Devlog 5

January 9 Update

Jan 10, 2023

TL:DR

Time is precious to everyone, and because we have so much in the devlog this month, we thought it would be important to include this TL:DR. But honestly, read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

The studio continues to grow, both internally and in our partnerships. Perhaps most exciting is in the Marketing section of this report, our partnership that will see an animated series take place in our metaverse. And while the Mine Runner release is delayed until later this month, the development of the first alpha of the Social Spaces continues apace, with our first planned Alpha test weekend still planned for Q1. Matchmaking, player-to-player interactions, and the level profiling tool are all operational, all-important features for that Alpha build. And the first images of the XRS Bullet Yacht are also in this report. Finally, a wrap up and link to our latest AMA are also below. So, grab a cup of cocoa and enjoy this January Devlog.

Studio Update

Slow and steady growth of the studio continues. This period we secured two additions to the team to further assist development.

Our new UI artist hails from Argentina and currently lives in the United States. His extensive background is in design of products, branding and marketing, as well as website and app interfaces. We loved his sample work for its inventive thinking and approach that our team had not considered until seeing it. Happy to have him aboard and hope to drop some samples in the upcoming Devlogs.

Netvrk also added to our design team with a promising new game designer. Originally from India and also living in the United States, he is making his career move into game design after completing the strenuous Full Sail program and securing his BS in Game Design.

In our AMAs, we have discussed the need to grow wisely so that we have the structure and communication channels in place to support the scale. Studios that grow too fast have issues with coordination when the expansion is uncontrolled. We’ve seen it. We are working hard to work in the right order.

Development Overview

Mine Runner Beta release missed the Q4 expectation. The challenges of working with an outside service provider proved to be more than we anticipated. We crossed multiple time zones to have conversations and email chains, there were lawyers from both teams holding conversations as well as development teams. We certainly learned from this experience. This is not something that we feel was done with any disregard for our product from our partner. To the contrary, we appreciate that they appreciate the complexity of what we are doing with the Netvrk metaverse. Regardless of all good intentions, the work did not complete in time for us to do the proper testing and be comfortable with launching. We are still confident that we will launch in this first month of 2023, and will be shouting loudly in enough time, with our community team and with our partners, as soon as we have a day in January that we are comfortable announcing.

Because this has a ripple effect on the staking rewards, we will of course adjust the deadlines for participation to coincide with the actual beta launch date.

The development of the Social Spaces has not been drastically affected by this delay. Much of the team has been moving full steam ahead on work that will go into the first Alpha build of the core features. The Unreal Team Update below outlines all of that work that is in the pipeline.

Unreal Team Update

Player-on-Player Interaction System

We’ve created a Player-on-Player Interaction System that will allow users to communicate, manage, and learn more about other players. This is an obviously essential feature in any social media experience. While this first edition is the core functionality for interaction, the variety of actions a user has after interacting with another player will be expanded as new experiences and features are added to the Netvrk metaverse.

Party System

We’ve developed a Party System that will allow users to group up and explore, accomplish various tasks, or simply share experiences with other players. This feature helps create realistic and memorable social interactions between users. Players can send and receive party invitations and manage their party.

Level Matchmaker

Our matchmaker system is finally wrapped up, and with it you can now choose what map you want to load, as well as travel between worlds using our Portal system. This system was built from the ground up to be as scalable as possible, allowing users to travel to the most populated servers of the selected map, while maintaining an appropriate latency.

Automated profiling system

With all the new content that our art team is developing, we have added a new automated tool to our DevOps suite, automated profiling. We have a nightly build running now that captures the performance of all the maps in the game and compiles a report. With an automatic capture system for the map using orthogonal cameras, we can compile the information from the profiling system and generate minimaps automatically. This will allow our artists to quickly see where there are lower performance areas on the map that need some extra attention while making sure that all the zones of the metaverse consistently hit our performance guidelines. Here’s an example of one of those generated images, from our upcoming Coolio mansion map:

XRS Bullet Yacht

We are happy to provide for the first time some sample images of the interior of the XRS Bullet Yacht! This vehicle in our metaverse will have the functionality of both an entertainment/social space as well as being a transport. To live up to the potential as a social space, our artists have been hard at work making the interior warm and engaging, as well as functional. More updates will be coming through other social media, and we are excited about the progress we are showing in these images.

Blockchain Team Update

Social Spaces

To support blockchain reading in the Netvrk Metaverse, we will be creating many tools and systems for the Unreal Team to get the blockchain data required as we grow. Last month we created a system for reading NFT metadata on Ethereum, Polygon and Solana. When provided with a contract address and a token id (or just a token address on Solana), all metadata is returned.

NFT Marketplace

The marketplace is a high priority for our team in 2023. It will serve as the website to discover, explore, mint, buy, sell and rent NFTs. It is a major part of our ecosystem that will continuously grow.

On the tech side, we have agreed on a solution for tech stack and architecture and will begin building later in January. On the art side, we’re working closely with the Art Team to bring the amazing metaverse art direction to the marketplace.

Marketing Department

New Website

December saw the launch of our reengineered website, www.netvrk.co. It is easily understood that a project’s website is a major contributor to first impressions for interested investors and project participants. As we prepare ourselves for game launches and other cross-business opportunities, we put our marketing resources into improving this important resource. Along the way we sought to address concerns raised by the community, such as ‘how many people are at the studio?’ Check out the new website if you have not yet and feel free to send comments along in the community channels.

New Partnerships

As just stated above, we continue to expand our partnerships and business opportunities. Kalidor, a trusted group that includes animation and video streaming, has taken a strong interest in the Netvrk metaverse as the home for their new animated series ‘Jungle Freaks’, based on the Jungle Freaks NFT line. To say we are excited to be working with Ken Cantrill and Kalidor Media Group would be putting it lightly. The concept of our world being the hosting location for an animated series, bringing that type of creative value to our world, is exactly the kind of value spoken about when we envision a successful metaverse! Check out the link below for the full announcement. https://www.awn.com/news/experience-netvrk-metaverse-virtual-world-trailer

Social Media Update

On December 20th, 2022, we held our latest AMA and received a lot of questions from the community beforehand. We were able to address several of them during the AMA (see a couple of them below), and as usual, you can find a summary of them in the #ama-answers channel on our Discord: https://netvrk.link/discord

A portion of the AMA is below, but you can listen to the entirety at this link: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1RDGlaOZdZVJL

Q: Can you further explain the reasons to hold the NTVRK token apart from using it to buy Premium currency?

A: We have partnerships beyond gaming and avatars. Travel agency Travala, the largest Web3 travel site, is a partner. So, you can already purchase real world travel with $NTVRK. We just announced the partnership with Kalidor/Xentrix which is more than just an animation studio. They are expecting to bring in and help develop IP for this space and have many of them housed in our metaverse. That's tremendous additional creativity into our world.

Q: Will assets created for the metaverse be restricted to real world physics or would creativity be encouraged?

A: We have yet to lock down limitations on the behavior of assets in the general world, however I would expect that we will have areas of the world that allow for unusual physics such as the lunar or alien biomes. I also expect that we will allow individual landowners to set or remove limitations on physics behaviors on their own parcels of land. Many of these decisions will be made in conjunction with other systems. For example, if we allow people to fly at will at high speed to anywhere in the world then our transport systems become worthless which removes what we hope will be a fun immersive part of the world.

Compliance

The Compliance team continues to work with us addressing the issue of reward distributions. The team has approved of the plan that requires play of the Mine Runner game when it releases to a certain level as a requirement for rewards. This satisfies participation as the analytics from that play will inform the team about difficulty in that critical early section and assist with balancing the game. We will also record any bugs, if any, that should arise, further enhancing the product.

The point that not all holders who have staked have the ability to play the Mine Runner game has been raised. Our team has taken this point to the Compliance team to search for a solution. At the time of this writing, nothing yet has been decided. Discussions are ongoing and we will keep the community apprised of our progress through this and other channels.