Welcome to our 24th newsletter on Star Atlas! This is a weekly newsletter published by Aephia Industries, that is focused entirely on Star Atlas . Here we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits that were dropped by team members throughout the past week.
Roadmap
The team released a new Roadmap Scan, where they shared the current state of the team’s progress. Below we summarize some of the key points:
Showroom
The big news here is that the team has now wrapped up the prototyping stage of blockchain programs and flows, and moved on to building and implementing these programs. The core focus is connecting a wallet and using it for authentication. This week, they will focus on testing the wallet.
Galactic Marketplace
The marketplace program is being audited, while the team is continuing to build out the ATLAS staking program on-chain. Meanwhile, the UX is being tested with internal users, while the Front-end is ready for testing.
DAO
The team stated that the on-chain program is close to completion, which is good news! UX is meanwhile preparing to move to high fidelity designs, while the Front-end team has been busy connecting their prototype UI to the blockchain models.
SCREAM
No big milestones were reached, but the team is making progress in all production areas. The game design team has been exploring a rewards structure with the Game Economic stakeholders, and they will validate the playability of the game loops in WebGL this week. Also, UI design completed the SCREAM outliner, while the Economy team reported that they produced an analysis on a key feature. The feature itself was not disclosed in the report.
Other news
Timeline
Michael confirmed that the DAO and new Galactic Market will be released first, followed by the showroom, and finally SCREAM.
Showroom
Danny confirmed that two ships - the VZUS Opod and the Peace X4, will be part of the initial showroom release.
Danny (CPO) mentioned that they might hook up space flight mechanics where players can launch into the space flight zone from the showroom and back. However, there is a very good chance this feature won’t become available this year, as it is not one of the core features planned for the showroom.
Ships
Next Thursday a new ship will be made available on the marketplace, the Calico ATS Enforcer, which is a medium fighter.
Awards
This week the Star Atlas website won another people’s choice award at the 26th Annual Webby awards, in the Entertainment category.
Solana concerns
There is still a lot of congestion on the Solana chain, which unfortunately also affects people’s ability to buy/sell goods and even re-supply in SCORE. The team identified some areas where they could improve, and they rolled those improvements out this past week. The real issue itself needs to be solved by Solana engineers, however, and this will take a few weeks at the least.
Meanwhile, the team added a banner at the bottom of their website to indicate the current status of the chain.