State of Aurory Address - May 2023

Jun 05, 2023

Our team reached a major milestone in May with the past few months of design, development, polishing, and debugging leading up to the release of the Prologue to Adventures. We are incredibly proud of the foundation that we’ve been able to lay and are excited that our holders finally get to experience a small taste of what is to come!

In this early pre-alpha phase of Adventures, Aurorians can immerse themselves in the vibrant village of Blanche and challenge each other in Speed Blitz battles. For more detailed information, be sure to refer to our Adventures Guide!

The Prologue was well received by our community, with the graphics receiving the highest praise. Players have also particularly enjoyed the interactive chat box as well as the in-game emotes, both of which add an extra layer of engagement to Blanche. Speed Blitz, with its fast-paced combat and unpredictable outcomes, offers a refreshing alternative to Aurory Tactics.

However, we quickly saw that, as expected in a pre-alpha, some additional key components to incentivize players to return to Blanche on a daily basis are needed. As we have previously expressed, our decision to release early gameplay was aimed at establishing a solid foundation upon which we will continue to build. Releasing a full game is not something that will happen overnight, and it is for this reason that we are planning to take the live-ops development route with game content and features being deployed in various stages. If you haven’t seen it already, we’d highly encourage you to check out our Adventure page for a more detailed roadmap into the additional features and content that we have planned. Some of these upcoming additions include procedural lands, Neftie progression, and the highly anticipated full Blitz mode!

Speaking of new features, let’s kick off this monthly recap with our Design team!

DESIGN

Following the latest balancing and testing in order to release the Prologue to Adventures, our Design team has continued working on new platform and game features, spanning from the upcoming Tactics patch to the “Aurory: Welcome to Tokane!” release.

These mainly consisted of the following:

Progression System Designs.
Web Ecosystem Improvements.
Neftie Merging Mechanics Design.
Incubator Improvements.
Testing Economy Balancing Features.
Procedural Lands Implementation.
Narrative Tweaks.
Full Blitz Combat System Testing.
Neftie DNA System for Adventures.

Even if we’re a team of more than 60 people, balancing resources between two games isn’t always the easiest task, but rest assured, we aren’t forgetting about Tactics. The Design team has noted recent player feedback and has been working on improvements and changes for a new patch that we intend to deploy by the end of this Tactics season.

Furthermore, the UIX Design team has had their plate full with Adventures in-game UI tasks, along with tasks related to the new web ecosystem UI that’s required for the launch of our first cross-chain experience.

ART

You’ve seen their work in Blanche — the Environmental Art team won’t stop delivering this level of quality. They are now back to working on the production of unique biome elements for procedural lands, ensuring a diverse world for Aurorians to explore in Adventures.

*Swamp Biome Spawnable Elements Exploration*

Following an internal discussion last month around the implementation of Neftie chromas, the Character Art team gave some love to the new chromas design documentation and began to put it into practice with various Nefties.

Many of you have already met the first NPCs in Blanche, and more are on the way! A new character in the works who we’ll be introducing through more teasers is the Village Merchant. This NPC was drawn by our co-founder, Yann, who is overseeing new character art direction while simultaneously working on the art upgrade for Aurorians.

Other art tasks have been tackled by Claire, our Lead Character Concept Artist. These have included the creation of element icons to be shown in Blitz Battles, as well as concept art for food consumable items that will be introduced in the future. Claire also worked on an amazing teaser for our first cross-chain integration. Can you guess which blockchain it will be?!

The Rigging team worked on reskinned Neftie models of Znix, Dodorex, and Dinotusk.

[video-to-gif output image] — *Rigging Dodorex*

[optimize output image] — *Rigging Dinotusk*

ANIMATION

The Animation team worked on The Prologue to Adventures all the way up until the release! Their current focus is now on finishing all of the animations for the new v2 Neftie models, which will be required for the full version of Blitz.

Motion Design/VFX

The VFX team implemented some incredible new VFX for every Helios so they can play Adventures in style. Additionally, they worked on testing out various effects to bring liveliness to Adventures environments, while the Motion Design side added some effects with the same goal for in-game UI elements.

AUDIO

The response that we’ve gotten to the music and SFX in Blanche has been nothing but love, and we’re so happy you all are enjoying it as much as us! We’re incredibly grateful for our talented Audio team, and we have to thank you all for the positive vibes that you’ve shown towards their work. The Audio team is now working on creating new music tracks and SFX for land exploration in Adventures, as well as SFX for new Nefties in the pipeline.

TECH

As you can expect, most of the work of our Tech team this month was making sure that the release of our Prologue to Adventures went smoothly. And that it did, thanks to every department in the team making sure that the following bases were covered:

Web3:

Adventure mode UX.
- Requirements constraints.
- Landing page optimization and deployment.
- Marketplace adventure toggle feature.
Bug fixes.
Adding site-wide search to the landing page.

Backend:

Gameplay.
- Blitz/Adventures.
  - Full Blitz combat system integration.
  - Matchmaking improvements & fixes.
  - Support for lands & designing configuration workflows.
- VIP list functionality for the Prologue.
- Neftie XP system testing.
Platform & Economy.
- Cross-chain.
  - SyncSpace marketplace integration.
  - SyncSpace swap mechanism integration.
  - Investigating EVM tokens (NFTs, SFTs, etc.)
- SyncSpace improvements and stability.

Infrastructure

Adventures.
- Prologue deployment support.
Tactics.
- Anti-farming measures.

MARKETING

May was a month full of polished videos and in-game footage in order to tease the Prologue to Adventures. You can check out some of these posts here: teaser video, release video, and tutorial videos!

We’re gearing up to announce a collaboration with IndiGG, the largest gaming DAO in India, in an effort to bring some new players to try out Tactics!

Our holders got the opportunity to mint our animated sticker pack in Dialect! Will you collect them all?

We were also happy to announce that you can now play Aurory games through two new platforms: Gameswift and Odyn. Partnerships like this will be essential going forward as we continue our efforts to ensure that Aurory games show up everywhere online as well as offline. Speaking of which, we will be attending 3XP on June 8th-9th, where we will have our own booth to showcase our games and meet with other gaming enthusiasts. This precedes the next event, which we will be attending in San Diego next month (PlayGG), hosted by Solana Games.

In conclusion, it has been an eventful month for Aurory, filled with incredible strides and major releases. It has been amazing to watch our ecosystem evolve and grow, thanks to the continuous support and feedback from our community. But the excitement doesn't end here! As we step into June, we have even more exciting announcements and releases around the corner. We can't wait to share more details with you all very soon. Stay tuned!

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