Aurory Project - Q3 2022 Executive Update

To celebrate my first year anniversary with Aurory, I thought I would kick off a new type of update. This format will most likely evolve over-time, but the objective will always remain the same. To provide more context and visibility around our decisions, choices, priorities, and to answer the why’s and how’s of developing a blockchain gaming platform. 

With that being said: Introducing the Aurory Executive Update! 

It’s my goal to publish these updates every quarter, so four times a year. I will attempt to fit three months of development into every update, giving you the latest and greatest around Aurory. These updates will not specifically go into details about macro market conditions, but will stay around the crypto-gaming vertical. 

To kick off the first edition, I wanted to address the our production timeline and what to expect for the remainder of 2022 and early 2023.

In one of our town hall meetings we had a couple weeks ago, I presented a refocus of priorities. The reasoning behind the shift was highly due to the public reaction of Aurory Tactics. In this meeting, I used the bullseye approach to assign priorities to each of our products we are developing. 

We wanted to touch a bit of everything at once, and while this worked early on when we had fewer experiences, it quickly became overwhelming in recent months with new projects and new partnerships. 

In the picture below, you can see the graph on the right, at the time we had 9 products to manage. We had some difficult decisions to make because we couldn’t continue working on these 9 products at once without burning out the team. But that wasn’t an option, since we are here for the long haul, and this is a marathon, not a sprint. 

So with that in mind, we decided on important business objectives to drive the rest of 2022 and early 2023.

• Objective 1: Finish up Aurory Tactics ASAP so that it can be used competitively.

• Objective 2: Focus hard on the reward loop to kick start the in-game economy.

• Objective 3: Improve our onboarding and integrate event-type features to foster a growing community.

Objective 1: Finishing up Tactics

With the feedback we received from the early access of Tactics, we all agreed we needed to properly finish up the experience. Which means, integrating the missing features, such as power stones, and the right flow for picking your team, overall quality of life improvements, improving the presentation, loading and matchmaking screens, adding more relevant information in Kitty’s tavern, such as connected players, link to marketplace, etc.. We have a long list of updates for Tactics that will greatly improve on what’s already a great foundation. I won’t go into the details here, but expect a production timeline specifically for Tactics! 

Objective 2: Reward Loop

You guys have been asking for it since the project was announced. We know you’ve been patient and this is long overdue. We will integrate the reward loop in stages, to make sure we maintain a healthy economy. The first version will appear in 0.2.7 scheduled for late October. Players will finally be able to gain tokens from playing Aurory Tactics. The second version will factor in your player rating and rank to give you more (or less) rewards depending on your stats. This is currently planned for early December. 

Objective 3: Onboarding and tournament features to support a growing community

We are planning a big overhaul of our onboarding process for 0.2.8 (early December). Again, we will roll this out in stages but the first onboarding version will have scripted Tactics tutorials to help new players understand the game mechanics. You will also start seeing more documentation around game features, such as the reward rules, how to hatch your first egg, what content can be found in each egg, etc. Lastly, and this is a big one, we are also looking to improve the account creation process on the aurory.io platform. Our goal is to have a seamless experience, especially for non-crypto players as it will be critical to mass adoption (picture being able to login with your google or twitter account to play).

In terms of tournament features, we are serious about a competitive pro league of Tactics. We still need to develop a few additional features that will allow us greater flexibility in the overall management of such events. But we are making great progress on this front and I’m excited to announce some of these features will start making their way to you guys by the end of the year. Aurory Battle Bash anyone?

We are investigating the addition of a challenge mode as well as a spectator mode. But we are still early in the process. We’ll be sharing more on this soon!

Finally, take those three objectives, and mix that up with the fact that there isn’t any competitive blockchain game in our genre, and you have a winning combination for success that we want to capitalize on.

We would be doing every holder a disservice by not seriously taking this window of opportunity in the market, as it probably won't exist in six months from now. The web3 market moves at such a rapid pace that we have no choice but to adapt if we want to stay relevant to the community as a whole. Especially since our objective has always been to play a huge part in the adoption of web3 through educational gaming content. 

Contrary to the approach of most other projects, we did not integrate our full economy inside our NFTs. We planned fun and addictive gameplay loops for that, because we are a gaming project first. 

The consequences of focusing on those three primary objectives is that we had to slow down the development of Adventure mode. Keyword here is slow down, not stop. During early tests, we found out loading Tactics while playing Adventure proved challenging, from a technical standpoint. WebGL has limitations unfortunately, and we had to adapt the direction. Otherwise, the user experience would have been atrocious. This new direction created a series of events that led to the creation of a new battle system for Adventure. I can’t say more than that for now, because we are planning a much bigger reveal around this. All I can say is keep an eye out!

But outside of this new battle system, we have been working hard with a group of writers from Hollywood on our story and seasonal narrative. Like any good game, you need a good story, a reason to do all this. I’m extremely happy with what I have seen so far, and without spoiling too much, players will be travelling from Tokane to Antik with many twists and turns along the way. You will get to discover who Kitty really is, and why Helios even exists. 

Adventure mode is a beast. It takes a while to craft, and even more time to craft well. But we have a small team of dedicated developers on it, and our hope is to deliver a hands-on demo early 2023.

We have been working together as a team now for about a year, but building synergy takes time. That being said though, I’m super happy with each individual we have in the team, and what they bring to the table. You saw us from a tiny team to 60+ in less than a year, we hired the best talent for what we want to achieve. Talent that knows what it takes to ship a good game. This is no small feat and we are extremely proud of what was achieved so far. You see the fruits of our labor by playing Aurory Tactics, but LOTS and LOTS of love went into it to bring you something exciting and truly unique that will change the landscape of web3 gaming.

To wrap up this first executive update in style, I would like to share with you all a project timeline from the past year that showcases our tremendous velocity, and how quick we can deliver. It’s a testament to the talent we have in the team!

As you can see, a lot has been achieved in the past year up until now. So hats off to you, Aurory dev team, for all of your accomplishments! I’m ever grateful to have such an amazing group of individuals working together for a greater and bigger cause. 

Also hats off to our amazing community! Without your support, you know we wouldn’t be here today. 

Thank you for making Aurory a reality and we sincerely hope you stick around a little while longer to see all the possibilities this new platform will bring to the web3 gaming space! Yes, I did say platform.

Johnny Aurory
Executive Producer
Aurory Project

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