The Demo Cometh! Release Info and Retrospective

Hey Godlings! Your Faithful Bookworm has returned, and he hopes you all had a joyful holiday season and very happy new year~!

Today we’re ecstatically excited to discuss the arrival of Phase 2 of our Dungeon Demo Prerelease, which will roll into the full public release shortly thereafter. In fact, we’ve even got some great news for everyone — our doody devs have been working around the clock and we’ve managed to move up our production schedule for our Godlings! To wit:

Jan 17th — Planet/Star Holder Snapshot for Batch 1 Demo Game Time airdrop

Jan 18th — Game Demo page unveiled on https://marketplace.apeironnft.com/

- Game Client Download

- Planet/Star NFT holders who have undergone snapshot on 17th as well as official Apeiron partners can login and begin playing.

- Planet holders will receive an amount of game time scaling with Planet rarity. Star holders will need a Battlepass to add game time.

- Users without any Apeiron assets can burn Solar and Lunar fragments to create Lunisolar Battlepass (but will not be able to play until the 27th).

Jan 27th — General public release, non-asset holders can play should they hold a battlepass.

- To create a Battlepass, will need to burn Solar and Lunar fragments together. Each Battlepass gives 60min of game time.

- Leaderboards live.

- Next Planet/Star holder snapshot on Feb 1st.

Mar 1st — Season 1 Leaderboard ends

Mar 16th— Season 1 Leaderboard rewards sent out

We already have an FAQ on the demo that goes over details about how to play and get in — check that out if you haven’t already. In this article, we’re going to take a broader perspective, providing details on the leaderboards and rewards we’ll have during Apeiron’s inaugural season, some talk about how to handle the challenging final boss fight, and reflecting on the roads and choices that got us here.

Loot, Leaderboards, and Apeiron: Season 1

First and foremost: LOOT! When you clear one of the 3 Dungeon Depths in Season 1 for the first time, you’ll be rewarded with Animus tokens, the soulbound version of our future ANIMA token. Animus can be used to reduce mini-Black Holes needed during Celestial Conjunction (Planet breeding). In the future, after our token and game launch, it will also be used to pay for Armageddon (resets) for Planet NFTs. Please beware that Animus cannot be traded. For beating all 3 Depths — including the final boss — you can earn up to 500 Animus! Animus will be displayed in our Marketplace shortly after Season 1 ends on March 1st.

On top of the Animus rewards, we’ll be putting up our competitive leaderboards! These leaderboards will serve to record speedrunning through the dungeon. Here’s the details on how the timing works:

• The time players spend in each Depth will be recorded.
• Only time spent in battle counts, beware that battle time ticks during unit placement and in-battle pause menu!
• When a Depth is completed, the time will be recorded and displayed.
• If you die, you will restart the Depth — but your time will NOT reset. So don’t die if you want to get on the leaderboards!
• When you finish all 3 Depths, your total time will be the sum of your time in all three Depths.
• Players can reset their save at any time to restart the game from the beginning of Depth 1 with a fresh timer.
• The game will calculate differences between your best/worst times at the end of each Depth.
• Best times will be saved.

Those with the best total times will make it onto our leaderboards, with the fastest doods in the land winning fabulous prizes! Here’s what you can win:

It’s all to play for! Leaderboards will go live on the 27th. Please note that it may take some time for the leaderboard to properly show the top times, but rest assured that they are being recorded and will display.

Rewards will be given as above two weeks after the end of season 1, on March 16th, and after we’ve performed our anti-cheat and rule violation evaluation of the winners. In regards to cheating, we should note that any users taking advantage of exploits will be automatically disqualified. Additionally, the top 10 on our leaderboard will be asked to perform KYC to confirm their winning times. Let’s have a fair competition in the spirit of doodiness!

Dungeon Demo Phase 2 Prerelease and Public Release: What to Expect

For Phase 2 of the prerelease into the public release, the full Dungeon Demo will be made playable, including the dungeon’s monstrous final boss. You’ll also be able to watch a series of epic cinematic cutscenes that tell a riveting tale of doody adventure as you delve deeper into the game. Mystery! Danger! Doods!

A little more about the boss: he’s tough. His attacks hit for a lot of damage, and you’ll need to be on point with your Avatar dodges. On a more advanced level, you’ll want to try and control his movement with the use of your Avatar and Apostle skills. If he starts pulling out his AoE attacks, and your Apostles get hit, they could be put in danger, which itself jeopardizes victory; squishier members of the party like the Priest or the Mage need to be kept safe. But, since you can’t order them directly to move, you’ll need to get creative. Try and get his attention using your Avatar as bait or with taunt skills from tankier Apostles. The boss is immune to stuns — so those won’t work. Good luck!

Now, on a slightly different tack, please note that you may encounter bugs in the demo. And you might be thinking: “Bugs? BUGS? After all the delays?! It should be perfect!!!” The thing is, with a normal development cycle, you would 100% finish putting all the content and features you want into your game and then bugfix. But that doesn’t really work for us: we’re constantly updating with new features as we go along so that we can get it out the door to you as soon as possible. And every time we add a new feature, there’s a chance for things to go pear-shaped…

Some bug war stories: there was a build that we had where the Rogue Apostle seemed quite powerful compared to the other DPS classes. This also was the same for enemy Rogues — a Dungeon enemy Bood Rogue could absolutely murder your Avatar if you were even the slightest bit unprepared. As it turned out, there had been an error in coding the Rogue passive. The Rogue was supposed to have an innate 10% passive chance to critically strike on each attack. But due to this error, the innate was actually set at 100% crit chance. So Rogues were critting all the time. OP! But this also meant that it was difficult to determine the relative strengths and weaknesses of the other classes, because the Rogue was so far in its own league.

And another, from relatively recently: so we had just implemented the boss fight into the game, and our internal playtesters were getting ready for a helluva fight. Except, uh, the boss didn’t seem ready for the fight. He was in the game…but he wasn’t moving. He was totally and completely stuck. And it took around 3 days for our programming team to figure out what the issue was and fix it so we could actually begin playtesting!

So with this demo, you can expect a few bugs. Nothing gamebreaking, we hope, but something here or there. If you do encounter a bug, if it seems relatively minor, just restart your client and see if that clears it up. If it’s a major problem though, or an exploit that lets you zoom through the dungeon, please let us know! We’ll have a form you can fill out on our Discord to report any bugs you run into. Together we’ll splat ‘em!

That’s all we’ll say about that. In any case, we’re excited to see what you think of Apeiron’s first gameplay release and the strategies everyone comes up with to overcome the forces of Chaos! There’s a lot of different combinations of Apostles and Avatar skills you can try out. Still, if you’re scratching your head about which Apostles to put your faith in, consider a classic Tank (Guardian or Warrior), Healer (Priest), +2 DPS (your choice of Mage, Hunter, or Rogue) combination.

The Winding Road to the Dungeon Demo

So the time for the demo to fully release is finally here, so we thought it would be neat to reflect a little on how we got here. It’s certainly been a journey! Our tale begins all the way back in July, when we got our hands on the first playable build. For this first build, we were working with a partner studio who produced it according to our specifications. And while it ticked many of our boxes, there was a lot of internal discussion about areas for improvement.

LoreKeeper (Frank Cheng, our CEO) wanted combat movement to be faster, LoreScribbler (Gem Ng, our CTO) was interested in reconfiguring the codebase, and our trio of Chief Artists were keen on polishing up the graphics. So we decided to delay, which was a tough call — but one that we think was worth it, because the demo we have now is not only awesome and fun, but also gives us solid foundations for everything else we’ve got lined up over the coming months and years. And we have a lot of plans!

We’re so excited that this month Apeiron will be publicly playable for the first time, and we can’t wait to hear what you think. It’s been over half a decade to make this dream a reality, and to see it happening now…well, it brings a happy tear to our doody eyes :_)

Alright everyone, that’s about all we have for today. Any questions? Head on over to our Discord and some doods will help you out. And make sure to follow us on Twitter to stay up to date with all the latest godiverse goodness.

And as always, thanks for reading, godlings. We’ll see you next time.

About Apeiron

Apeiron is the world’s first NFT-based play-and-earn godgame. Apeiron will feature a unique card-based action-adventure combat system combined with god game simulation gameplay inspired by classic god games like Populous and Black & White. Players will be able to build up planets from above before descending to the ground as a powerful Avatar to solve the mysteries of the universe. Players will grow their planet to the point of developmental stagnation, then reset the planetary cycle via an Armageddon event to allow for even more advancement and thrilling late-game alliance level GvE and GvG activities. Apeiron will use a tri-token architecture, which means that there will be three separate tokens to navigate their ecosystem: a governance token, a play-to-earn token, and a premium alliance token.

Visit Apeiron’s Website | Official Marketplace | OpenSea | Youtube | Discord | Twitter

Edit: This article was edited on Jan 18th, 2023 with updates to information concerning the demo release schedule, access, and leaderboard.

Edit: This article was edited on Jan 27th, 2023 with an update to the release timing of the leaderboard.