Axie Infinity: June Development Update!

Greetings Lunacians!

We were delighted with the response to the last development update and are excited to share our progress from June. We’ve realized that these updates help with coordination and keeping everyone in the ecosystem aligned with our vision.

June was an incredibly productive month at Axie HQ! This post will go over some of the highlights.

Axie Battles

We’re now deep into the Alpha for the Axie mobile application. So far, the Alpha has been a resounding success. Here are some key metrics:

• The number of Axie holders has grown by over 30% since December 19th (when we launched the Community Alpha).
• We’ve seen nearly 5,000 downloads of the application.
• We now have an average of ~620 weekly active users within the application.

In addition to these quantitative gains, we’ve made progress in introducing the concepts of play to earn, decentralized exchanges, and liquidity pools to our community.

Over the course of the Alpha, we’ve been diligently gathering feedback, analyzing data with the goal of making our battle system even more engaging.

Some of the main issues we’ve come across center on:

• The gameplay pacing being a bit too slow.
• The parallel turn system adds a lot of unnecessary mental math and calculations to mastering the game.
• A few unintuitive mechanics and UI issues.
• Energy steal limiting creativity in strategy.
• Hoarding cards and energy leads to too many “no move” turns.
• Cards with very low usage.

With these issues in mind we currently have a team of engineers and product designers devoted to revamping the current battle system. The changes will make the game faster, more intuitive, and better for streaming/content creation.

Many of the cards, especially the current popular cards will remain similar in spirit. The under-used cards give us a great opportunity to add fun, new mechanics to the game which should add utility to a high number of Axies. We’re also thinking about adding some utility to Eyes/Ears, as that adds another layer for innovation.

These changes are currently being tested by a small group within the Axie development team, which we call a squad. We will add progressively more team members to the testing and once we feel that the changes are ready for the community to experience, we will open it up for community testing.

Scaling Axie

The recent Ethereum gas congestion, while a good sign for the adoption of Ethereum and blockchain technology, has negatively affected the experience of our community and slowed down the Axie economy.

We announced our plans for scaling Axie Infinity in a separate post earlier this week. Check it out here!

Land Development

June has been an awesome month for development of the Land system! We won’t feature visual leaks this month as we’d like to reserve some of the hype for launches and many of the new visual/UI additions are in a rough/preliminary state.

Resource Gathering

We’ve added a variety of different resource spawns to the land plots. Different land will have different types of resource spawns. The value/utility of these resources will correspond to the quality of the land they spawn on. Balancing these resource spawns and drops will be vital to ensuring a strong land economy. We must make sure that there are sufficient resource sinks added to the system to prevent an oversupply and create opportunities for diligent harvesters.

We now have a basic UI for harvesting resources within Lunacia using your Axies.

Axies are now able to leave their plots and travel around Lunacia. We’re testing out the speed by which they travel. There is an equilibrium point that balances fun & economic considerations — we’re testing to see where that boundary is.

Crafting

Over the last month we’ve implemented the UI for crafting which will be a key component to the land system. We will have some basic recipes ready for our first community release. Make sure to join our Discord and let us know your biggest crafting desires!

We have some very basic crafting trees and upgrade paths for things like structures and tools (think hammers/picks).

Rendering Unique Axies

Last month, we mentioned that we were having some difficulties with rendering unique Axies on land. We were able to resolve the issue thanks to some nifty code from our game engineering team! This means that we’re now able to load your Axies on your land plots rather than using placeholder Axies.

Chimera Battles

Linking Battles to land will be a vital component of land gameplay. At the moment, we are hammering down the details of how exactly Chimera battles will be integrated with land. As we mentioned earlier, we are revamping some aspects of the battle system and are working through how this affects land battles. We also are intrigued by the possibility of collaborative and social quests & missions and are thinking about how these could be tied to Chimera battles on land for rare resources.

Community Release

Let’s discuss some of the requirements we have for the community release: Our number one priority is that it must look amazing. It needs to instill a sense of wonder among our players and attract our friends and family to Axie.

We then have some gameplay requirements. The essence of the gameplay should be clear and our vision for the long term should ring crystal clear. As we continue to test mechanics and gameplay in our office, it’ll become clearer when we’re ready to release some gameplay to our community.

Other Thoughts

We believe that recent trends in both gaming and Blockchain demonstrate the potential for our land system.

Building and gathering games like Animal Crossing show that there’s something innately satisfying about building a new home for yourself in a beautiful world inhabited by cute fantasy creatures.

In addition, the recent craze around DeFi’s “Yield Farming” craze shows demand for systems that allow users to earn tokens by interacting with a product.

See you in Discord!

The Axie Infinity Team