State of Aurory Address - July 2022

Aug 02, 2022

July may not have necessarily been a month full of huge announcements and alpha leaks, but that is not to say that our team hasn’t continued to lead the Solana game-fi space in terms of shipping speed and level of quality. One of the biggest happenings this past month was the release of our first patch of Q3, v0.2.4, which had been in the works for five weeks. Since the release of v0.2.4, we have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community on their impressions of Aurory Tactics (new name for PvP) with this new version. We can confidently say that the game is feeling a lot more balanced and we are getting closer to having a version that is tournament-ready!

Aurory @AuroryProject

Fresh patch just deployed, 70+ improvements on this one! 🔥 We've added auto-whitelisting for Aurorian holders, new Nefties, additional balancing, game features, and much more... ✨ You can check out the full notes on our Discord 📝

With this patch, we introduced:

N9 and Axobubble as default Nefties.
Automatic whitelisting of all Aurorian holders.
New game features (Hype Zone, Hype Inheritance, Danger Zone).
Additional battle fixes and balancing.

We expect to be releasing another small patch in early August, which should include the new Player Profile system and Leaderboard, along with the automatic whitelisting of ALL holders of 250+ $AURY.

Aside from the big patch that we pushed, July was a tech-heavy month where our back-end team began laying the critical foundations for a secure network that will keep our players and team safe from attackers.

DESIGN

Along with the balancing and bug fixing of Aurory Tactics that has been ongoing, our Design team also spent some time creating documentation that will be used as a framework for our first tournament.

Additionally, the following Aurory Adventure (new name for PvE) related tasks have been of the highest priority for the Design team:

Having all levels playable.
Conducting a collision + navigation pass.
Progression system improvements.
Combat + FUDs spawn/respawn.
Quest/objective manager.
UIX features design and integration.
Rewards + economy balancing.
Narrative updates.

*Dialogue + Quest Manager + Progression System UI WIP*

ART

Our Environmental Art team has continued with the polishing of various Aurory Adventure related locations and assets. Further up the pipeline, our environmental concept artist has begun working on creating the first iterations of landmark pawns and the village location that we will see in Aurory Adventure.

In addition to this, our level artists have begun modeling assets that will be used in our Nefty Defenders mini-game, which is in it’s prototyping phase.

In the Character Art department, our Nefty Art lead, Claire, put some love into redesigning all of the ability icons for our battle UI. In addition to this, she worked on preparing the NFT cards for Nefties that you’ll all soon be able to hatch from a new biome-specific egg that will be released. Make sure to keep an eye out!

Some of the other character art related tasks consisted of the 3D modeling of the Helios and FUDs world map pawns, along with the modeling of the “biggie” versions of Axobubble and Number 9.

[video-to-gif output image] — *3D Helios’ World Map Pawn*

Our Animation team has continued working on asset animations, Sam interaction animations, and polishing/finishing Aurory Adventure related cinematics.

*Still Frame From Aurory Adventure Cinematic*

TECH

July was a labor-intensive month for our Tech team. Although these updates tend to cater more on the side of showing the massive amount of creative progress that our team has been making month-over-month, we have a highly experienced technical team that is working in the shadows making sure things run smoothly by laying critical infrastructure, and protecting our team and players from bad actors.

In our Web3 department, the following tasks have been of high priority throughout July:

Locker UI follow up.
Navigation UI integration.
Marketplace Rebranding (Collection, Mint and Inventory).
Implementation of Magic Eden UI proxy.
Magic Eden integration (transactions).
Completion of Player Profile page + Leaderboard sync.
QA server side events integration.
New Player Profile page integration:
- Updating to new design.
- Locker integration ($AURY migration).
- Leaderboard sync.
Deploying API updates due to the new back-end infrastructure.

In the Game Tech department, our engineers spent most of July tying together various Aurory Tactics/Adventure related components, and making sure that all systems were go for a smooth release of the v0.2.4 patch.

These tasks included:

Aurory Tactics

Icons Integration.
Matchmaking system improvements and rework.
New SFX Integration.
Finishing & testing the integration of the following features:
- Hype Zone (add UI/marker).
- Hype Transfer on Death (add VFX health transfer with a new color).
- Danger Zone (add UI/marker).
- Tournament features.
Continue debugging Number 9.
Debugging/Bugfix pre-tournament.
Preparing for v0.2.5 patch: improved reliability, unique sessions.

Aurory Adventure

World Map integration.
Economy Loop: Finalizing final design details, continuing reward integration with battle zone spawn.
Quest Machine: Integrating first quest to sanity check system.
Locations: Helios AI, LD and ingredients iteration and Crystal switch.
Locations: ingredients debugging, animation, and iteration.
Security/cheat protection: Single session per user implementation.
Code infrastructure improvements for robustness.
UI: Integration of currencies, and Crystal switch pop-ups.
New VFX testing and integration.

Tools

Build and deployment system improvements.
Preparing for the release of v0.2.4.
Matchmaking system improvements and rework.
Build size analysis and improvements:
- Nested prefabs-related load time and build size issues.
- Analyzing static batching impact.
- Analyzing baked lightmaps impact.

Our Back-End team also saw quite a bit of action throughout July, with team members being delegated to oversee the fulfilment of the following tasks:

Services

Player Profile features and E2E integration with FE team.
Implementing Locker Backend.
Live deployment of infrastructure transition.
Complete migration of services to EKS on AWS Prod account.
Cleanup and migration of deprecated resources on AWS Root account.
Implementation of Energy System.
Continuing design discussions (Item Generator / Minting Process).
Leaderboard optimizations:
- Defining requirements for next iterations (design updates).
Releasing Aurorian whitelisting as part of 0.2.4:
- Continuing process for $AURY holder whitelisting.
Economy Loop:
- Implementing currency features.
- Locker Backend - APIs.
- Finalizing locker design and starting implementation.
- Starting implemention of Item Generator Service.
- Adding metrics to track economy rewards.

Infrastructure

Services migration to staging/prod AWS accounts (ongoing).
Faucet migration to Kubernetes Staging.
Game Client logs finalization.
ArgoCD authentication.
IP protection investigation.
Architecture documentation.
Create prod infrastructure for gameservers and services.
Migrate 0.2.4 gameservers/matchmaking to prod AWS account.
Database migration to staging AWS account.
VPN update for PROD (Split network + SSO).
WAF Metrics dashboard.
Architecture documentation (to be continued).

A few additional words from our Director of Technical Operations, Julien Pellet, on a big milestone achieved in July on the infrastructure/security front:

“As we continue to improve our cloud infrastructure, we are really proud to announce that we implemented the Web Application Firewall (WAF) managed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for all public traffic with the release of v0.2.4.

AWS WAF helps protect web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.

It is used as a protection against malicious attacks by mitigating suspicious traffic before it reaches the load balancer:

One of the most important parts is that it offers observability on the incoming traffic so we can detect and investigate suspicious patterns.

A few hours after we started getting data from the WAF, we started building dashboards and immediately noticed an IP generating an unexpected amount of traffic.

We found traffic that was automated, coming from an IP listed as Abusive in the Spamhaus IP Reputation List.

We decided to block the traffic from this IP. As a result, we could see the drop in the incoming traffic, but also the count of blocked requests from this IP. As a bonus, around the same time, we also blocked suspicious traffic coming from the AWS Rule filtering Bad Reputation IPs.

Summary and Next Steps

We are really happy in the way we gained observability and operability on the incoming traffic, but the current approach is really restrictive for the sanctioned IP. In the next iterations we should implement multiple tiers for the incoming traffic for a better flexibility:

moderated rate limiting, allowing a large margin for legitimate traffic
restricted rate limiting, allowing just the necessary traffic for suspicious IP adresses
blocked IP list, for banned IP addresses.”

MARKETING

The Marketing team grew with the arrival of Bart, who used to work for a notable French newspaper. He is a specialist in SEO and SEA, and is experienced in many other marketing practices. With his arrival, we will be looking to use his expertise to make improvements to our website and it’s discoverability through search. We are also launching a TikTok page to leverage their algorithm to grow our presence and capture new eyeballs on the platform.

In addition to launching pages on new social media platforms, after some feedback from our community, we will be looking to take a slightly different approach with our Twitter account regarding the frequency of posts and type of content that is shared. For over a year, we’ve stuck to sharing only high-quality posts and updates, and saved a lot of alpha and sneak peeks for these monthly updates.

However, we understand that not everyone has time to read these updates and because of that, they will regularly miss out on all of the awesome content that is posted here. So, we agree that it’s time to start sharing more sneak peeks and smaller updates to keep everyone in the loop of what’s going on with Aurory and keep our page active in order to have the algorithm work more in our favor.

That just about sums up July! If you are not already, make sure to keep training in Aurory Tactics mode as we get ready to release our next patch that will allow you to create a player profile and play for a ranked spot on the leaderboard where players with the highest W/L ratio can earn weekly rewards! You might also want the practice so you can be ready for our first tournament! Lots more to come so stay tuned.

As always, thank you all for the support and remember that the best is yet to come!

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