Author: Davy
Welcome to our first update in our new Monthly Update series, a series of posts that recap our game development progress in the preceding month.
Having closed out major back-office operations at the end of June and into early July, the rest of July was dedicated to charging full-steam ahead on all matters of development. Here’s what we’ve been up to.
The team has been hard at work honing the combat prototype.
In April, we built an early prototype to test the mechanics for fighting an enemy. Play-testing the prototype, it felt fun hacking away at foes. That gave us our starting point and we’ve been iterating on the battle mechanics ever since.
Here’s what that combat looks like at the end of July.
Combat prototype with sword-like weapon — primary and secondary attacks
Combat prototype with sword-like weapon — primary and secondary attacks
For sword-like weapons, we now have two moves: a primary slash, a secondary charged attack. There is a planned tertiary move as well that is still under development.
We imagine this moveset to be universal for all sword-like weapon classes. Other weapon classes will have different movesets, but we won’t be developing those until at least after the sword-like moves are well refined.
Compare the above video to our combat prototype from April:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1519223309287763969
As part of the game, players will receive a free house that they can customize and decorate. During July, we implemented the house editor which will serve as the decorating interface.
Housing System editor in-action
Housing System editor in-action
The houses are fully customizable, from decor items to even the walls and floor. Here are some examples of decorated houses.
Examples of decorated houses: fantasy home, rustic cabin, Japanese tatami house
There are vast amounts of possible combinations of decor. This side-game will hopefully add an extra dimension of fun for players venturing into dungeons in search of house decor loot.
In developing our combat prototype, we needed some opponents to fight against. What better and more versatile enemies than this bunch of scary, spooky skeletons! Can you guess which one throws projectiles?
Various skeleton opponents, each with different attributes and attacks.
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A scary, spooky skeleton showing us its moves…
…but those old bones are no match for a sturdy stick.
The artwork for the dungeons were also long overdue for a makeover. We envision there being many different biomes for dungeons, but we are starting with the standard — a cave that used to be a mine.
While we may feast with our eyes, there are plenty of important work done by the team behind the scenes, literally.
In building a fast-paced action-heavy game, we acknowledge that not all transactions can be done on-chain. The latency for on-chain transactions is too great and will break immersion. As such, NFTs will need to be imported into the game prior to play in order for it to be used. Having NFTs imported and available for use in-game means that the NFTs cannot be transferred or sold in the middle of play.
After concerted development efforts in July, the backend functionality to support the import and withdrawal of NFTs is now ready for testing. This testing phase will continue into August.
In the meantime, the team has also been hard at work building the frontend and backend for the dApp to support the Settlement Launch. July was dedicated mostly to designing the frontend and building out the API endpoints. There has been considerable progress on building out a referrals feature.
In the middle of the July, we made our official announcement that we would be joining the TreasureDAO and Arbitrum family. We believe in these two ecosystems, and think they will help propel us to 10,000 players the quickest.
Take a look at our announcement on Twitter. In a thread, we lay out our thesis for the web3 gaming space and why we’re fans of TreasureDAO and Arbitrum.
https://twitter.com/The_Beacon_GG/status/1547246644311236609
Looking at August, gameplay continues to be the focus of our efforts. In particular, we will be completing and refining the combat experience for sword-like weapons. That means finishing the animations for the tertiary move and implementing it in-game. Combat is a core gameplay experience, so everything from hits to dodges will need to be polished to feel as satisfying as possible.
In addition, we will be stress testing the NFT import-export functionality. Progress will continue on all fronts on the dApp for the Settlement Launch.
More art to come as well. Expect to see prettier dungeons; we have additional dungeon decor and tileset variations in store. We will also be teasing a first look at the town tavern. This tavern will have in-game functionality, serving as a place where players can obtain quests.
As we launch this Monthly Update series, we are also releasing our Vision Paper. Think of it as a whitepaper-lite. You can read that here.
Join our Discord to receive game perks and content sneak-peeks. Otherwise, we’ll see you here next month!
𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘰𝘯, 𝘎𝘭𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘵𝘰 <redacted name>.