Welcome to our 20th newsletter.
Development
Michael (CEO) addressed the feedback the team received during the previous weekend, which was that the information shared by them is not considered to be sufficient. To solve this, the team implemented a few important changes:
- Starting this week, the team will publish a developer blog that goes much deeper into the status of each major project they have in development. The first issue can be found here: Ustur Executive Surveyor Report: Star Atlas Roadmap Scan #01.
- The team is considering setting up a Discord bot that will monitor and report changes to their code-repositories and Project Management software. It’s important that sensitive info does not get published that way however, hence it’s is certain that this will happen.
- From now on, town halls will be organized “once every 3 weeks”, to stay in sync with the team’s development-sprints (a sprint lasts 3 weeks) and subsequent tech demos. The next town hall is tentatively planned for April 1st.
Michael added a warning to this approach, which he dubbed Radical Transparency, as it could very well lead to people reaching wrong conclusions, especially when they are not aware of how the team operates. A big chunk of the team’s work is experimental, so oftentimes things will change (dramatically) and some processes might even get completely reset. He stressed that this does not mean the team doesn’t know what they’re doing. In fact, it’s the oposite. The discovery and exploration phase is critical to the long term success of Star Atlas.
Assets
Players will be able to trade crew members via the open market. All crew members can be deployed anywhere. However, each crew will have varying aptitudes and these aptitudes will buff the rate at which they earn experience. So, if a crew has an aptitude leaning towards piloting, deploying that crew in said role would level up faster compared to other roles.
Showroom
Star Atlas just released a two-minute clip showcasing the Showroom Module. You can watch the clip via this Tweet. In this clip you can see a number of ships, including the VZUS Opod, Pearce X4 and the famous Busan Titanship: The Last Stand mk VIII. For those paying close attention, a few more ships can be spotted in the background.
Roadmap
As mentioned above, the roadmap updates will be replaced by a more detailed developers blog. The first one of these was published last Friday, listing the internal projects currently in development and their status. As a fun way of delivery, this list was preceded by a short story, into which important aspects of the updates had been interwoven.
The most important takeaways from this week’s developer blog were:
- Nearly all facets of SCREAM are in the prototyping stage
- The Showroom’s Art & UI are being built, whereas the blockchain part is being prototyped. Concept & Game design are done.
- For the new Galactic Marketplace, the blockchain programs are being written, while the UI is being prototyped.
- The exact same goes for the POLIS DAO
Motherships
The team clarified that the mothership size-class will not be player-created. This class represents the biggest ships in the game, and represents ships that are bigger than titans. Danny (CPO) added that each faction’s central space station is in fact a mothership.
The current design is that these ships will be stationary, or at least will have a very limited ability to move around. Portions of the mothership will be ownable by players, including habitats, hangars and commercial real estate.
Cargo space
Chypto (Game Systems Designer) shed some light on the way they currently plan to calculate each ship’s cargo space (in SCREAM). For this they use some numbers that are being lifted straight from SCORE, specifically a ship’s capacity for Food and Toolkits.
The rough calculation (subject to change/tweaks) is:
- F = Food capacity x 0.0006144 (= ATLAS price for 1 Food)
- T = Toolkit capacity x 0.0017408 (= ATLAS price for 1 Toolkit)
- Cargo “score” = T + F
The bigger this score, the more cargo space a ship has.
ATLAS Income
So far, all ATLAS that the team received through their sales has been HODL’d. There are no plans to change this strategy, but Michael did mention that they will have to pay taxes on their ATLAS revenue. It is very likely that the team will liquidate sufficient ATLAS into USDC to cover that liability, as to ensure solvency for the company.