Welcome to our 34th 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 the team throughout the past week.

Official News

The team released issue #8 of The Atlas Star, which reflects on all that went into the organization of the first-ever COPA event.

Michael (CEO) shared that we have more reports to look forward to. The team will release a full economic report later this month that is curated to SCORE. These reports are planned to be released quarterly with future editions also covering other aspects of the game’s economy.

Team

Danny (CPO) provided current information on the headcount of employees that are working directly on product development. These numbers do not include marketing, HR, and other supporting teams.

Product developers:

  • ATMTA: 93
  • Sperasoft: 55
  • Additional art & engineering co-dev and outsource: 33

Star Atlas - Concept Art

Star Atlas Branded PCs

Hot on the heels of the COPA event, Michael announced during the latest Townhall meeting that they are deepening their collaboration with iBUYPOWER and will start selling Star Atlas branded game PCs.

During COPA, the team gave away a one-of-one, custom-built PC to a member of the audience. It’s unclear what these upcoming PCs will look like, but likely there will be differences, to make sure the PC awarded remains unique.

The unique Star Atlas branded PC [COPA]

SCREAM

Chip (Director of Game Systems Design), confirmed that there will be guides in the form of documents and videos about what SCREAM is and how it works, when the game is ready to be released. Besides that, they are already thinking about tutorials & how-to’s, noting, however that part of the fun of playing the game, is to figure things out yourself.

Chip also shared that the team is working with restrictions to the amount and composition of ships players can have within a single fleet, for balancing purposes. This plays an important factor in how fleet performance metrics are calculated.

Michael, when asked about approving transactions in SCREAM, said that players should anticipate a high number of transaction requests. There are currently 12 on-chain programs for things such as movement, engaging in battle, and harvesting resources.

The team realized this would become quite tedious and burdensome, so they will try to make the process simpler, for example through means such as enabling an auto-approve function for assets while in-game. He recommends leaving assets on a hardware device. Alternatively, players can move assets to a web wallet that supports auto-approve, then play the game, and moving the assets back to the hardware device when signing out. This is clearly not optimal either, but it’s important to realize SCREAM is in the prototype phase, and a lot of things can and will change between now and the first release.

Michael also confirmed that having multiple accounts, as well as sharing accounts, is not prohibited. On the latter, he asks us to be careful as it requires a lot of trust. His recommendation is to wait for a trustless on-chain method in order to share assets, before doing so.

Companion app

Last week, the Solana team announced their Solana Mobile Stack and mobile phone, the Saga. Some community members were quick to ask the team if they would support SCREAM on the Saga phone, which Michael of course could not yet answer. However, it did prompt him to reveal that the team is conceptualizing a potential Star Atlas companion app.

Progress

For development updates, on the game economics side, the team worked on the risk evaluation of gameplay mechanics and is now determining game balancing tactics as well as contingency and scenario planning. Meanwhile, the UI department has been working on the Main Menu, and Settings Screens.

A more significant update came from the web team, which has exited the prototyping phase, and is now officially in the building phase! They are now working towards playtesting and validating gameplay loops that require higher fidelity.

The 3D model of a Pearce X5 ship used in SCREAM (WebGL)

Showroom

The team is finalizing the very first release (“pre-alpha”) of the showroom! The UI and all the visuals are done, the last bugs are being fixed as you read this. The final item on the list that remains is the wallet integration. Last week the blockchain team (ATMTA) has been preparing this, and this week they will work on the actual implementation.

As mentioned in last week’s newsletter, as well as in our in-depth article on the updates released during COPA, the Showroom should be released in July, with Michael stating that it will be one of the earliest releases of the 6 he announced during COPA.

Galactic Marketplace

The second audit on the marketplace contracts was completed, and there were no new findings. This is good news and could mark the end of the work for the blockchain team on this feature.

Over the last few weeks, the UX team has been helping out with the implementation of the user interface, but last week they spent some time creating new designs for the home screen of the website, by including links for the showroom module and SCREAM.

On the front end, they have successfully integrated live data from the chain, marking another significant milestone! The UI is now 99% done and the team has started design reviews. This week they kicked off the Quality Assurance process in order to gather even more internal feedback.

Finally the marketing department has started preparing a knowledge base. They also started recording how-to videos and have been preparing a campaign on the transition from the current market to the new one.

POLIS DAO

The progress report for the POLIS DAO project remained unchanged compared to last week. That means it is currently unclear to us what the exact status is, though the first iteration of this module, with the POLIS Locker, should be ready for launch next month as well!

NFT NYC

Although the team did not have an official presence at #NFTNYC2022, several team members including Michael were present for meetings and networking.

#NFTNYC2022, it’s been a blast! Thanks to the many fans and friends we’ve met there, including @KAI__HENRY from @FaZeClan! https://t.co/jytvlD8ULe

— staratlas