State of Aurory Address - September 2022

Oct 03, 2022

After ending the month of August with a bang for the one-year mint anniversary of Aurorians, our team continued along with development throughout September to turn the teasers of our “what’s to come” style video into tangible milestones.

Aurory @AuroryProject

It all started with 10K Aurorians ✨ With this team we've assembled, it's hard not to be excited about the future. Cheers to many more years of building!

We started off September with a teaser of some early concepts of one of the most anticipated milestones: the Aurorian Art Rework. We received feedback on this first iteration that was immensely constructive, and now have a much clearer vision in mind now for what our holders would like to see. We can’t wait to share some more concepts of reimagined traits with you all! In the meantime, any ideas or further suggestions are always welcomed and most likely to be heard by our team when shared in our Discord server.

Aurory @AuroryProject

The glow up is real! ✨

DESIGN

September has been a month of hustling for the Design team as they fixed more bugs and implemented further balancing measures in order to deploy the 0.2.6 patch. The most notable changes that came with this patch were the reworking of the timeline UI and matchmaking improvements. With one of our next patches, our UIX team plans to update the entire Aurory Tactics UI to something that is more user-friendly.

*Early WIP Sneak Peek Of The Tactics Mode UI Rework*

The team has also been working on the upcoming patch that will be deployed in October and should include some big updates. One of the main components is the first iteration of our Tactics Mode reward loop that you have all been anticipating! Make sure to keep an eye out for more information we will be sharing on the mechanics that will drive the earning mechanism. What we can say for now though, is that most rewards will go to players with skill rather than those who grind the hardest. So make sure you get your practice in, as the competition for rewards will be fierce when it all goes live!

Beyond Tactics rewards, we haven’t forgotten our promise of holding our first community tournament, and we are still working on it. We can only recommend training hard in order to be ready!

On the Aurory Adventure front, we are aware that many of you had expected to be playing an early access version by now. However, development of this game mode has taken a slight backseat in priority as we have been focusing on optimizing the already playable experience that we have (Aurory Tactics) and deploying the full economic loop on that end.

Another important piece to note is that we’ve recently brought on a new narrative team who have overhauled our lore, which is a fundamental aspect that will make the Aurory Adventure experience like nothing else we’ve seen in a web3 game thus far. Along with this overhaul, there have been some changes to the battle design of the Adventure mode that we think you will all enjoy much more!

Our Executive Producer, Jon, will be looking to share a “Production Statement” soon that will talk more in depth about all of this and more to give our community a deeper insight into what has been going on in the studio, and explain some of the rationale behind recent decisions that have extended the delivery timeline of Aurory Adventure. We look forward to sharing this read and more teasers of the epic story mode we’re building with all of you very soon.

Now let’s head to each department for some updates and sneak peeks!

ART

Our Environmental Art team has been heavily focused on creating early concepts and ideations for our new biome that is being worked on: The Desert Biome. In addition to this, they have continued with the production of various level art assets (roads, houses, taverns, tech accessories) for Tokané Village, which will serve as another in-game hub and point of interest on the World Map.

**Tokané Village:** Shop Design Exploration WIP

**Tokané Village:** Rock Wall Concept Art WIP

**Desert Biome:** Brainstorming Sand Types WIP

**The Desert Biome:** Brainstorming Various Assets WIP

In addition to working on the highly anticipated art rework of the Aurorians, our Character Art team has been exploring some ideas for customizable Nefty attributes.

*Early Concepts For Unika Wing Attributes*

We have also seen some impressive progress in the following:

New Nefty concepts and early 3D modeling.
Bitebit mini 3D model update.
Nefty facial expression modeling.
New Collectible artwork for Aurorians on Expedition.
3D modeling of Honorory Aurorians.
Lucky: New Nefty Concept Art
Before and After of Bitebit Mini’s 3D Model
Bitebit’s New Facial Expressions >.<

*Anatoly Yakovenko’s Honorary Aurorian Model*

ANIMATION

Our lead rigger, Tigran, worked on the Data Crystal assets to prepare them for animation. In addition to this, one of the coolest looking upcoming Nefties, “Frostbyte”, has completed its modeling stage and made its way to our rigging department to receive bones in preparation to be animated!

The Animation team worked on bringing the beloved Wassie and Unika to life. Frostbyte has already started receiving it’s moves as well! Can you guess which Nefty will be playable next?

In addition to Nefty animations, the team continued to work on animations of various Aurory Adventure assets.

Our Audio team went beast mode throughout September. Some of the projects they worked on were:

Cinematic music.
Aurory Adventure battle music.
Creating new Nefty SFX for Tactics.
Creating Battle Arena SFX.
Creating SFX for Nefty Defenders.
Creating Danger Zone music.
Neftie knock out SFX.
Polishing SFX for the Treasure Activator in Aurory Adventure.

If you have any references for the type of music you would like to hear in-game, feel free to share them with us on Discord and our audio wizards will try their best to work their magic!

TECH

In the Tech department, the team had their hands full as usual this past month. Their main focus consisted of the following:

Infrastructure

Defining metrics for on-chain activity.
Domain and brand protection service analysis.
VPN access to observability tooling.
Performing upgrades to Kubernetes.
SSO Authentication for observability (Grafana + Prometheus).
Bootstrap paging process for on-call.
Research for more anti-bot solutions.
Finalizing tournament requirements.

Back-end services

KuCoin event support.
Deploying ranking service to production.
Economy:
- Item Generator API.
- Locker APIs.
- Worker deployments and testing.
- Design of the Incubator Service.
Updating player name restrictions.
Adding metrics to game servers.
Authentication upgrades - combined with profile fetching.
Data Validation on Ranking Production Data (ELO):
- Planning first season for Release 0.2.7
Unifying web and game authentication.
Observability improvements (tracing on Unity Servers, various metrics).

Game Tech

Navigation mesh prototyping.
Release and hotfix of the Tactics 0.2.6 patch.
Defining the scope of the Tactics 0.2.7 patch in preparation for deployment.
Defining the scope of Tactics Refactor 1.0.0.
Deploying the 0.2.6k build for the Solana Spaces demo.
VFX testing and integrations.
Data Crystal VFX
Decal VFX For Aurory Adventure

WEB3

Backpack app finalized.
Deployment of SSE and new authentication.
Continuing integration of the locker and player profile page.
Public web improvements.
Planning redesigns for the Dashboard and Expedition pages.

MARKETING

Everything on our end is ready for the October opening of Solana Spaces in Miami. Store goers will be able to complete an educational introduction to Aurory to receive a reward, and they will also be able to play an Aurory Tactics demo and purchase limited edition Aurory merch!

We will also have six frames in the NFT gallery for the entire month of October, so if you’re interested in having your Aurorian displayed, we are running a fun contest you don’t want to miss, as it allows holders to easily submit theirs for showcasing.

Aurory @AuroryProject

We'll be submitting random entrants' Aurorians to be showcased at the Solana Embassy in Miami throughout all of October 🌴 To confirm your submission, follow the steps below 👇

We’ve been taking steps to clean up our Discord server by making information a lot more easily available to new users. We are also testing a new initiative that aims to reward our most active Discord members for their engagement with the community. With this initiative, we’ll be holding a raffle once a week that only users with special XP-based roles can participate in. If you’re not there already, jump in the server, start chatting, and try your luck at the Thursday raffle!

Another piece of content that is important to have easily accessible to new users is a proper tutorial that simplifies Aurory Tactics in an easy-to-understand way. We were happy to team up with one of our contributors, Rafikey, this month to bring our community the first two videos of an ongoing series where he will cover everything Tactics, so we can all get good! Check the videos out below if you haven’t already!

As Q3 comes to an end, we are looking to close out these last few months of 2022 strong with multiple new releases and announcements. We are tremendously grateful to each and every one of our community members who have stuck with us through a volatile past couple of months, and we hope we can make you all feel that your waiting has been well worth its while.

And lastly, October will be a great month to get involved in playing Tactics Mode as we plan to finally release rewards. We’ll see you all in Kitty’s Tavern!

Click here to 👉 Play Aurory 🕹️

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