State of Aurory Address - June 2023
With the market finally showing signs of recovery, it’s with an optimistic mood that the team has been working towards our next milestones. We’ve officially announced that Aurory is going cross-platform, starting with a new chain in July! Without ever leaving our home, Solana, we’ve decided to expand to more blockchains and traditional gaming platforms in order to make our games accessible to the widest audience possible.
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!
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