Star Atlas & Aephia Industries 2021— The Year In Review
Those of you who were in the right place, at the right time, could have seen a bright new star emerge in the gaming/crypto firmament. On January 15th, 2021 the team behind Star Atlas publicly unveiled their ambitions, publishing an article that revealed the first details on their game and why they chose the Solana blockchain as their crypto-home. This piece of prose also contained a link to their whitepaper, which would serve for many months as the must-read for any new recruits.
Now that we are wrapping up 2021, earning our first ATLAS with the SCORE module, it’s a good time to pause and take a look back over our shoulder. As one of the founders of Aephia Industries, I would like to run you through some of my highlights and lowlights concerning Star Atlas this past year, while also, of course, looking back at Aephia Industries’ place in it.
This will be a long read... so relax, pour yourself another drink, grab your favorite snacks and make sure you are seated comfortably!
Star Atlas — The Good
Looking at Star Atlas, there were a great many highlights in the past year. The ball (obviously) started rolling slowly, but towards the end of the year, big events were launching in rapid succession! I could talk for quite a while on Rebirth, the IDO, the launch of the Galactic Marketplace, Faction selection, or SCORE. I could for sure dedicate a lengthy separate article to the GAO and its ship sales. I hope the team will do a more complete write-up on their first year because to prevent this article from turning into a book, I will not do so here. Instead, I have chosen to highlight two aspects that I want to compliment the team on. These heavily focus on the community, but that will be no surprise for those of you who know me.
Community-centered Development
If you are going to develop a AAA game, and you want to start gathering a loyal fanbase before development has (more or less) even started, you know you will have quite a few challenges ahead of you.
To keep their early community engaged the team made three, in my opinion, very smart moves:
Modular development
First off, they opted to develop the game in an agile fashion, planning to release one module after another until their full vision would be gamified. This practice (perhaps inspired by that other big title in this space — Star Citizen) should result in the community being able to get their hands on some of the aspects of the game early on. Instead of having to wait a long time (5–8 years have been mentioned) for the game’s completion, they would be able to get their first taste within 1-2 years.
Mini-game
Now two years is still a long time to wait of course. Additionally, that first taste might leave the alpha testers wanting more, succeeding in only increasing their enthusiasm and thirst for more. And modular or not, the development of a huge Triple-A game takes a lot of time. That is all to say that there will be a substantial amount of downtime between most subsequent modules.
So the next smart thing the team decided upon was to create a mini/browser game that would be playable within the first year. This should allow the community to start earning ATLAS a good while before the first module for their Unreal Engine 5-game (UE5) would be released.
The earliest supporters of Star Atlas came from the crypto-community and most of these individuals would likely not choose to be identified as “traditional” gamers. Star Atlas is a crypto-project as much as it is a Triple-A game, and things are moving at break-neck speed in the crypto-world. That meant that the team needed to find a way to reward their early investors sooner rather than later, to keep them interested and supportive.
Creating a browser game provided the developers with a way to pull this off, allowing them to focus first on an earnings module while postponing more involved gameplay to a later date. It looks like the team originally had more ambitious plans they had to backtrack on, but — because this mini-game is simpler to develop — they could pivot and choose this new route when the need presented itself.
This came with the additional important benefit that they could start their work on the most challenging aspect of their project, the UE5 experience, much more like a traditional game. The mini-game liberated them from the need to first deliver a player-income-generating module in full 3D, which would no doubt have taken a long time to accomplish. The reason for this of course being that booting up the game and finding yourself presented with a few 2D menu screens to enlist your ships, would no doubt be considered a very disappointing experience. The subsequent backlash would be easy to predict. In general, people tend to have a lot fewer expectations from a browser experience and on occasion, the team did try to temper these as well.
An additional important benefit from this 2-pronged development approach — working side-by-side on the mini-game and full 3D game — is that it allows the team to develop both products in such a way that the two synergize. If you take a look at their roadmap, you can see they planned all of this out so that the early modules of the Unreal-based game will complement the mini-game experience. Only much later will there be a need to copy elements (and improve them 100-fold) from the mini-game to the full game.
![The Heart of Star Atlas [Rebirth poster #2]](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:2000/format:webp/1*GcEgK-PMQxnaa1v8wyrz2A.jpeg)
Rebirth
Finally, a full year is still a long time to keep the community reprieved from anything material. Seeing as their early supporters would no doubt be primarily crypto-minded people, the team planned to launch an NFT-campaign early on to build momentum and reward their early following.
Instead of selling some static 2D art pieces, the team elevated this whole concept by including original soundtracks — produced by popular EDM producers — and augmented reality (AR) experience. They termed these NFT’s meta-posters and sold one variant per week over 14 weeks (infinite supply, time-limited). A smart reward structure laid on top — you would earn more assets, the more subsequent posters you owned— combined with a doubling the price of every subsequent poster, was enough reason for many people to come and have a look.
Originally the mini-game was forecasted to launch on the heels of the Rebirth campaign’s conclusion, but this proved an impossible timeline for the team. However, the momentum generated by the Rebirth campaign and subsequent events occurring during the second half of the year (e.g. Rebirth rewards airdrop, IDO, the launch of the Galactic Marketplace, and of course the GAO) proved enough for most supporters to stay put and wait for more to come.
In Sync
There is a whole lot more to say about these three projects, but let’s wrap this part up with an observation. This 3-pronged approach to building and engaging the community is perfectly synced to the default development cycle of a game. Early on development kicks off by (among other things) creating concept art and fleshing out the story. The Rebirth campaign utilized both right away, using art and pieces of the background story in the creation of the meta-posters. The same goes for SCORE (or really the whole Galactic Marketplace), which launched using more of both. Something which was possible exactly because it is a strictly 2D experience (for now at least). And finally, later on — when the 3D models are ready — the first module of the 3D game can be released showing them off.
As a final note on this topic, I am well aware there exist a whole bunch of additional reasons for the team to pursue these three projects the w. For example, there is a clear financial incentive underlying the Rebirth campaign as well of course. My intent was not to do a full analysis of why the team organized things the way they did but to highlight those aspects I think are very well-conceived.
Townhall
On the 8th of April at 4 PM PST (0:00 UTC), the team kicked off their first Community Townhall. Since then, the team’s leadership — primarily Michael, often accompanied by Pablo — have made themselves available to the community with some regularity via Discord’s Stage Channel feature.
Originally this started with Pablo (CRO) and Michael (CEO) sharing their vision for the game, looking back on past events, and occasionally pulling someone from the audience up to ask them a question. Later on, Santi (Community Manager) would take over these duties from Pablo and the focus shifted more towards answering community questions.
The early Townhalls occurred roughly every week. However, after having organized a few of them, the team announced to scale this effort back to once every other week to save some time for other important duties. In practice, however, it looks like the team decided on a weekly basis if another Townhall seems warranted (and possible) or not.
These Townhalls, combined with the impressive amount of interviews Michael keeps doing and the foundation channel on Discord, really provide a near-unprecedented level of access to the leadership team. That goes a long, long way in keeping the community happy, by addressing concerns early on and squashing potential explosive situations before they can get out of hand. It also instills a higher level of confidence in the team and the team’s ability to execute on their vision.
Star Atlas — The Less Good
At Aephia Industries we are big fans of Star Atlas and believe in the team’s vision and the project’s tremendous potential. That said, we are not a collective of starstruck fanboys. We keep a close, critical eye on everything the team says and — most importantly — does. We have no qualms with voicing our discomfort with the team’s decisions if we think there is cause to do so. To the team’s credit, most of the bigger issues were quickly corrected/resolved after the community voiced their displeasure — like with the Armstrong rewards and FIRMAM3NTAL collection. Unfortunately, one sore point remains to this day, where the team even decided to double down on it instead. I am of course talking about the alternate — originally unpublished — route for whales to buy NFT assets from the team directly (some call these “backroom-deals”), allowing them to circumvent the marketplace and purchase NFT’s at origination price.
A Bumpy Ride
The past year the team had the unfortunate tendency to overpromise and underdeliver. The release date and feature set of the first version of the mini-game were scaled back dramatically, ultimately resulting in the launch of a pretty barebones SCORE-module a week before Christmas.
Personally, I chalk this up to enthusiasm combined with (at least Michael’s) inexperience with (game) development on this scope and magnitude. Contrary to what people might expect, this did not cause us to lose faith in the team’s ability to deliver. Passion goes a long way to bring a project to completion and so far the team seems to positively radiate passion for this metaverse they’re building. Additionally, the whole chain of delays did not come across as purposeful misdirection. No doubt they suffered at least as much from all of this as we, their community, did. Both of us had to go through this rough patch (losing a few people — including some passionate OG’s — along the way), but we emerged a little stronger than before... and with a much more realistic looking roadmap ;-)
Enough on Star Atlas for now though, let’s move on to Aephia Industries.
Aephia 2021
Early June, Prometheus and I connected and we started conceptualizing how a different kind of guild (aka DAC) could look like. At this point in time, there was really only one other guild — the Interstellar Alliance (IA) — and we both realized that if their growth was to remain uncontested, then sooner or later they would have grown so large it would hurt the gameplay experience of those not part of it.
In a perfect metaverse, no guild would be so big as to completely dominate it.
Additionally, both having had a brief experience in IA and realizing we did not like everything we saw, we decided to do things differently from the very beginning. So we brainstormed, discussed, and prepared, until more than a month later, on July 18th, we publically launched Aephia Industries.
Aephia Station
A week later we launched the first episode of Aephia Station, in which we interviewed Santi and discussed game mechanics among the two of us. We also encouraged audience members to jump in and ask us their questions.
Early on in the community’s existence, there were not many community-made shows where the deeper layers of the game were discussed. So right after we launched Aephia, we decided to jump into this glaring gap and host a show of ourselves, which we dubbed Aephia Station — at the end of the metaverse.
However, as Aephia was growing pretty quickly we found ourselves suddenly swamped with requests from members that wanted to learn more about us, forcing us to re-route our energy towards member-only meetings and to engage more directly with our own community.
We did manage to squeeze in a second episode of Aephia Station a month later, but after that, the show went on a long hiatus, which is still ongoing.
Fortunately, other members from the global community stepped up afterward, and their efforts have superseded ours. I want to specifically highlight the Metaverse Nomads (produced by the ROME guild) who are hosting a weekly show in which they discuss Star Atlas (plus other P2E games), and the Twitter Space sessions hosted by Ashes (also known as HippoCryptic), who is looking specifically to bring together as many guild leaders as possible to discuss the game and inform her listeners.
Multi-faction
Originally we anticipated that the DAC registration would become a reality in 2021. Some of our plans depended on its exact implementation, leading to these having to be put on hold. A good example of why this matters: Originally the team did not envision the possibility for DAC’s to create their own Solana (SPL) based token and integrate it within the game. They did however like the idea and a few months later it was revealed that DAC’s would get the option to mint their own tokens in-game. By then we had prepared for both scenarios, but there were more moving parts that needed to solidify.
An equally impactful part of this equation was the team’s decision to restrict DAC registration to a single faction. Originally this was part of their vision, but after a few months, they let us know that they were contemplating allowing a DAC to be part of multiple factions instead. In the end, however, the team decided to stick to its original vision.
This led directly to our decision to have Aephia Industries establish a presence in all three factions. Since we publicized these plans, quite a few other DAC’s have followed suit or are thinking about moving in this direction. It will be interesting to see if this will have any effects on the game’s implementation.
A Sense of Realism
While quite a few of the other, bigger guilds seemed eager to jump on popular bandwagons, launching tokens & NFT’s, publishing “white papers”, or promoting their highly elaborate plans for how to monetize certain aspects of gameplay, we are quite happy we managed to resist the temptation to jump on these wagons prematurely.
We pride ourselves on being realistic. There is no game yet, let alone a metaverse. The most crucial game mechanics are still in flux and most of them are not even in development yet. Furthermore, it is completely unclear how a DAC will function in the Star Atlas metaverse.
We will do most of the aforementioned things as well, but in due time, when we know we can do a good job that synergizes with the game. We don’t see ourselves as some sort of NFT project, so we don’t act like one.
That same realism guided us with some other decisions we took as well. We are not buying members by promising newcomers a chance to win something. We have no referral system in place to reward aggressive recruitment, nor do we give you something for the simple act of joining us. And there are clear reasons for this.
We are building a long-lasting corporation in the metaverse, instead of trying to make a quick buck by organizing a one-off event like some concert.
Of course, we realize that this more down-to-earth stance is costing us potential members. Especially crypto-enthusiasts are easily drawn by token releases and they still represent the majority in this early community.
Despite this, we have been quite successful in growing our member count to over 1500 members in less than 6 months. We managed to do this primarily by giving back to the community, both our own and the greater Star Atlas community as a whole.
Community First
In addition to the weekly meetings where we primarily answer questions from our member base, there is a ton of information shared within the confines of our private Discord channels. This information has led quite a few of our members to improve their total asset value, if not to better understand what DeFi is all about.
Next to that, we released a lot of information to the entirety of the Star Atlas community. To name a few examples:
- On August 13th, we launched the unofficial Star Atlas wiki — The first public source of information gathered by community members!
- Before faction selection (registration) went live, we published a comprehensive guide on the various factions and considerations. To this date, it is our most popular Medium article by far.
- For SCORE, we created a complete guide, detailing every facet of it to get people up and running quickly.
- We publish a weekly newsletter, summarizing the news items for that week.
A few months ago, we also launched our website, where we report on the latest Star Atlas news, provide popular tools to determine which ships to invest in, and offer several additional, shorter guides to bring everyone up to speed. A big shout-out to our Sensei Yamura for coordinating all of this, and building out our presence on Web2!
We are also home to Metaverse Explorer, a crypto-savvy influencer who is often reporting on Star Atlas and helping newcomers find their footing.
Finally, on September 9th, we launched the first-ever Star Atlas story writing competition together with our friends from Grape. It was a tremendous success, resulting in 25 submissions of which the community selected the 10 finalists. During the last phase, a delegation from the Star Atlas team picked the final top 3.
Aephia 2022
As we are closing out this year, we are of course looking forward to the next. 2022 is promising to become a pretty awesome year, bringing us more modules of the Star Atlas game and a great many awesome events that have been brewing within Aephia.
For the new year, we are looking forward to growing further. Not just our member count, but primarily our structure, engagement, and our platform. We have plans for each of these and will divulge more into them when the time is ripe.
Our corporate mission is to construct and sell spaceships, but as long as Star Atlas is not there yet, we will be doubling down on our efforts to educate and help our members grow their Star atlas/crypto portfolio.
$AEP
At least monthly the question arose whether we were planning to mint our own token. Initially, we were somewhat reluctant to discuss this, not yet knowing if we needed to have a token of our own. However, over time the necessity for this became more obvious to us.
That did not mean we could move forward with this right away, there were a variety of external conditions preventing us from doing so. Primarily we were missing most of the relevant DAC-related info from the team, compounded by a serious lack of proper DAO tooling on Solana.
Game-wise, there are still many unknowns surrounding DAC’s, and we can only solidify our plans when we have a lot more information on how they are exactly going to function. We’re hopeful that the team will be sharing this when the DAC registration goes live in 2022. I would be quite surprised if we would not find ourselves able to introduce our own token in 2022. Especially as the DAO tooling issue seems to be in the process of being resolved as well.
During the last few months of 2021, we have seen DAO-related programs (smart contracts) on Solana rapidly evolve. Initiatives such as Tribeca DAO and SPL Governance (aka Realms — recently “joined” by SQUADS — one of the earliest initiatives to make creating a Solana DAO accessible to all) are paving the way for us all to really flesh out our own DAO setup.
The future is looking bright!
More to come
A lot is happening behind the scenes that I would like to share with all of you, but we will instead reveal these things when they are ready to take flight. Most important for now: It’s not too late to join us, join in on all the fun and prepare for a bright future ahead! You are still early!
Final words
There is a small truckload of people I really ought to thank for making Aephia Industries the success it is today. But instead, I am dedicating this space to a man who is no stranger to any of us, our Star Atlas Community Coordinator, Santi (on Discord known as Santiacc).
Together with the moderators, he has always been the first line of defense against community backlash, for example, due to yet another communication snafu or because there was a newly announced 4–6 week delay. There have been quite a few moments in time where I did not envy him… I am grateful he remained standing, even when wave after wave hit him, and I absolutely believe our community as a whole is all the better for it.
As we wrap up 2021, I raise my glass and salute you all. Here is to our wonderful community, the Star Atlas developers who are realizing our shared dream, and to Santi — our awesome community manager!
A Happy New Year to you, dear reader. Let’s make 2022 one for the history books!
— Funcracker (co-founder Aephia Industries)
