Dev Blog #34

Dev Blog Summary

a) Game and Web 3 Development

• We have heard the community loud and clear on the need for a better match-making experience, we are developing a separate logic for this and fixing this in 2 ways 1) a new logic that applies only to new players to ensure a better first-experience that is separate to the normal match-making algorithm 2) further reducing and limiting the number of rare weapons equipped by bots
• Another feature that we will be working on is reducing the cost of forging into common and uncommon tier weapons (bottom 2 tiers), both in terms of $GCOIN cost as well as the number of weapons required — we hope this will kickstart the progression loop for people wanting to forge through the tiers again
• On the game side we also made a couple of changes to the game system which includes refactoring game logic for stability, improved the processes for accessing partner characters as well as running internal tests on the Battle Royale mode
• On the web3 development end we are continuing with the dashboard revamp, the first stage of this is complete and in testing, the next phase would see us integrate all existing mechanics (forging, training etc) into this new dashboard so that everything is in one place and more user-friendly
• Both game studio and web3 team also continue to focus on integrating more partner collections as we ramp up onboarding for more partner collections as preparation for our cross-IP tournament
• There were issues in regards to disappearing BYOPills (FYI we will add cool-down for these soon!), and key fragments crafting not working (especially the 3 key fragments option). These have now been resolved, If you did tryCraft recently in the past couple of days, we recommend checking your wallet again if you tried to craft keys in the past 2 weeks as the crafter might have minted a key to your wallet after the reboot.

b) Business Development & Marketing

• We’re off to a great start of our first official Cross-IP championship! The launch of our championship teaser trailer was very successful, reaching over 12k views and 90k impressions within only a few days. We are excited to share the full trailer with the NFT space very soon!
• The AMAs / Spaces were hosted on the participating partners Discord & Twitter accounts and can be found accordingly. Our final one is happening in a few hours in the Illuvium Discord at 11am EST!
• The purpose behind the trophy run, exclusive to each community, is to provide them with a casual setting with a small reward pool, allowing us to onboard players from every community to our best capabilities.
• To clarify — this current stage is not meant to be for our community ann there is no internal trophy run for the GFC community at this time. If you would like to get involved please reach out to the respective partner communities for more details on their specific trophy runs.

c) Community

• The Galaxy Community Cup came back in full force in September! To reward those grinding the game day in and day out, we decided to go with “reward-only” weapons and characters which was very successful, we will be hosting similar tournaments again in the future
• We also ran another 2 ETH tournament this week, 33 teams battled it out over more than 5 hours spread over 2 days. TeamPlaySafe (arguably the best team in GFC-land right now) from Comfy Ventures met Pasalamat 4 Oct from GFI in the finals and some finals it was!!
• Besides tournament action we saw more community participation, you were asked to come up with a banner for our YouTube channel. There were some beauties out there! Congratulations on the winning entry from HIRAYA | ZEN#2850

A: Game and Web 3 Development

GAME

Game System:

• Refactored game logic to get rid of an SDK we previously relied on that was becoming unstable and unreliable
• Improved the process of importing game assets, which means it is now much faster to authenticate you own any partner character and being able to select it for gameplay
• Adjusted the number of rare tier weapons available to bots
• Battle Royale mode internal testing!

Character:

Add new character:

• Crypto Raiders Collection: Tammy, John, Mike, OldMan, Blue Elf, Fairy, Dark Elf, Cyborg, Orc, White Elf
• Supducks
• Voxies

• Mint Mink: Mink V1, Mink V2
• Birdez Gang
• Goons of Balatroon
• Byopill Collection: Voyager, Psychonaut
• Frontier character
• Remodeled character: Alien Boy

Weapon:

• Guzzy: adjusted cooldown time of normal attack from 2.0>2.1s, skill damage 448 > 443/hit; ultimate damage from 1822>1702
• Tenderizer: changed ultimate attack aim type from straight line to radial with 60 degrees angle, now every bullet of the ultimate attack will deal 668 damage and stun enemies for 1.2s, changed cooldown of ultimate attack from 20>21s

WEB3 DEVELOPMENTS

1. Dashboard revamp

The revamp is close to completion and the restructured backend has entered testing this week. Once this is done we will also integrate other mechanisms such as p2e rewards (fragment redeem/craft, loot box, forging and gen2 training etc) into the dashboard so everything is in one place.

Subtask 1: Dashboard Frontend Update
Status: Completed, ready for deployment
ETA: TBD

The frontend revamp was completed shortly after the last update.

Subtask 2: Landing Page Mobile Compatibility Issues
Status: Completed, ready for deployment
ETA: TBD

Subtask 3: Backend restructure and strengthen security
Status: In testing phase
ETA: 10th of Oct

This task has been pushed back because the dev team was prioritizing implementation of the new partner collections in preparation for the Cross-IP Tournament.

As mentioned in the previous dev blog, the completion of this sub-task would mean quicker response time on endpoints, less issues with the dashboard and GCOIN claim, and also better onboarding experience for newcomers. Having a restructured codebase will increase the expendability, meaning adding new features will be less time consuming and less prone to error. While doing that, we will also take the opportunity to scout out any technical debt that was leftover since the beginning of the project due to historical reasons.

2. More partner collection integrations

We have prioritized implementation of those partners who are participating in the Cross-IP Tournament.

Subtask 1: Gathering partner NFT images and metadata
Status: Completed for most, still waiting on some.

Most of our partner collection teams were able to provide their assets to us. Some teams weren’t able to provide them and for quicker turnaround time, we have decided to get one uniform image from the project and use it as default image for the character instead of displaying a unique NFT images according to the NFT that the player owns as a interim solution, we will continue to add in unique images as these teams provide us with the right assets.

Subtask 2: Energy system Ingestion
Status: Completed

All of the partner collections in this batch have been ingested by the energy system.

We have made the importation of new partner into the energy system simple and easy by implementing a configuration system, when a new collection needs to be added to the system, the team just needs to put in some details of the collection (such as contract address, NFT standard, chain ID etc) into the configuration and restart the server, the server then picks up the change in the config file and start ingesting the newly added collection. This will help us speed up partner integration moving forward.

Subtask 3: NFT Auth API update
Status: Completed

All of the partner collections in this batch have been added to the NFT auth API.

Subtask 4: Creating game model for characters and weapons
Status: Completed for most, still waiting on some.

We are testing the models that are completed in the game, seeing whether it is compatible and if the existing weapon pokes through the character model or if anything weird happens when the model is moving around.

Not all of the models are ready and we are testing as we get them.

Subtask 5: In game stats balancing
Status: In progress

This task comes after the game model creation and testing, we play the new character against others and see if it is too weak or too strong, and tweak their stats along the way.

OTHER CHANGES

1. Issue with P2E key crafter
Status: Fixed and live

The P2E key crafter is in charge of watching the tryCraftKey events on-chain, does the calculation and mint the corresponding P2E key into the players wallet if their tryCraft was successful. Unfortunately we had some issues with the Polygon RPC that we were using to listen to events, and players thought that they are not getting anything when they do tryCraft.

This issue was resolved by adding in retry logic into the keyCrafter, if the RPC does return an error for whatever reason, it will retry again after 1 minute. As a failsafe, when we created this crafter, we had a database built for it so even if it broke, we can restart it and it will pick up from wherever it started to fail.

If you did tryCraft recently in the past couple of days, we recommend checking your wallet again as the crafter might have minted a key to your wallet after the reboot.

2. BYOPill disappearing
Status: Fixed and live

Couple of days ago, we had some issues with BYOPill consumable disappearing or being grayed-out in game. It was due to the Polygon RPC being unstable which caused the energy system to malfunction, the energy system was missing on some transfer events and wasn’t calculating the energy on ERC1155 NFTs accurately.

This issue has been resolved recently, you should be able to see and use your BYOPill or any other NFT character/weapons normally in game.

B: Business Development & Marketing

We’re off to a great start of our first official cross-IP championship!

The launch of our championship teaser trailer was very successful, reaching over 12k views and 90k impressions within only a few days. We are excited to share the full trailer with the NFT space very soon!

As announced two weeks ago, we are in full motion for the cross-IP championship. We have completed the first step of the outline previously shared in our bi-weekly update, the AMAs / Twitter Spaces, and are now in the second stage, the Trophy Run.

The AMAs / Spaces were hosted on the participating partners Discord & Twitter accounts and can be found accordingly.

The final AMA will be held today, Tuesday, Oct 4th at 11am EST on the Illuvium Discord.

To further elaborate on this stage of the series of events:

The purpose behind the trophy run, exclusive to each community, is to provide them with a casual setting with a small reward pool, allowing us to onboard players from every community to our best capabilities.

This includes getting the in-game characters ready, fixing technical issues, helping out with questions regarding account creation and more.

Furthermore, the trophy run allows our partner communities to start getting used to the game and practicing for a more serious setting, which will come in the later stages.

To clarify — this current stage is not meant to be for our community. If you are part of any partnered community, feel free to participate within their community and help others get into GFC, too. However, there is no exclusive Trophy Run for our community at this point in time.

Due to the casual nature of this Trophy Run, we purposely decided against running a leaderboard / scoreboard. It’s free-play, everyone in their own time and in their own pace and we will reveal the winners at the end.

Additionally, we decided to launch another Twitter giveaway this week as part of the cross-IP championship events, in combination with some of the participating partners. We also decided to extend the duration of both of our Twitter Impact initiatives until the very end of this series of events.

For those of you who might’ve missed some of the new partnerships -

VaynerSports Pass

Karafuru

Women and Weapons

Goons of Balatroon

Last but not least, we’re hosting a Twitter Space with Polygon Studios today, Tuesday October 4th at 1pm EST.

Make sure to use the following link to set your reminders!

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C: Community

What happens when you organise a tournament with limited characters? Some questionable line ups!

The Galaxy Community Cup came back in full force in September! To reward those grinding the game day in and day out, we decided to go with “reward-only” weapons and characters. It was as you would expect a freeze fest and some rather spooky line ups, filled with Insane Clowns, Crazy Chefs and Cyclops ! The only way to obtain those Characters (and weapons) is through playing games, leveling up and unlocking! It was so much fun, expect more GCC tournaments with this format in the future!

It was team 2CG GGWP who beat The way of Zen in the finals! Awaken#1820 was the finals MVP and scored themselves a GFC hoodie! Congrats!

GCC tournaments are fun and nice, but we all know the 2 ETH tournament is what it’s all about! And after a little break we came back with full force! To make things more interesting we lowered the weapon cap to 6, to allow for even more competitiveness and boy oh boy … did you all deliver!

33 teams battled it out over more than 5 hours spread over 2 days. TeamPlaySafe (arguably the best team in GFC-land right now) from Comfy Ventures met Pasalamat 4 Oct from GFI in the finals and some finals it was!!

Down to the wire they went! TeamPlaySafe took the first game with a logical win, but then Pasamalat stunned the reigning 2 ETH champions by taking a 2–1 lead. Game 4 was an absolute whitewash, TeamPlaySafe obliterated Pasamalat and it looked as if it would be easy sailing after all for Zaphkiel, Psyy and Jboi.

Wrong again! Pasamalat with some resilience, taking the lead again. xKev, Toybits and Khey from the GFI team came within 1 game of the biggest win in their young GFC career, but it was TeamPlaySafe who in the end won game 6 and the deciding game 7 to claim their FOURTH “2 ETH tournament”. An incredible feat and showing once again they are indeed the team to beat!

You can watch day 2 at the link below!

More tournament action coming up later this month, who is up to the challenge and will end the reign of Team Comfy and TeamPlaySafe?!

Besides tournament action we saw more community participation, you were asked to come up with a banner for our YouTube channel. There were some beauties out there!

4 of them were shortlisted and you voted! (special thanks to Je#2888, AxeCap#0907 and HIRAYA | ZEN#2850 for their shortlisted entries!)

Below is the winning entry from HIRAYA | ZEN#2850 — Congratulations!!