16/01/2022
10-MINUTE READ: January Development Update
Key Points
1.) The Sky Mavis team recently welcomed our 100th team member!
2.) Progress on Origin and Land continues to hum along and we’re gearing up for an Origin alpha test launch in the coming months!
3.) Wen RON?
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Happy New Year Lunacians!
2021 was a seminal year for Axie Infinity. Over the last year, we truly came together as a community and a movement, which has provided us all incredible opportunities to realize our vision of an expansive gaming digital nation. Together, we will create an ecosystem that will allow each and every single community member to first and foremost have emotionally engaging gaming experiences, no matter their interest.
We are working our hardest to rise to this challenge, to simultaneously grow our capacities in game development, community engagement, core infrastructure, and financial empowerment. Let’s get into it!
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🌾 Land
We hope you enjoyed our end-of-year Project K update, but needless to say, we’ve been hard at work building in the meantime! Currently, the team is focused on building out the Project K trading feature that will enable players to trade various resources with one another. Just to give an idea of how much effort goes into a major feature, the trading system will likely take more than a month to build. Concepts and modeling are also in progress for various assets such as buildings and items.
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🌋 Axie Infinity: Origin
Axie Infinity: Origin (Battles V3) development has been pushing full steam ahead, with a target alpha test launch in the upcoming months. Here’s some more in-progress power-up art as well as new attack VFX! Notice that the facial expressions that many of said you missed in the last update for the current battles are going to be returning with even more emotion!
Also, be ready to learn more about the world of Axie with new lore that will be part of the Adventure mode. Here’s a small sneak peek… meet Buba!
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📈 Growth
Growth has been moderate recently as the community gears up for a flurry of catalysts and launches in 2022.
Our growth team is hard at work preparing for the launch of Axie Infinity: Origin. Origin will have much easier on-boarding than the current experience as players will be able to receive free starter Axies to start learning and falling in love with Axie before making any economic decisions. This means that new growth strategies will open up as the game becomes easier for our community to show their friends and families.
In addition, Origin will introduce new economic balancing features such as vertical progression of Axies which will introduce much needed sinks for the economy. We are working on both a technical builders program and a creator program to make sure we can keep building together alongside our amazing community. For example, we are currently exploring how to create a referral code that will allow content creators and evangelists to be rewarded for the new citizens they onboard. We are also exploring how to structure a grants system for Axie community developers!
Our E-Sports team is excited to launch a second round of esport grants in the coming days, stay tuned!
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⚔️ Season 20
We’ll be launching a balancing patch for Season 20 in the coming days.
We’re planning to release this patch prior to the release of the season to ensure sufficient time for play-testing. This should allow us all to catch any unintended mechanics and consequences of the patch. This means that until Season 20 is formally launched, we may launch hot-fixes.
Once Season 20 is launched, the card stats/mechanics will be static for the season. There may be extraordinary cases where a mechanic slips through but in those cases we will signal through our communication channels in advance and ask for community input. That said, we expect this new process to significantly decrease the probability of such a situation arising (this happened in Season 19 and we heard your feedback loud and clear).
This was the first round of balancing where we actively sought community input. We were delighted by the response and looked through over 40 unique sheets of suggestions. Many of the sheets were based on objective data and showed a commitment to the best interest of the game. Others were less polished but were fun to look at nonetheless! We see this as one of the initial steps towards bringing the community closer to the act of co-creation around Axie.
Stay tuned for more details in the very near future!
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Follow RONIN on Twitter for more updates
https://twitter.com/Ronin_Network
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🛠️ Sky Mavis
The organization has been working around the clock to grow our team along with all aspects of the organization. We are now well past 100 team members, all of them focusing on different projects such as Project K, Origin, Katana, and Ronin. In particular, over the past month, we have grown our art team considerably, bringing on a number of new animators, concept artists, and 3D artists. We are super excited to see what these new team members are capable of. Some of their early work speaks for itself.
