Welcome to our 15th newsletter!
Development
According to Danny Floyd, Chief Product Officer, there are no releases dependent on getting all or any ships fully flight ready before launching them. The estimated number of ships (around 140) is for the extended life of the product. They have a robust ship building team that they can easily put more resources into. Given that a web based, on-chain playable game exists, they only have to get to the concept completion phase of ships before having real utility. The UE5 portion of ships is a deeper and more immersive client of the same game. They have an aggressively iterative release plan and have structured the roadmap to allow releasable systems that are a part of the full game. Major releases should happen at least twice a year on this plan until complete.
Recruitment
There are now around 68 employees from Sperasoft who are working on the project. Additionally, there are somewhere between 150-180 employees internally and they are almost daily onboarding a new employee.
Assets
Staked ships can now be accessed via Step.Finance and are now accounted for on the leaderboard.
A ship’s crew will be able to be a mix of players and non-playable characters (crew NFTs).
The team teased two new ships that should go on offer later this week. One of these will be the Fimbul Lowbie (most likely XS), the other one has not yet been identified.
In order to prevent players from easily reading data such as locations of other players’ ships from the blockchain, the team is looking into using “Zero Knowledge proofs” to hash that data, which would basically mean it would become unreadable.
Legal
The team released an article that goes in-depth into when the use of the Star Atlas brand and its assets is allowed to be used in community-created content and when not. This is definitely worth a read if you’re planning on using imagery, logo’s or other elements in content you publish or even sell.
Showroom
The showroom will launch in Q2/Q3, and will probably have two ships viewable at first, with more being added over time as they are completed. Furthermore, Michael confirmed once again that it will be possible to look inside of the ships.
SCORE
There will be two types of story missions down the line: Infinite replayable ones, resulting in XP
“Season/chapter” specific ones that will reward the player certain items. These will be limited and their rewards will have their quantity limited as well, so as to not inflate the economy.
DAO
Michael clarified that there will be elements of gameplay introduced that will allow players to earn POLIS. This means there will be different ways to earn POLIS in the future, not only through staking.