April 2022 Dev Update — “Bull-ish”

Our World Architect (CEO), Tin Nguyen, shares yet another Sipher Development Update. “We’ve continued to make progress on many fronts. This month, we’re feeling especially “Bull-ish”. Why?”

TLDR:

• We have onboarded new animators, game-devs, and a dedicated NFT Marketplace Advisor, bringing the team’s size to 128 full-time members.
• While live multiplayer is 10x harder than single-player or turn-based multiplayer games, we have made significant progress in this aspect. The Multiplayer experience is now syncing smoothly across 3 clients.
• Our BURU, the third playable race, is getting so much love from our community. He s it.

A close up of a WIP BURU — showing how detailed we are within the character design process

• The Ather Labs branding is complete, and we will reveal more details to the world over the next 6 weeks.
• We internally shipped version 0.1 of our Launcher, the gateway to all Games and dApps within our ecosystem and partnerships.

• We are shipping our technical pre-alpha to some of our investors, friends, and community members, and we are hosting physical playtesting sessions within our studio. This build includes the base gameplay experience of our three characters: INU, NEKO, and BURU. Feedback will be collected after playtest sessions to help us further validate that our game is “fun” and improve our core gameplay experience.
• Look forward to seeing many highlights of this build going out on our Socials 
• We’ve assembled a dedicated game design team to work on Levels and Boss encounters, something that will be key to the SIPHER experience across many worlds and game modes.
• We are making progress with our metagame, including the economy’s design and what a multi-token economy would bring. We also started to model out these assumptions on dedicated software that will allow us to test our hypothesis & assumptions before and after the game launch, with live input feeds of actual gameplay data.

You can view all past updates here: SIPHER Development Update

Introducing the BURU

The Four Sub-races:

The INFERNO

The INFERNO sub-race is the rarest of the BURU sub-races. Forged out of unbreakable obsidian sheathed beneath layers and layers of scorching volcanic magma, these Siphers are living furnaces of nature who wield fire and stone like the twin horns of catastrophe — smelting entire armies and cities into nothing more than smokes and ashes. Don’t mistake their mastery over igneous elements for stability, the INFERNO is fury made flesh.

BURU — INFERNO Sub-race

The MECHA

The MECHA sub-race is the tech-organic variant of the BURU, born out of the race’s unending thirst to elevate their combat prowess. These Siphers have rebuilt their bodies with cutting-edge — and in some cases banned — augmentations from mechanically enhanced body parts to internal cold fusion reactors. Living engines of war, the MECHA BURU can never stop fighting — to do so would risk overloading their own over-clocked neuro-circuitry.

BURU — MECHA Sub-race

The ANCIENT

The ANCIENT is an enigmatic techno-mystic sub-race of the BURU. Unlike their grounded and domineering cousins, they are a class of tribal hunter-gatherers who pay deep reverence to traditions and rituals. Their shamanic powers are tapped from sacred totems, talismans carved deep with arcane markings and symbols, intelligible to few. Still, with respect for the past comes wisdom to pioneer the future, these modern ancients won’t hesitate to use bleeding-edge weapons and armor to chart their destinies.

BURU — ANCIENT Sub-race

The TAURUS

The TAURUS sub-race is the most common variation of the Buru. Their limitless stamina and valor in battle are the stuff of legends. A TAURUS brawler is immediately identifiable on any battlefield — both by their brightly-colored power armor and the symphony of destruction they leave in their wake. TAURUS Siphers have made their way to countless worlds of Sipheria; they are always ready to rumble and fight for justice.

BURU — TAURUS Sub-race

New Character Design

We have made lots of progress with our three new Playable characters: code names N, H & S.

They should be revealed to the public slowly, over time, including plans on when you’ll be able to acquire & play them. All of them are integral to the larger Sipheria’s story and thus we want to keep the suspense and the surprise for you guys. We’ll evaluate the trade-offs accordingly.

We’ve also teased one of the “characters” that Sipherians will be encountering in the very first episode of the weekly Sipherian Lounge stream, a great initiative started by our dedicated community. You definitely should follow their Twitter for updates.

There are a few Easter Eggs of messages hidden in this image. Please drop your guesses on Discord on what secrets this character would bring.

Gameplay

Gameplay is (King). Content is  (Queen).

For the past month, we have been polishing the gameplay, especially our 3C. I’ve personally spent many days just tweaking the micro-moments of our INU’s katana gameplay, the state of which I’m currently relatively happy with.

Linking & syncing animation, VFX, SFX, and hit triggers are very important. This took us a while to master, as these are all in constant flux with micro-improvements being made by the team. But we’re happy to say, at this moment, we have the formula going forward. It should be slightly easier for us to leverage this for our future characters.

Can’t wait for some of our playtesters to give us feedback on this early gameplay build!

Guns

Being a looter-shooter game, wicked cool weapons are at the top of our minds. We have created systems and processes that will be capable to craft many different types of guns, with many unique combinations of traits such as:

• Projectile shape, path, speed, and behaviors
• On-hit status effects
• Ammo count & reload speed

More on this later, as we truly take our gun-craft very seriously

World Building & Lore Crafting

ANDOS is making progress as well. The world setting is vast, the story deep, and the boss encounters will be great. We envision a world mixed with sci-fi and fantasy lore, a strong pan-Asian root with a few pop-culture inspirations.

Without spoiling the details, here are some works in progress from our awesome concept artists.

Moonbase Station

Moonbase Station, the Nexus of all Sipherians, is coming to life with different sections being fleshed out, each serving a different purpose for our players. Crafting, questing, bantering, or simply jamming out in the metaverse, you might just find all you need in here.

Being an important hub, we do want to make the effort to ensure it’s the most well-designed, vibrant, and welcoming social hub for Sipherians and other metaverse beings alike.

From there, we believe more community-generated events and activities can foster and grow, allowing the Moonbase Station to have a life of its own.

User-generated content (UGC) is something we have always envisioned. However, it is definitely not on our immediate roadmap for the next 12 months, but we do believe the true open metaverse is built by its communities and citizens, and we want Moonbase Station to be a part of that vision.

Web3 Products

Without a doubt, you have seen our updates to the Ather Labs Dashboard, with our suite of new features, including Loot boxes Claim and Airdrops already live, and Loyalty Program features coming soon.

We’ve completed our NFT Marketplace smart contracts and coded most of the core features. However, we decided the timely launch of such a marketplace would best coincide with the game launch so we are taking time to work on additional features that will enhance the discovery and trading experience within the game and outside of the game.

We are building the scaffolding of the data structures that will funnel all the important data points into visual dashboards that will serve 2 purposes:

• The game design & balancing decisions.
• The advanced players’ marketplace purchasing and selling decisions.

These analytical tools will be tested internally first and will be designed with advanced players and gaming guilds in mind.

Spaceships

Have you collected your Lootboxes? If not, I highly suggest you do, as not only will they carry you across Sipheria to its vast multitude of worlds, but also act as the trusty item that will bring you certain perks and benefits during your odyssey. That’s not all — there are a few more hidden benefits to these awesome Spaceships that will be revealed over time. So I highly suggest you pimp the best ride for your journey.

As always, true to SIPHER’s ethos for a 3D metaverse experience, these Spaceships are of course fully crafted in 3D. Please see some sneak peeks of them below:

So that’s all folks!

As always, we’re having so much fun (and stress!) building this amazing universe with all of you, so thank you for all the support.

If you love making great games and have a passion for Web3, please check out our Careers Page, we’re always looking for talents to join our awesome team.

Let’s make amazing games and fantastical multiverses together!

Disclaimer:

These are a work-in-progress (WIP) updates and will be subjected to game design changes over time.

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April 2022 Dev Update — “Bull-ish” was originally published in SIPHER on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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