Dev Update — Sept 2018

CryptoPioneers
Sep 5, 2018 · 5 min read

Since our June launch of CryptoPioneers, we have been extremely busy with design, site updates and behind the scenes development work. This Dev Update will provide a look at what’s been happening over over the past 10 weeks and outline what future development looks like for us.

Roadmap Update

New roadmap excerpt, full version here

Last month we published our whitepaper detailing the vision of what we want CryptoPioneers to be. Recently, we also released an updated roadmap which breaks down what we were previously calling “Phase 3” into more specific milestones and also provides our target timeline for each.

Founders Monuments

Cats on llamas, cats from the future and even Destiny’s Traveler. Our Founders (the players who snatched up the first islands released on each continent) have been forever immortalized on Cryptopeia through their Founders Monuments. Our artists worked with each player to create a monument based on their own designs, it was a lot of fun for us and our Founders.

Founder’s Monuments.

Site Updates

Since launch we’ve released a number of changes to our site and the user interface, both to improve the experience but to also lay some of the groundwork for our next releases. Here are a few of the more notable changes:

  • Translations added for Chinese, Japanese and Korean
  • Optimized island card layout to provide better and more structured information
  • New fonts and color palettes for improved readability and consistency across the site
  • Revised topbar and footer for easier navigation
Before and after.

Marketplace

In addition to the site and UI optimizations, we also launched the marketplace. Currently, the marketplace provides an easy way to see all of the newly released islands currently in auction. More importantly, this is a key piece of infrastructure, as the marketplace is where our players will buy, sell and trade islands, plots, resources and more.

Marketplace — Island’s currently auction

Player Profiles

We’ve also expanded and improved the player profile. Now each profile has a public view that displays all of the islands owned by that player along with other information like the achievements they have collected. Player profiles can be accessed by simply clicking on an island owner’s name.

Left: Owned Islands. Right: Transaction History

Additionally, we’ve significantly improved the transactions section, making it much easier for players to fully track their bids, purchases, sales and refunds. With the launch of Exploration Age, Stone Age and beyond, this will be of even more use as the number of potential transactions for a player will continue to increase.

Tech Updates

A lot of the work we’ve been doing has been back-end and infrastructure related as we prepare for the next releases. Here is some of what we’ve done so far:

  • Optimization of world loading times
  • Update for compatibility with new version of MetaMask
  • Improvements to sign-up process
  • Refactor of code for better scalability and expansion for future releases
  • Design of new and optimization of existing contracts

Contracts in particular have taken the majority of our focus. We are going from our current 1 contract to about 15, just to give you an idea on how much we will be adding to the game with our next releases.

One of our biggest challenges is making sure we keep gas costs as low as possible on every single transaction, for ourselves and our players, so we are constantly testing and optimizing every single contract.

Future Development

Our next big release is the Exploration Age, where players will be able to settle new regions on their islands, opening up plots to be able to be bought and sold.

We plan to beta test the Exploration Age for 2 weeks starting on September 24th and assuming all goes well, ship it to main net following that testing. As we launch each stage to live, the next stage will go into beta on test-net. So for example when Exploration Age goes to main-net, we plan on launching Stone Age into beta on test-net. This means that players will begin to see new and expanded gameplay being developed and shipped at a much faster pace.

We are all excited to get Exploration Age out, but even more so for Stone Age. That’s when CryptoPioneers really becomes a game as new mechanics and interactions are implemented. We can’t wait for our players to begin picking up plots, gathering resources and establishing extraction and processing facilities as they start building their empire on Cryptopeia. Stone Age also opens CryptoPioneers to a wider audience and is when our early adopters will start to reap the benefits of owning islands.

To give you an idea here’s some teaser screenshots of how things are looking:

Unlock Region UI for island owners
Buy Plot UI for unlocked regions

If you have any questions or just want to chat, best way to get in touch with us is Discord. We share more frequent updates there and it’s where you can get information about participating in some of the beta testing for our new releases.

‘Till next time Pioneers!

Discord

Play now!

CryptoPioneers

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Economic strategy game built on the Ethereum blockchain by Blockplay Ltd — https://cryptopioneers.co/

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