Vorto Platform Dev Diaries: Short-Term Roadmap Priorities

We are definitely welcoming the arrival of 2023, with 2022 now squarely in the rearview mirror. It is important to be able to see where we came from and what happened (or didn’t happen according to the plans), but more importantly, it is crucial to keep an eye on the road ahead. Even with this Crypto Winter still gripping much of the industry, the Vorto Platform Development team is doubling down on both the opportunity to come “buidl” with us in Web3 and also using this Winter to ensure we deliver on our service promises. Especially those with the fastest, biggest action-to-impact ratio to the gaming supply chain.

To that end, we’d like to kick off the new year with a renewed focus and energy on the engineering plans already in progress and those in our development pipeline sprinting forward. By publishing our short-term roadmap as a baseline for Q1 2023, we’d like to share where we are focusing our Development firepower at the moment as we work to close gaps on key requested features from both Game Studio (customers) and Players (users) alike.

Post this opening salvo, we will continue to provide engineering development updates as our own monthly DEV DIARIES for the platform infrastructure project. Providing a better flow of information transparency on our progress, delays, or changing priorities while allowing our community, stakeholders, and users to also “play along at home.”

KEY ITEMS ON THE ROAD AHEAD

We largely develop in a lean agile train model, iteratively releasing in a continuous mode vs. bigger releases. This aims to deliver faster, learn through an established feedback loop and thus better improve the service infrastructure offering. In some cases during the last year, the established process derailed certain development efforts due to scope creep or situations where supporting Studio Customer technical needs directly impacted our core features development timeline.

We now separate integration vs. core platform development to avoid crossing skis in the future. The development packages across Q1 2023 (plus or minus a month) will tackle a number of critical improvements and new functionalities in service infrastructure and tooling topics as below 👇

A New Web Site & Integrated Service Offering for 2023; We’ve kicked off the new year with a new look and feel by rebranding our visual identity across our service platforms as a whole. The newly launched integrated website will continue to evolve rapidly to support gamers playing titles on The Playground and an upcoming Developer Portal for a more semi-automated onboarding process. As the development team releases new functionality, you’ll also be able to see a revised UI & UX cascade seamlessly across Vorto Services as a whole.

• You can already see the first steps of this redesign at https://vorto.gg/

New & Wider Blockchain Integrations; A promise of Vorto has always been provisioning infrastructure + developer tools that help games launch quicker with a pretty rich and comprehensive Web3 backend at their disposal. This technical capacity allows Game Studios and Devs to rather focus on building engaging, winning games instead of managing the whole tech stack in an ongoing and costly manner. We continue this strategy, along with the launching of a few new upcoming studio titles that will further expose;

• Step 1 — Additional support for integration and minting smart contracts on the Polygon (MATIC Network) Blockchain
• Step 2 — Providing support for ETH extensible marketplaces
• Step 3 — Show underlying asset details & info (expose enhanced metadata to the in-game objects on the network)

Vorto will also be supporting real-time API in-game item creation (for resource collection, crafting, and other digital items that would be vital to in-game economies, but often digital assets which may be transitory in nature or “consumed” or “reformed” through crafting services). We believe this type of additional asset class (-ification) will benefit both in-game economies and players alike, forming a more robust asset-based economy as to secondary marketplace trading and in-game collectible actions or quests.

Wallet Connect & Web3 Enablers; We believe mass adoption of Web3 games should be led by fun first and needs to be “effortless” to participate regardless of your starting point as a player. Vortos’ mission remains to bring together these fun-to-play great games to The Playground, along with the power of Web3 asset ownership and management. Whether you are playing games to maximize your fun and or monetize your time & attention (or both) — we got you covered! In that sense, we’ll be supporting both custodial & non-custodial wallet solutions that allow players to decide when, where, and how to manage their in-game assets and inventory.

• Step 1 — is now further exposing “wallet connect” services, which in the future will also allow for additional seamless secure log-ins if players so desire
• Step 2 — will also include the ability to withdraw assets from your NFT (inventory) to non-custodial compatible wallets where the Studio game allows

Cash Out Services; Along with key 3rd party payment providers, Vorto will look to enable cash-out compliant services for players through an upcoming withdrawal mechanism on the platform. While this is an often asked-for capability, very few services today offer this in a “truly compliant manner.” We believe we must do this feature correctly in order to protect our Players’ and Customers’ rights or interests, as well as for industry credibility. This remains an important step for bridging the rails between today’s world and that of a future Web3 reality, where the movement of value will be redefined through the role of virtual economies.

Developer Academy; Web3 gaming success starts upstream with the need for really fun games to play (new, existing, and reformed titles). Vorto wants to help enable these Developers & Gaming Studios by providing them both education and the needed tools to jump-start them to the world of Web3. The Developer Academy (https://developers.vorto.gg/) will be an integral part of this puzzle, where not only can you learn how to integrate Web3 functionality to build up robust in-game economies & the whole life cycle of asset management but where the onboarding process to get moving will support easy sign-up, credentials issuing, test environments and even pulling new users through their first mints all the way to full Production integration of their titles to the platform. #PoweredByVorto.

• We subscribe to the idea of launch quick, fail fast, fix and get forward in the ever-changing market environment.

Operational Improvements; Vorto will also expose many different service support improvements for ticketing and problem resolution management faster responses. The Development team understands the importance of automation and self-service in order to scale, but at the same time, security remains at the heart of everything we also do. So safeguards will need to remain in place in many support situations, as self-service may sometimes not reflect industry best practices or open up security vulnerabilities, liabilities, or breaches unintentionally.

• For Studios, operative dashboards, basic service support, and configuration tools will be exposed.
• For players, Zendesk integration widgets will be used to gather info quickly and solve problems in a more timely manner.

GO FORWARD

Like many projects working through this Crypto Winter, Vorto has recently restructured in order to bring more efficiencies to our progress (i.e., fewer handoffs, faster development cycles, and a focus on the biggest impact development priorities). To that end, Jan Borgelin remains head of Engineering (team), and Warren Sample moves to focus squarely on Platform Operations as Vorto gets ready with various game titles moving to transactional business operations.

We know there is a lot of work to do in 2023 — and we are not waiting for the end of Winter to show progress, but rather rolling up our sleeves to better execute with haste to build confidence. Web3 is about improvements done together, interoperable, decentralized, and through building on the wins as they are delivered time after time.

We hope you will join us and come make some fun as the journey continues.

Get in Touch with Vorto

We always love to hear from game studios, players, devs, and crypto fans alike, so follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram group for more discussions about everything Web3. You can find more about what Vorto can offer your game on our Medium page or reach out to our team at hello@vorto.gg