Devlog 2

October 3 Update

Oct 03, 2022

Studio Update
Development Overview
Unreal Team Update
Blockchain Team Update
Social Media Update

Studio Update

Staffing

We have brought on a full-time Community Manager, recruited from our Discord community. SohoNoho has been an active and valued member of the community and has a strong resume in the community management sector. We are happy that he has accepted a full-time position to increase our communication with the community, heading up initiatives that will strengthen our Discord and Telegram presence and various marketing and partnership opportunities.

Development Overview

We have spent this past month reaching out to many of our partner projects to realign our expectations and outlining the steps for the next four quarters at a high level. The conversations have been illuminating, giving us a sense of the types of communities they are representing and the way that our partnerships can evolve. For these groups, we have set up regular calls every other week, and more immediate communication channels to keep information flowing.

Within the team, project overview documents used as the basis for updates to the Whitepaper have been presented. These have served to reinforce our team cohesion on our project goals, pillars, and procedures. Some amount of these internal documents are being prepared to share with our larger community.

The Gitbook document, linked here, will serve as the definitive version of the Netvrk Whitepaper going forward, to prevent any misalignment between it and any published PDF. The latest updates to that document will go live within a week, in line with the newest direction of the Netvrk Metaverse. Awaiting some last updates to some of our screenshots and art samples before we push the newest version.

Finally, work on the Game Installer and Patcher has been a focus for this past month. With a live product that will be expanding over the next quarters, having a tested installation, updating, and patching system is a high priority for the team.

Unreal Team Update

Mining Game

Alpha3 release

This month saw the release of the Alpha3 version of the Mine Runner experience. This release recognizes and grants access to the experience based on a snapshot of our partner’s chains and granting access through assigned codes. For those partner projects we have integrated, this is a big step to adding utility through their NFTs.

This release includes changes to the player combat choices, improvements made based on player feedback sent to us through community channels and from our own internal testing. Abilities especially were given attention to improve their feel.

Optimizations to the game have been made in this release, providing a smoother frame rate and better performance all around.

Beta Progress

While this release on Mine Runner does not contain additional content not seen in earlier releases, there has been continued progress in levels past the first 10. These deeper mines are now populated with more challenging enemies and greater rewards and are awaiting testing to make them available to release in Beta 1. These additional mines incorporate new biomes, including those pictured below.

Blockchain integration to Unreal5 continues! Access to Netvrk avatars Adam and Eve will be restricted to players who own those NFTs. We have created the system in Unreal5 to unlock avatars owned by the players linked crypto wallet. This is currently functional for Adam and Eve, ready to scale as we introduce partner avatars into Unreal5. While it has been integrated into the Mine Runner Beta1 already, the system is created as a re-usable and modular component. This allows it to be re-used in the social space and the wider metaverse with minimal integration time.

Metaverse/Social Spaces

Social Space

We continue to lay out our first social space and finalize the first feature set to be included in the Alpha launch of this experience. These features include communication between players, a level of moderation when interacting with other players, and a simple way to transverse between this space and the other experiences, like the Mine Runner game.

Aesthetics continues to be an important differentiating factor for our metaverse and having our artists working with Unreal5 is helping to push the boundaries. The foliage work continues, and these concepts exhibit the playful nature of this first social space.

Introduction Multiplayer Ready Modules -

With social spaces we are enabling more multiplayer experiences such as replication of player avatars and animations across the network. We are ensuring that our users will be able to socialize with each other while donning their favorite character skin from Mine Runner and eventually avatars based on our partner's NFT assets.

Venues

The first social space that will be available in the Alpha release is an example of what our Venue system will support. The venues we recognize that are needed for a full metaverse are widely varied, from social spaces and community centered ‘headquarters’ to commerce stores, music venues and personal homes. We have started partnerships with some entertainers who are interested in a presence in the Netvrk Metaverse as a way to engage with their community. While individual partnership announcements are coming, we are able to share some of the early images of the venues that will support this type of partnership.

Blockchain Team

Mining Game

Alpha

We completed the snapshot of selected partners collections for wave 3 on Tuesday, September 20 at 5pm UTC. For those who love numbers as much as we do, we took snapshots of 22 smart contracts with a total of 126,438 NFTs which resulted in 26,398 unique wallet addresses being assigned codes.

Beta

Since our last update, we’ve successfully built the core blockchain functionality and completed manual testing. We just deployed onto the test nets (Goerli and Mumbai) for further testing. Once that is complete, we will move onto testing on the main nets (Ethereum and Polygon).

The core blockchain functionality can be broken down into 4 main components described below.

Cashing in

You will be able to spend your NTVRK tokens on Ethereum to purchase in-game premium currency. All payments made with NTVRK token will receive a bonus percentage of in-game premium currency. Make sure you have some NTVRK tokens in the same wallet you link to your game account.

Minting NFTs

Any Ax in your inventory can be minted into a NFT on Polygon for you to flex or sell. If you don’t want to purchase an Ax in-game and then mint, you also can purchase any available Ax NFT on a secondary marketplace and then use in-game. If you buy an Ax NFT on a secondary marketplace, make sure you transfer it to the wallet you link to your game account.

Cashing out

Once you earn enough in-game Metacrite you will be able to convert it into NTVRK tokens on Polygon.

Avatar eligibility

We completed the build of our subgraph solution for token gating by collection and handed it over to the Game Team. We’re excited to see this first use case for token gating in action and can’t wait to expand our token gating capabilities into future releases.

Netvrk Reserve Staking Rewards Distribution

We’ve iterated on our smart contact implementation and will continue to optimize it. In parallel, we have started work on the front-end interface for tracking and claiming rewards.