Devlog 6
February 6 Update
Table of Contents:
TL:DR
Studio Update
Development Overview
Unreal Team Update
Blockchain Team Update
Marketing Department
Social Media Update
TL:DR
In the interest of time, here’s the boil down. Mine Runner Beta is up and running, performing fairly up to our expectations. The balancing and some other updates are in progress, as you’ll read about below. The Metaverse first Alpha also continues apace, with new features being demonstrated to the team by the development team in recent meetings. Our bridging to Polygon has been achieved, further cementing the concept that we are multi-chain. And our monthly AMAs have brought forward some great questions and answers, so please attend our next one in two weeks.
Studio Update
The big news from Netvrk this month is the release of our foundational interactive experience, Mine Runner! A release such as this serves multiple purposes. First is always providing engagement to our community, giving them an opportunity for entertainment, and showcasing the talent from our development and art teams. Second, the project is a forcing function for the studio, to design and develop all of the back-end aspects of a live game. These are things such as a player account database, a bug reporting system, an analytic collection system, and an inventory system. Third, the Mine Runner game provides the basis for one of the two in-game currencies, ENERGY. This currency is the measure of value added to our ecosystem by player action in the world. Subsequent experiences in the world will require ENERGY, so those players who have built up a large reserve will become some of the whales in the larger virtual world.
While the Mine Runner launch was our big news for the month, it certainly is not all that happened.
Netvrk has been getting a fair number of other projects and communities interested in being a part of our world. We are in discussions on the various ways we can do that with these groups, and more news should follow. We have sharpened our focus for the first Alpha launch of the virtual world to ensure that the experience we test in those first releases are the type that bring you in and keep you in. And finally, we are adding additional structure to how our development team is structured and how the studio functions with the best possible efficiency overall. More about all these things will come in future devlogs.
Development Overview
Mine Runner
Based on feedback and our observations of how Mine Runner is being played we have made the following changes that will soon be released as an update to the game:
Once a player unlocks a biome, they will now be able to start at any sector within the biome. While we will encourage players to start closer to the start of the biome, they will be free to start wherever they wish.
After crafting a pickaxe, players will now be able to see its star rating when viewing them in game.
We have made adjustments to the pickaxe star ranking formula to emphasize the value of energy cores. This will have the effect of pushing some axes with high tier cores into a higher bracket but will not cause any existing axes to drop in rating. This update more correctly labels those axes with more powerful cores, ensuring that they will be given the proper four- and five-star ratings. We believe this will better reflect the utility value of various ax combinations and help players decide whether to mint or purchase an ax. This change has no effect on the utility of axes, their drop rates or the appearance of the models, it just creates bigger buckets of axes classified as tier 4 and 5.
We have also fixed a number of bugs and visual glitches based again on the received feedback.
Netvrk Avatars
At the end of the year, our Art and Design teams recently took inventory of our story and character to date and have discovered some opportunities to really push ourselves. While the original avatar line up will remain the main players in our lore, we like the idea of adding an array of archetypes for our world. These playable characters will have a wide variety of personalities, body shapes, and variations for players entering our world without NFT avatars to utilize. Work on this is early, and more will be forthcoming in future social media and other posts, but here is a sample of the type of style sheets being created for each archetype.
Unreal Team Update
The Unreal team continues to work on the core systems in support of the greater Metaverse.
Emote Function
This month saw the expansion of the emote system to expand the way that players communicate. In the final design, this system will allow for multiple ways to express yourself, including custom made emotes that individual content creators can add to the library. And yes, a curation system will be employed to ensure exploits are avoided.
Immersive Sound
In order to fully be as immersive as we require, we are dedicating a fair number of cycles to our audio system. Environment audio has been made to provide ambiences that are more dynamic and lifelike. The number of binaural sources in our environments has increased as well (headphones are highly recommended in order to get the full 3D audio experience!). Vehicle audio is in its prototype phase with Unreal Engine's MetaSounds as our main driver of the sonic experience. Our vehicles will be brought to life using AngeTheGreat's open-source Engine Simulator as source audio! Please go and check out some of Ange's phenomenal work: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV0t1y4h_6-2SqEpXBXgwFQ
UI/UX
The often-unappreciated roles in product design are the User Interface and User Experience roles. This group is tasked with making sure that the user can find the information they want as fast and effortlessly as possible, without distracting from the overall experience. We have spent the time since the beginning of the year with the look and feel of our interfaces, which are likely to have a drastic upgrade from what can be seen in the Mine Runner experience. Because the goal is a unified look across all features, there will be changes down the road to that first release. But those updates will happen only after we get the unified look into the larger metaverse, to be seen in the first Alphas and Beta release later this year.
Blockchain Team Update
Multi-Chain
Netvrk is officially multi-chain after bridging our NTVRK token to Polygon and releasing Mine Runner! We are extremely excited about being part of the Polygon ecosystem and community. While our community gets to enjoy lower gas fees, we continue to strengthen our relationships with our Polygon partners and start conversations with new Polygon partners.
Please be extra diligent about using the official links that can be found on our Discord. We are using Chainport as our only bridge and only accept NTVRK tokens on Polygon from one contract address.
Our next blockchain integration will come in Social Spaces. More on that in a future DevLog, but we can't wait to explore it with some prehistoric friends...
Mine Runner Beta
For those into data, here are the blockchain transaction numbers as of this writing:
Crypto payments on Ethereum: 82
Crypto payments on Polygon: 43
Axes minted on Polygon: 269
Serving Metadata
While it may sound minor, the way we get and display NFT metadata is a complex and important part of our ecosystem. NFT metadata will be served in many places, including in engine and in the NFT marketplace. Having an accurate and efficient solution to serve metadata from all linked wallets is critical to a great experience. We have our first iteration in testing and continue to work with the UE team to enhance our solution.
NFT Marketplace
There was a lot of discussion around the NFT marketplace last month. We challenged our team to really think through what functionality is important for any marketplace, and more importantly, what functionality is important for a marketplace supporting a metaverse.
Out of those conversations, we determined that our marketplace should put a larger focus on the utility that NFTs in our ecosystem will provide and on primary sales by Netvrk and our partners. As a result of this increase in scope, we anticipate the first release to be delayed to Q2. We look forward to sharing more details in future DevLogs.
Marketing Update
With each project we complete, the marketing team continues to freshen up the Netvrk brand visual language and expand our visual library. Currently in the works is the game and metaverse UI/UX design, pitch decks, and graphics templates for online and print use.
The website had a few miscellaneous items to finalize this month, including updates to our partners, the addition of more sections, including NFT Collections, and Social Media feeds.
Our new NFT Marketplace website UI/UX has been wireframed and user flow has been workshopped. Next up, the devs will build it and we can tackle the graphic design aspects.
With the release Beta, several people outside the studio were given early access to playthrough Mine Runner and share their reactions with us. We sent out a marketing email to those who have subscribed to marketing content, so watch for more as our team ramps up with the studio roadmap.
We have worked to establish a production pipeline and continue to assess our processes and make adjustments as needed.
Social Media Update
Our next AMA on Twitter Spaces will be held on Feb 15th at 2pm EST. We’re expecting a lot of questions about Mine Runner, our first game release, so if there are any questions about the game or anything else, head over to the #ama-questions channel on Discord and drop them off. This is a chance to get answers straight from the team!
Set your reminder here: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1YqGoAVrpvjxv
In other news, we’ll be building a Netvrk Community Clubhouse for all our members to come together and connect. We want to create a space that reflects the interests and values of our community, so we’re inviting all of you to share your idea for the theme of the clubhouse. If there are any suggestions, visit the #club-house-theme channel on Discord or reply to the Clubhouse announcement on Telegram and let us know. We can’t wait to see what our community comes up with!