Apeiron Update: May 2023 Dev Report

Salutations, doods and doodettes! It’s the end of the month, and you know what that means (maybe): time for another monthly Dev Report! Cue…

Jun 01, 2023

Salutations, doods and doodettes! It’s the end of the month, and you know what that means (maybe): time for another monthly Dev Report! Cue the excited cheering and rapturous applause.

In this blog post we’ll be updating you with all the latest on what the team has been up to for the past few weeks and what they’ll be chewing on over the next month as we step into a hot summer. Things are certainly heating up around here…🔥

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

Web 3

With the season 2 demo launch fast approaching, the web3 team has been busy working — not on the game itself — but on all of the scaffolding holding it up. This means big updates for our Marketplace website, including leaderboards for the Guild Wars, updating the Battle Demo page (which includes updating the Battlepass and showing reserved Apostles), working on backend upgrades, and finalizing Apostle minting contracts.

For June, the Web 3 team will be re-focusing all their efforts on designing, prepping, and implementing the Apostle section of the Marketplace. This is a big job, and we expect it to be completed around mid-July.

Game Development

Crunch time for the Game Development programmers as they nailed everything into place for the demo season 2. This has meant finishing skills and AI for different bosses, updating level designs and confirming skill balance, implementing updated Skill SFX, adding support for buying Apostles and Artifacts in the Shop, improving the login and email-binding flow for new users, and fine tuning the droprates for rare Apostles with high IVs and the free mint item Dood Halo.

As for THE FUTURE, the devs will be monitoring and potentially addressing any post-launch issues that may crop up — smacking down any wayward bugs — before turning their attention to the next big project — bringing to life S3 PvP! Hope you’re ready to ruuuuuuummmmbbbllleeeee (next season).

Game Design

It was a very busy month for the Game Design team as with Web 3 and Development. Putting the final tweaks on the Artifacts, Avatar and Apostle Enemy AI, cleaning up the boss (and getting him some fancy new digs), and then in every spare moment testing the whole darn thing, then repeating the process ad infinitum…it’s been a ride. A very long ride. With doods, boods, bosses, and bugs — oh my!

Anyway! The point is, the demo is soon to launch, and once it does there may be a few more adjustments to make sure everything’s coming up doodhouse. After everything’s running smoothly, then the designers will be able to do some more big picture stuff, including a holistic skill balance design review, putting the details on future release design plans, and turning an eye towards PvP(!!!).

Art: 3D and Animations

Ups and downs for the 3D and Animations team this month. First, the work for the demo season 2 was finished, which was the most important thing. With season 2 already done, the team has been working on producing the skill special FX for ALL of the missing Avatar Wisdom elemental skills — so skills for the elements of Fire, Water, and Earth.

This is challenging work that involves a lot of moving parts, and sometimes the results aren’t up to our high standards — and when it isn’t, we take a lesson from it, go back, and do it again. This is to say that this month has been testing our limits, and growing together. The team will be continuing to iterate on these skills in the coming months to make sure that when they do release — they’ll blow you away.

Art: 2D and Concepts

Skillful. It’s a word that describes our 2D and Concepts team. It’s also a word that describes what they’ve been working on for almost all of this month: skills. In particular, they’ve been developing the Wisdom Avatar skills for the different elements (Fire, Water, Earth), as well as starting on some of the skills for the other Apostle classes — Berserkers, Shamans, and Summoners.

Stepping into the summer, the 2D team will be working on some concept art for the Axis Mundi as well as refining some of the god characters we’ve been drawing up behind the scenes — maybe you’ve seen a couple of them! They’ll also be working on even more skills — the Fury Avatar skills for the different elements, as well as continuing the work on the above listed Apostle classes.

Story/Lore

Ah but of course, of course! For the merry month of May, the tale of the Story/Lore team is that it is expanding! As such, there were some hours devoted to reviewing and (in some cases) interviewing potential hires. Beyond that, much of the writers’ time was spent on proofreading and fine tuning text for the demo season 2, as well as publishing a couple of fun stories in our weekly blog to keep y’all entertained. ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED???

June’s going to be about training up the newbies and then taking a step back to a more long term view as we breathe a sigh of relief with the season 2 demo release. We’ll be meeting with various teams to discuss more about implementing story content in-game and what that looks like. Stay tuned!

Community

This month the Community Team made some changes to the setup of the Discord community. We streamlined the process for new users to come onto the server and simplified requirements to level up and get rewards — basically we just want people to come on, chat, hang out, and have a good ol’ fashioned doody time.

Speaking of chatting, we wanted to go over with everyone the chat level rewards in our Discord. First off, in order to claim any rewards, you need to be chat level 5. That’s the most important part of it.

But THEN there’s the rarest prize of all: the elusive (and EVIL) bood plushie.

Most people will have very limited opportunities to get the bood plushie. In order to be eligible, you need to be in the TOP 3 of all chatters on the server, netting you the role of Blabberdood for a period of 1 month. While a Blabberdood, you can get your own FREE bood plushie! On top of that, we’ll even pay for shipping! DM Lorekeeper to claim.

Among the top chatters, ranks 4–20 shall received the limited time @boodtouched role, which will allow them to buy our bood plushie in a few different ways:

Spending 5 Foonie Emblems [exclusive to asset holders]. In this case, you’ll get a Bood Plushie NFT that can be exchanged for a real bood plushie. If you do exchange for the real plushie, you need to pay for shipping.
Sending $50 USDC to us via ERC20 or Polygon. This’ll get you the bood plushie NFT.
For those who want to get a plushie directly without any web3 interaction, you can get them mailed to your doorstep directly! Just pay $50 USD + shipping to us through PayPal — we’ll send you the payment link through email.

Please note that for shipping info we’d need to collect your real name, phone number, and address.

The chat level winners for May will be decided by June 1st 12pm GMT+8. We’ll be collecting bood plushie claims from eligible candidates until June 7th and then airdropping the bood plushie NFTs on June 8th.

Finally, any individual can only claim/buy 1 Bood Plushie. Gotta make sure everyone has a chance to get one!

Looking forward, the new chat leaderboards for June will go live after the reset — so from 12:01pm June 1st and running until July. Use this valuable time to chat so as to secure your own adorably evil free bood plushie!!

In other news…to go along with the upcoming season 2 demo release, we also launched our Apeiron Creator Program so that content creators can partner up with us and get access to a whole bunch of perks and rewards. If you’re a content creator, check it out! You can find more info on that here.

For June, since we have the new season going public, we’re expecting a whole bunch of new doods to be joining into the Discord community. That being the case, we’re going to be active in hosting a whole ton of Apeiron-themed events, as well as getting the leaderboards up and going, and then there’s the Guild Wars (with a MASSIVE prize pool. Truly GARGANTUAN). After a quiet few months, it’s go time babyyyyy!

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And with that, we have another Dev Report in the books! We hope that these reports give you an appreciation for the challenges of game development…but also for how you work as a team to overcome them to make something awesome!

Remember, the public launch of the season 2 demo is next Monday, June 5th! THAT MEANS YOU NEED TO COLLECT YOUR S1 ANIMUS IF YOU HAVEN’T DONE SO ALREADY. IT WILL DISAPPEAR. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY YOUR FINAL WARNING.

Mark your calendars and prime your engines, because it’s going to be a big month for Apeiron!

In the meantime, if you wanna come and chat with us about Apeiron or anything else, consider checking our Discord. We have doods from all around the world chatting and we’d love for you to join us. Also make sure to follow us on Twitter so you get all the latest Apeiron updates!

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.