Dev Update: 4/29/22

Entry posted by enjoi in DeFi Kingdoms News · April 29, 2022

89 views

Greetings and welcome to another Dev Update! The explorers of Crystalvale revealed three new zones this week and we’ve all been busy soaking in the sights and sounds of the Tavern, Portal, and Meditation Circle. Grab a beverage of your choice from Barkeep Enderdain and gather ‘round to hear what the devs have been working on this week!

Our Front-end Team completed integration and deployment of the new Crystalvale Zones and threw in a surprise quality of life update in the form of better Hero sorting in the Meditation Circle. They also wrapped an initiative to reduce the build size of our code by 75%. Developers will know what a huge undertaking this is, and it provides meaningful performance improvements for our users. With that update out, they’re now working on hooking up all the contracts needed to bring those zones to life and to facilitate the gen0 gene re-roll. In the less visible space of their updates, they’ve added improvements to the development experience through a new code testing system which will create more confidence in the overall codebase and in future releases.

The API Squad and Solidity Team have been working closely together to finalize preparations for Heroes in Crystalvale. As Frisky Fox mentioned in the AMA, we’re still hoping to go live on Wednesday with these updates if our internal and alpha testing phases go well. A single patch that includes a new Summoning contract (and an update to the Serendale one to accommodate the new genes), a new Tavern contract, a never-before-seen Hero Bridge, a gene re-roll contract for gen0 Heroes, and all of the API support to make these features run smoothly requires a lot of coordination to pull off! On top of all of that, the API Squad has been refactoring leaderboards to facilitate the collection of airdrop data and our Solidity Team continues to work with external partners like Synapse and OpenZeppelin to deliver cutting-edge products with top-notch security.

Our Art Team is still mostly working on pets. More and more of the individual pieces are coming together, from specific pet sprites and their animations, to backgrounds, to card art, to shiny cards. The sheer scope of the pets project will, we hope, be a pleasant surprise to all. We are, as of now, still feeling like we are on track to deliver pets as planned and that is very exciting! Now that a new round of Crystalvale zones has launched, that means we’re already at work on the next ones. It’s amazing to think that Crystalvale will feature so many zones in such a short time frame! There are only a few key zones left to go, so we’ll let you speculate on which ones might come first and how they might be themed both visually and musically. We would also be remiss not to mention the UI work in progress to support the new bridge, the entire pet system, and the Stone Carver, whose NPC is also entering the final stages of design.

Since we’re talking about the Stone Carver, the Mechanics Engineers have finalized the formulas for crafting Lesser Enhancement Stones. As many of you know, these Stones will enhance summoning by providing flat bonuses and growth bonuses to their associated stat. The Stone Carver will make them for you, but he’s a bit of an eccentric guy, so we’ll be intrigued to see what you think of him. The Mechanics Team is also continuing to refine pet mechanics and professions quests. There’s also a rumor that they might be meeting in secret with their old buddy Vendor Zada and teaching him some basic principles of economics. Don’t be too surprised if he learns more about supply and demand in the future. We always support continuing education and learning here in the Kingdoms.

The Task Force is still hard at work on Duels. In this card game, Hero backgrounds matter. We’re reimagining the card backgrounds as a part of the aesthetic of this game, and we have a side-by-side preview for your viewing pleasure.

In addition, the Task Force is also starting ideation on a new feature of a different type: an in-game space to display important information on login such as important announcements, known issues, patch notes, and more. This is very early in concepting and will represent a concerted effort across departments to maintain over time, but the intention is to recreate the “launcher” experience common to MMORPGs and MOBAs, so that players have one integrated space to get all the information they might need, however often they log in.

This wraps our updates for this week. Our Lore and Game Design teams haven’t been forgotten and they continue to work on their respective projects, but we don’t have any interesting and specific updates to share. You may notice teams and workgroups coming and going from the Dev Updates each week, as we want to share anything that’s fun, new, and cool while staying away from too much that’s repetitive or stale. We’ll keep iterating on this process and welcome feedback from all of you on how to do it better!

Thanks for reading, thanks for playing, and thanks for being the best part of DeFi Kingdoms! We’ll see you all next time!