of $AURY distributed to other players by 26.73%.

In the next few weeks, we will take more granular approaches that will allow us to better handle those behaviors throughout the week, not just at the distribution time.

We proudly defend the gameplay mechanics and the honorable players in order to create a safe and enjoyable environment for everyone.”

MARKETING

As we mentioned earlier, November started off with a lot of momentum and excitement. Meeting community members, gamers, fellow degens from the Solana ecosystem, getting live feedback about Aurory Tactics (with this feedback, we’ve updated our Battle Guide as well!). We even had the pleasure of having a dinner with the Backpack team who we’ve been working closely with for some time, building our Aurory xNFT in their wallet.

Among the many amazing people we met in Lisbon, we had many opportunities to form new relationships with fellow builders in the space, and even some big names looking to get involved through partnerships with Aurory!

The rest of the month wasn't as enjoyable, but we did our best to be open about the FTX situation and the state of our treasury. 

Rafikey, a well-known community member, joined us to work on content creation! You probably know him already if you’ve been following Aurory for a bit. We are really excited to have one more talented community member working with us. Have a look at his YouTube channel to stay up to date with content he’ll be posting to his own channel, in addition to the content he’ll be creating for the Aurory YouTube channel!

As the last month of 2022 kicks off, we want to take the time to thank everyone for sticking with us through this rollercoaster of a year for the ecosystem. Keep up the faith and know that we will continue working to bring you the best possible gaming experience that we can! We hope that you’re enjoying the game and the constant updates, that you’re enjoying the vibe within the community on Discord and Twitter, and that you’re ready for a big 2023 to come. Enjoy Christmas and time with your family and friends!

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory Tactics 🕹️

Connect with us on our socials 👇

🤖 Discord | 🐦 Twitter | 📷 Instagram | 💬 Facebook | 📺 YouTube

This patch came with the implementation of rewards, the addition of one of the cutest Nefties of all, a huge UI update, and the deployment of a new ranking system! We had more than 200 active players in under 24 hours while still being in closed access, and hundreds of eggs were hatched. Things are really starting to heat up!

DESIGN

As many of you can easily guess, a big part of the Design team’s work throughout October has been prepping for the release of 0.2.7. One of the biggest tasks for them was finalizing the economic loop design, as this was not something that was only worked on in October. Our Economy Designer, Adel, worked for months to create many different models that would help us anticipate various scenarios that could play out once rewards begin to distribute. With his thorough planning and research on this front, we were finally able to confidently deploy our reward mechanism that our community has been patiently waiting for!

With our first reward distribution underway, some may wonder why we aren’t totally showering the community with lavish rewards as a marketing tactic to attract new players. We would like to reiterate that we are looking to push a new model in web3 gaming; “Play-and-Own”. This model is much more sustainable in nature than any of the “play/earn” models that we’ve seen thus far. With that, we have a certain type of user in mind that we want to attract. The type of user who is here for the game first and foremost but is happy to receive some rewards for their efforts as a bonus. Bringing such players in will allow us to grow steadily and sustainably, rather than using unsustainable rewards to attract those who just want to farm and extract. It will be a delicate balancing act going forward, but as we mentioned before, rewards could increase or decrease week-to-week depending on player activity, so we’d like to encourage the community to not focus too much on the number that was distributed in the first week. Our number one priority this week was making sure the conversion and distribution mechanics worked appropriately, and it appears that this was the case!

Aside from the enormous rewards push for our designers, we also fixed a ton of bugs and implemented various balancing measures with 0.2.7. Some of you may have noticed the changes if you’ve played in the last week. You can read the full patch notes here:

Our UIX team also pushed a new update to the in-game UI, which aims to clean up the screen a bit and make things more clear in terms of Nefty HP, turn order, hype counter, skill icons, and more!

The team also grew in October with the arrival of Tim from Paris, who recently graduated with a Master’s in Game Design. He’s had former experience as a Game Designer for a VR experience at Ubisoft and has also worked as the lead GD on multiple indie side projects. With his addition to the team, he will have a main focus on Aurory Adventure, but will also be assisting the design team with implementing and improving current and future features for the project. One of his main goals will be to help optimize both our designers' production workflow and the user experience.

ART

Our Environmental Art team wrapped up their current sprint by having the Tokané Village art fully produced and ready to have some life added to it! With this map locked in, they have now begun working on Land prototypes.

The Character Art team has been working on the beautiful Aurani, one of our new NPCs!

Our lead Nefty artist, Claire, has continued her work with updating the “mini” versions of Nefties to something that will more closely resemble the artwork that is shown on Nefty NFT cards. With these new v2 Nefties, she has also begun creating the artwork for new Nefty attributes to add more diversity in-game. Some of this work has already made its way to our 3D artist, Keith, for modeling, and it is looking amazing!