Vorto Platform Development Diaries — January 2023

Welcome to our first Platform Dev Diaries of 2023, where we update the Community on the progress across our development short-term feature roadmap. A new year and a new model to ensure the Community is better in the “know.” You’ve likely heard the old philosophical ideal, “When a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well, we think development features work the same way. We want to ensure they are heard and understood by the Community forward, as we shout them out more loudly.

We’ve also taken much of your feedback and tried to prioritize key features in this roadmap that our customers (game studios) and our users (players) have been actively lobbying. Please keep this up, as our collective goal is to BUIDL together — and even if we can’t or don’t prioritize something, where we see common requests, this helps us to understand the market needs and how to best support our Community.

January has been a more singular longer development sprint cycle this time around (month-long). This is to put in place several key foundational items that will allow the development team to release at more frequent intervals as we fully embrace the lean/agile methodology to get features faster to market. So let’s jump into what we have released across the month.

Integrated Service Infrastructure to better serve the market

If you have visited us lately at vorto.gg, you will have noticed a fresh new look and feel visual, but it goes much deeper than that. It is the groundwork for an integrated umbrella of service offerings (portfolio of services) that Vorto offers to the GameFinance supply chain. A Corporate marketing site, with routes to both the playground (games network) for players and an upcoming developer academy (for game studio easy onboarding to tools, infrastructure & solutions).

• In addition, we have renewed our ticketing support channel with Zendesk bolted on and will expose this in a more integrated way across the service sites and chat in the following step
• For now, players can always contact us at — support@vorto.zendesk.com

Web3 Wallet Connect Services

The Vorto player inventory currently supports connecting your Meta-Mask wallet to your account. We are expanding this service, using the more comprehensive “Wallet Connect” hub service(s) to offer a wider array of common player wallets tied to NFT asset management. This is another step in the Web3 direction to ensure a variety of feature functionalities shortly upcoming, including;

• Connection to a variety of different wallet accounts out there used by the Community
• Connect / Disconnect them more easily as players want
• And the big whammy we are all excited about in the coming development phase is allowing Asset withdrawals between your Vorto account & your personal non-custodial wallet (when an asset is permitted to do so by the game studio)
• The current implementation is in QA/Staging and will be released in next early February sprint, as testing is ongoing at the moment

You can always sign up or sign in with your Vorto account here.

Improved Payment Reliability

Being able to buy, sell and transact across the games network is a critical aspect of the Web3 gaming value proposition. Seamless, multi-directional, and reliable payments are at the heart of our shared goals to help players monetize their time and attention, and game skills, which is what they are monetising in the end. Vorto already offers a matrix of payment options (as one shoe does not fit all) from more traditional forms, such as credit & debit card payments, and more Web3-centric options, such as paying with different forms of crypto (USDC).

The engineering team has ensured redundancy (matrix of payment option providers) so that we are never reliant on a single point of failure. The team has also improved payment reliability (failover and queuing) so that when payment problems may occur, we can failover and help our users understand the problem on their side or overcome payment provider shortcomings to ensure payment success when expected.

Introducing Polygon Integration

We’re also very excited to announce our initial integration for our Studio Customers to the Polygon (MATIC) network. This is a further step to allow different Game Studios to mint their assets with Polygon and our continued pursuit to offer multiple-chain environment options to Game Studios based on the feature functionalities they may require. Polygon has shown strength in the GameFinance vertical, and we are very excited to open up our Service offering further to include their blockchain capabilities.

• Game Studios are already able to integrate with Polygon minting services via the Vorto Infrastructure and explore minting within our Developer integration environment via the existing Vorto API
• Vorto will support minting with Game Title-specific Smart Contracts OR using a ready-made generic Vorto template to get the job done
• We will share more info on this shortly as our first game title with Polygon gets ready to go live

The Developer Academy

We’re taking steps to ensure that Game Studios have all the tools to rapidly/easily spin up infrastructure, be provided tools to start “generating” gamified NFT assets easily, and can further extend Web3 capabilities to the players and Community in a super intuitive and effortless way. e.g., show up, play, accumulate value, and transact with others as you please or for your gain. No crypto wizards are needed, though we believe the web3 skill sets will be developing in us all going forward.

[Developer Dashboard Command Center]

To that end, we have already started to provide the toolset for our Studio Customers in this sprint to now enable;

• Developer “credentials” rights & roles access management to better control security and authorization features specific to the game developers vs. players in our single sign-on
• Support & separation of the Game Studio development environment flows from “Integration” to “Staging” (Pre-Production) and, of course, as they roll across the line to going LIVE within the existing “Production.”
• The rolling out of a Studio Portal as a developer dashboard, where Studio customers can monitor their service capabilities (stats & usage) as well as make different configuration changes autonomously

The wider Developer Academy’s goal in the future will be about education and exposing tutorials to help pull Game Developers through a series of events (like quests). This approach should help Developers get familiar with working in Web3. Developers will also learn and experience how asset-based economies can help them and their players to benefit from awesome and engaging fun games.

The Barometer

Beyond sharing more about the Vorto platform infrastructure & feature functionality every month, we will also provide a quick view tracker based on how we are progressing against the key development buckets (Epics) that bring together a much richer set of services to the community and the GameFi(nance) supply chain.

The Vorto short-term roadmap offers five specific Epic streams we are tracking, and each month we will update the progress until reaching 100% for each stream and the completion of the Epic. These include 👇the following;

1. BUIDL Together = Web3 Infrastructure services readiness
2. Developer Academy = Studio tools & service
3. Ready Player One = Gamer requirement
4. Virtual Economies = eCommerce — payments — monetization
5. Automate to Operate = Scale & love your customers

Until our next monthly report in February, we’ll see you out on the Playground!

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.