State of Aurory Address - July 2023
July saw Aurory Summer in full swing with our latest major milestone of expanding to Arbitrum! With this integration in place, Arbitrum users are now able to have a seamless onramp for assets to our platform. In addition to this, all Aurory assets can now be stored on both Solana and Arbitrum. This expansion is just the beginning, as we pave the way towards becoming a cross-platform ecosystem powered by SyncSpace.
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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