Welcome to our 63rd newsletter on Star Atlas! This weekly newsletter is published by Aephia Industries and focuses entirely on Star Atlas. Here we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits that were dropped by the team throughout the past week.
You have undoubtedly noticed this newsletter has been delayed for a few days. We want to apologize for this late delivery! Though the migration was straightforward from a technical perspective, our new service provider proved difficult to convince we were not sending unsolicited marketing emails to all of you!
This has now been resolved, so won’t be a problem going forward!
With the team still running internal workshops and planning sessions, there was not that much news last week. However, a few tidbits were shared in the foundation room that many will find interesting!
Additionally, with Revue officially shut down, we have moved our newsletter to our own website. While the older editions still need to be imported, this newsletter and upcoming ones will be available at aephia.com.
With that out of the way, let’s dive in!
Faction Selection: Take Two
The soon-to-be-launched PlayerProfile program permeates every single Solana program written by the team, including the (now legacy) Faction selection program.
If you have previously registered a Solana account to a faction, you have used this specific program. And as we’ve been told, faction selection is a one-time affair and can not be undone or altered.
At least, for now!
With the program having to make way for a new one, the team was left with a decision: Either automatically inherit the faction a user selected upon registration or allow players to reselect their faction instead.
They went with the last option, partly due to the many requests from the player base.
In short: soon, everyone will be able to re-select their faction! This means you can now rethink your decision and select another faction to call home if you want to.
It’s not yet clear when this will go into effect, but as SAGE already is built with PlayerProfiles in mind, it will happen around the time SAGE goes live on devnet.
Workforce
Michael (CEO) shared that ATMTA let go of 13 employees late last year. He estimates they currently employ around 90 individuals internally and an additional 110 through their partners.
As you might know, the team relies heavily on 3rd party studios to help them fill in the gaps, speed up development, and allow the team not to have to recruit at super ludicrous speed. On top of that, with development going through several cycles, there is no need to keep all disciplines around at peak numbers, and this approach means that they won’t have to let go of many employees later.
Danny (CRO) clarified: “These studios are like native team members […]. We fold them into [our] studio as such and break down those walls. It’s co dev not just outsourcing or better yet we all refer to it as team extension.”
The team is working together with at least ten co-creation studios, of which these seven operate directly under Danny:
- VertPaint - ships, characters
- Sentient Art Studio - environment, ships
- The Lost Pixels - ships
- RenderDOCK - animation, VFX
- Keveru Games - game design
- Chapter Four - audio
- Sperasoft - game design, environment, characters
SAGE - Three-Faction Combat
When two fleets from different factions meet, either can attack the other and -by doing so- engage in direct combat. When this happens, a timer starts running, during which other fleets can join in before the combat is resolved.
When a fleet from a third faction decides to join the fight, they will have to select for which side they will be fighting. Last week, it was revealed that every fleet joining from that 3rd faction would have to make this decision independently. This means that two fleets from the same faction may find each other on opposite sides of the battlefield if they do not coordinate their choice.
This is the only way in which same-faction combat is possible in the initial releases of SAGE.
The Future Of Web3 Gaming
After a long hiatus, Ashes (Media host) was back last week with another episode of her Twitter Spaces: The Future of Web3 Gaming.
In this 10th episode, she hosted a panel with other famous players in Web3 that lasted nearly 2 hours.
Ashes plans to go back to a regular schedule and host these Spaces every Friday.