Apeiron Update: March 2023 Dev Report

Greetings godiverse faithful! This week we have our March Development Report to share with you. We’ve been busy continuing to prepare…

Mar 30, 2023

Greetings godiverse faithful! This week we have our March Development Report to share with you. We’ve been busy continuing to prepare everything for our big Phase 2 Demo release, which will add a huge amount of content to the game — you can read more about that in last week’s blog HERE. So much to look forward to! And our team has been working hard to put it all together~

In this Development Report, as with last month, we’ll be covering updates from the following teams:

-Web 3

-Game Development

-Game Design

-Art: 3D and Animations

-Art: 2D and Concepts

-Story/Lore

-Community

Quick announcement 1: Primeval Planet holders can look forward to the Phase 2 Demo test build dropping tomorrow! Get ready for a first look at the new content: you’ll be able to load in as The Tempest Fate and command the battlefield or charge into the fray with The Tempest Fury! You’ll also be able to collect and use Artifacts. Exciting! Maybe you want to get a Primeval Planet so you can have this early access? Head to our Marketplace to see if you can snag one!

Quick announcement 2: We’re having a raffle where you can win a FREE Star NFT! Big value to be had here. In order to enter, you’ll need to own 11 out of 12 unique Origins Collection Apostle NFTs. You can find these on OpenSea so if you’d like to have a chance to win a free Star, get collecting! The raffle (and account snapshot to confirm you own the NFTs) will take place TOMORROW March 31st 2023, so you better act fast!

Also, small thing, but if you got Animus from the Season 1 Battlepass — make sure you claim it! You can simply go to our Marketplace to do so. You must claim your Animus before Season 2 begins — so you have some time. But don’t forget!

Ok, with that being said, let’s get to the Report:

Web 3

The focus for the Web3 Team has been getting Star Orbiting up and running. And we did! This month we launched orbiting for Star owners, so that you can start to get those sweet aging buffs up and running and power up your planets. We also did some bug fixing to make sure everything on the Marketplace is running silky smooth.

Building on this, the next step is to get Star Orbiting Rentals going, which involves tasks such as revising the existing orbiting feature to support multiple orbits and detaching, finalizing smart contracts for Orbital Track renting, and developing the frontend and backend.

Finally, the team is looking at launching soon the Animus Token Claims, and minting and distributing the Stars that are in are special Guild constellations.

Game Development

The Game Development team’s work is all in-progress, directed towards implementing and then testing various features that we’re looking to include in the Phase 2 of the Dungeon Demo release. For now, the bulk of effort has been put towards 2 elements: first, getting all the new skills in the game — and there are a ton of ‘em! — recently the Avatar Air Fate skills and the Apostle Warrior and Guardian skills. Second, inputting the first batch of Artifacts, over 100 items, and setting up the necessary support to make sure they’re equippable in the dungeons.

Beyond these two tasks, the Game Development lads have been working with the Art teams and the Game Design team on a first draft version of the dungeon levels rework as a basis for future dungeon structures. They have also been looking at getting multi-language support, having Bood enemies cast skills with more regularity, and a new mechanic…which we’ll cover at a later time.

Game Design

With so many new features planned for the Phase 2 demo, the Game Design team has been super busy — and productive! — with a laundry list of tasks finished this month: testing ALL Avatar Tempest skills for functionality and iterating as necessary with Game Development team, setting all the Bood skills and their use cases, creating skill design templates for new boss content, drafting up new items and choices as a part of shop and campfire room updates, setting up all the Artifacts, and reviewing and balancing Avatar and Apostle stats.

Moving forward, the game designers will be shifting focus to actual testing of the Artifacts as well as implementing the Event room content. Then, once everything is in place, they’ll take a step back to consider the overall game loop and see what they can do to improve it.

Beyond that, attention will turn to the other six Apostles’ skills and stats. Plenty to keep the designers busy!

Art: 3D and Animations

March for the Art: 3D and Animations division was all about Apostles. VFX and Skill Animations for all 6 classes — the Warrior, Guardian, Priest, Rogue, Mage, and Hunter — were finished this month, adding 30 new skills to the game. This was a huge amount of work and the team has once again proven that they can rise to the task by getting it done. Nice job guys!

Apostle customizations are also on the horizon! Those were finished this month (you can see one good lookin’ Warrior below), so that now — when you get an Apostle in the Phase 2 Demo — they’ll all have their own unique look. Gotta be fashionable, after all.

Next month is boss month. The pipeline will be moving from concept art to block, then to high-res modeling, then retooling before starting on the UV & Baking map, texturing, rigging, animations, and VFX. The team has already finished 1 of 3 such planned bosses.

Art: 2D and Concepts

The 2D and Concepts division of the Art Team was busy this month mostly preparing the artwork for the content of the Phase 2 Demo, including all new Apostle Skill Cards, Artifacts, Potions and new Shop Items, and Event room artworks. They all look amazing! You can see some Event room artwork below.

The team also put together some concept art for some major characters in the Apeiron storyline, but it was mostly a demo-focused month. Next month will be more on character designs and also working on the settings for PvP-related content.

Story/Lore

The Story and Lore team collaborated with the Concept Art Team to continue to develop character and settings for Vol. 1 of the Apeiron storyline. However the bulk of the writers efforts were directed towards producing the stories for the Event rooms that will be part of the newly updated dungeons in Phase 2. There are A LOT of events to explore, and we hope you take the time to read and enjoy them!

Community

Earlier this month we concluded both the Apeiron Guild War Season 1 and Letrina Cup, both of which you can read about in last week’s blog HERE. After that exciting finale, this month has been quietly prepping for our big launch of the Demo Phase 2.

Next week, we’re starting April with a bang: you can expect the long awaited revamp and streamlining of our Discord community to go ahead! LoreKeeper has been planning this for a while, and it’s finally happening woooo! We’ll also be ramping up events as we build up the hype for our Phase 2 demo release.

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And that’s all we have for this month’s Development Report! We hope this gives you an idea of all of the various odds and ends that the teams working on Apeiron are toiling away on. There’s a lot that goes into the making of a godiverse, but we’re here for it~

Got any questions about Apeiron? Maybe want to know more? Well then! I exhort you to check out our Discord, and I beseech you to follow our Twitter. The former will introduce you to a bunch of awesome doods, and the latter will keep you updated on the latest happenings. Notably, our Discord #Doodleaks channel has a ton of behind the scenes stuff being posted all the time, so if you’d like a cheeky look, go and take a peek!

And as always, thanks for reading, godlings. We’ll see you next time.

About Apeiron

Apeiron is the world’s first NFT-based play-and-earn godgame. Apeiron will feature a unique card-based action-adventure combat system combined with god game simulation gameplay inspired by classic god games like Populous and Black & White. Players will be able to build up planets from above before descending to the ground as a powerful Avatar to solve the mysteries of the universe. Players will grow their planet to the point of developmental stagnation, then reset the planetary cycle via an Armageddon event to allow for even more advancement and thrilling late-game alliance level GvE and GvG activities. Apeiron will use a tri-token architecture, which means that there will be three separate tokens to navigate their ecosystem: a governance token, a play-to-earn token, and a premium alliance token.

Note: This article was updated April 4th, 2023, removing mention of being able to buy Apostles on our Marketplace. This will come later!