State of Aurory Address - August 2022
August was packed with developments, with Aurory Tactics taking up the majority of the focus. The team worked tirelessly to push one of the biggest releases of the month, the v0.2.5 patch, which has brought a lot of stability to the game. The current build can handle a significant number of users, and we are gearing up to start bringing more players into our community!
That brings us to another notable event: the Kucoin competition with open access to Aurory Tactics. It generated a lot of exposure and a significant influx of new players. This is just the starting point when it comes to marketing and growing our player base.
We also celebrated the one-year anniversary of the Aurorians with an amazing video created in collaboration with one of our partners, Invisible North.
There has been a lot more cooking in the kitchen, so let's dive into all the developments!
DESIGN
The team has continued with the iteration, testing, and balancing of Aurory Tactics throughout August. Among the many fixes and new features that came with the release of version 0.2.5, users are now able to create a player profile with an Aurorian as their avatar if they own one. We’ve also launched our first version of the leaderboard, which will soon be updated to the more optimal ELO ranking system. In addition to all of this, we released a hot fix patch to reset the leaderboard just a few days after the deployment of 0.2.5
During all of this focus on optimizing Aurory Tactics, some of our designers have worked on establishing the ideal tournament format for the current Tactics Mode infrastructure we have. Our team wants to ensure the most pleasant, fair, and fun experience for all participants, which is why we haven’t rushed out the first tournament. But we know that you are all eager to play for some juicy rewards, so we definitely have a nice prize pool planned for it! We hope to be announcing the details soon, so make sure you start training!
Some of the other Aurory Adventure related tasks that have maintained high priority for our Game Designers this past month have consisted of:
Finalizing new battle design.
Continuing integration of the Quest Manager.
New narrative dialogue.
Updating overall game flow design.
Beginning initial discussions on Village tech.
UIX
Our UIX team had a lot on its plate this month between Aurory Tactics, Aurory Adventure, and working on our xNFT, which will be pre-installed in the Backpack app when it launches! Some of the other high priority tasks consisted of:
Aurory Tactics:
Polishing and integration of the Leaderboard.
Polishing and integration of the Player Profile page.
Polishing and integration of the tournament registration page.
Creation of tournament UI for Kitty’s Tavern.
Creation of in-game HUD elements for the tournament.
Redesigning loading screens, matchmaking screens, results screens.
Aurory Adventure:
Reviewing new game design flow and planning UIX elements.
Backpack:
Mocking-up needs for Aurory xNFT.
Finalizing UI designs.
Integrating artwork.
Aurory xNFT Screens WIP
ART
“Polish” was the word of the month for our Environmental Art team as we want the Aurory Adventure maps to blow you away when you play them for the first time!
A new level, The Village, is in the pipeline and assets have been quickly making their way from concept art to being modelized by our Environmental Artists.
The Character Art team has been coordinating with the Rigging team to bring to life some fun facial expressions for Aurorians! In addition to this, they have begun modeling the 1/1 honorary Aurorians that belong to some of our early advisors, and partners!
In the Animation department, the team has been working on cut-scene cinematics for Aurory Adventure. Some experiments have also begun on the side to create some early Helios and Sam combat moves for a future project.
AUDIO
Not to be overlooked, our Audio Team has been working on integrating the background music for the Aurory Adventure level: Elghazi’s Temple. They have also begun composing the first tracks for Nefty Defenders!
However, one of the biggest projects that they completed in August was the integration of an innovative system that enables dynamic tracks! You may have noticed it in the background music if you have played our Tactics Mode since the last patch. The way the system works is that for each section of a musical loop, three different audio tracks will be randomly played together. So you will almost never hear the same piece of music. Currently, there are only two sections, but eventually we will have five in total. This represents 243 possible arrangements of the same music. Each loop lasts 2 minutes 50 seconds, and you'll probably never hear the same song twice during your game session! The next objective with this system will be to make the music be affected by what’s happening in the battle.
TECH
For the Web3 team, the majority of the focus during August was on integrating Aurory listings with Magic Eden, locker integrations, and syncing the leaderboard. Our Front-end team also had their hands full with the rebranding of the inventory page on our marketplace, as well as the integration of the Player Profile page and Leaderboard.
Some of the other Tech department’s priorities throughout August have consisted of the following:
Infrastructure
VPN update for PROD (Split network + SSO).
Architecture documentation.
Gitlab Runners on-demand for builds
Monitoring & Observability: Distributed Tracing Feature (AWS X-Ray).
Provision resources for Ranking and Locker applications.
Ranking Service CI / CD & Deployment.
Enable AWS Cloudtrail / Permissions (for AWS auditing & visibility).
Back-end Services:
Release first versions of Profile Page and Leaderboard.
Expedition rewards Back-end rebuild testing and release.
Economy Loop:
Locker Back-end - APIs (Public & Admin).
Locker Back-end - starting Worker (processes and updates locker system transactions).
Start testing integration flow from Unity to Back-end for earning and spending crystals.
Start Item Generator service.
Ranking Service.
Support for Backpack application.
Improved security & authentication pattern for Public APIs.
0.2.5-r7 support:
Sessions Service Updates.
Marketplace fixes.
Leaderboard flexibility.
KuCoin event support.
Ranking Service on Staging.
Reviewing new authentication process.
Game Tech:
Aurory Adventure:
Nefty fatigue.
Locations: debugging and polishing.
General flow investigation.
Animation integrations.
Quest system integrations.
Data Crystals and World Map Link.
Player Leveling System.
New PVE Battle Mode discussions and investigation.
Data Crystals and World Map Link.
Player leveling System.
Aurory Tactics:
Preparing and deploying v0.2.5 patch: improved reliability / Client HSM.
Security checkup on authentication system.
Unique sessions and matchmaking Back-end side code rework.
Integrating Aurorians from profile pictures.
Tools:
Load testing in preparation for more players.
Improvements to client-side errors and log collection to catch more issues.
Testing load time and performance improvements by streaming map sections.
Setting up cross-game core tech packages (Crypto, Logging etc).
TEAM EXPANSION
We’ve continued to grow the team throughout August with the addition of four key members!
Nick Ciesinski is our new Web3 Product Manager who has been working in gaming for 4+ years (AppLovin and Big Fish Games). You might have seen him hanging out on Discord before he joined us!
Yat-Chi Lau is our new Gameplay Product Manager! He joins us after working at Unity where he was in charge of assisting indie studios using the Unity tool suite. He will work jointly with the game design and development teams, with the mission to continuously improve the player experience!
Maryse Duckett also came aboard as a Senior 3D artist with six years of experience. Three of those years were spent at Ubisoft, and the other three were spent in indie studios.
Lastly, we have Javier Moreno, who joined us as Senior Back-End Engineer!
MARKETING
We’ve teamed up with Solana Spaces to have a podium in their new Miami store that encourages customers to complete a short educational experience that will teach them about Aurory in exchange for a small reward. In the near future, we also plan to have a demo laptop setup for customers to try our Tactics Mode after they have completed the educational portion.
This is exciting as the new Miami store will have a lot of other potential opportunities to showcase NFT collections, host live events, and distribute some Aurory merch that will be coming soon as well!
The Kucoin event brought a lot of new players in to try out Aurory Tactics, with just over 2,000 players coming in during the busiest 24 hours of the event and more than 5,000 games played during the week! We’re happy to report that our servers handled the influx with no issues, and we now feel confident about continuing to do similar types of events that aim to attract large numbers of players.
We have also begun to reach out to a few other Solana communities to whitelist some of their holders for Aurory Tactics (DeGods, SMB, FFF), and more will come next month!
To close this month’s update, we’ll leave you with a statement from our Executive Producer, Johnny:
“Summer is almost over, but Aurory Summer is still going strong. We have decided to extend the public early access of Tactics until September 21st. That’s right, your family and friends can still play until the very last day of summer. Let’s keep the party going!
Also, just to let you guys in on a little behind the scenes, we are at a very exciting moment for the project, where I am really starting to see the benefits of all the hard work we poured into this game. I’m happy that we have a solid foundational structure in place that will allow us to scale in a controlled manner. We also made tremendous progress on the macro narrative of what Aurory is all about, from a franchise POV. Expect more sneak peeks on this in the coming months!
Additionally, with the recent hires, I’m happy to announce that we have our full management layer in place, which will allow me to focus more on the publishing/marketing side, with the objective of showcasing Aurory everywhere possible. We will start with the Solana Embassy in Miami starting in September! Aurory will be displayed in a retail environment for the first time ever, for us and also for Solana! Big accomplishment and super proud to be able to show Tactics to the public! More news around this in the coming weeks!
Lastly, the last year went by so fast for me. For the first time ever in my career, I get up in the morning looking forward to working with this team, and you, the community. I cannot find anything bad to say. Of course, I’m utterly biased, but you can’t argue with the fact that what we have right now is really unique and special to be a part of. I’m extremely grateful for the team, the community, the project, the vision, our partners and even our haters. Without you, this project would not exist, and we wouldn’t be who we are today.
My hats off to you Aurorians, Happy Anniversary and thank you for all your commitment.”
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