Battle Racers Update (August-September 2019)
Welcome to our Battle Racers Update! In these monthly updates, we’ll share with you the status of the game and how development is going. For this August-September joint update, you’ll get the latest on our game and website development, plus the launch date for parts trading.
Build update: Preparing for Decentraland’s launch
We’ve been quiet on Medium as both our game development and website teams have been on overdrive! Since our last update, Decentraland has started inviting players to their closed beta. These World Explorers have early access to the platform and can explore the virtual world freely. If you’re an Explorer, you might have already seen the Battle Racers arena at (66,-21). They promise to bring in more players soon. You can read about first impressions of the Decentraland beta over on Decentraland’s blog.
We’re still in the progress of updating the game to the new Decentraland SDK, which is being updated by Decentraland every few weeks. The gameplay isn’t fully ported over yet, but you can walk around in the arena and enjoy the sights. We’ve also spruced the place up with visual and sound effects and are currently working on improving performance.
Outside of Decentraland, the team continues to work on remaining gameplay features in preparation for launch. We implemented the medal system, which lets players trade in medals won in competitive races for reward crates. We also made a major change to how shields work: shields are no longer single-use (disappearing on the first hit) but now have durability depending on shield type.
Website update: Parts trading launch
We originally announced an August launch date for parts trading. Due to complications with tracking the parts as they went from Loom to Ethereum Mainnet, we had to delay the launch date several times. We’re thankful that both Loom and OpenSea have been working closely with us these past few months to make parts trading a reality.
We are happy to announce that we are finally going live with Parts Trading on Monday, Oct 21, 10PM GMT+8 (10AM EST; 4PM CET)!
Here’s a timeline of events for the parts trading development and the issues we faced along the way:
- We worked on cleaning up the process of sending parts/tokens to the ETH mainnet and dealing with contract security, while also fleshing out the front-end. We finished all the features of parts trading by end of August.
- During our staged tests, we discovered issues when moving parts from Loom to Ethereum. They were caused by unhandled errors for transaction-related actions (e.g. transaction timeouts, connectivity), and could result in the part being stuck in limbo
- We continued fixing these issues through September and October. While testing, we encountered some unforeseen crashes. We asked for more time from the community so we could test our solutions; testing is the most time-consuming part for us (and also the most important)
- Most recently, we encountered an issue where our event listener for Ethereum wasn’t catching the events. The cause was with the provider we were using to initialize web3. The event listener is used to update the state of the part tokens in our cache, which is used as the main data source of user inventory on the site. Without this, the parts listed in the user’s inventory would be inaccurate
Our goal is to launch parts trading from Loom to Mainnet/OpenSea as soon as possible, with the reverse (moving parts from OpenSea back to Loom) as our next task. We ask for a little bit more patience from our community (which has been incredibly supportive thus far). We would rather launch late but smooth-sailing rather than on time and buggy!
Have any questions on parts trading? Join us on Discord for real-time updates, and head over to the #marketplace to see which parts other racers are planning to trade!
Press and events roundup
Here’s what’s been happening with Battle Racers online and around the world:
- August 31: Legendary part #21 has been found by Chris Bell!
- August 31: XAYA gave away three Silver crates as part of their Taurion competition
- August 29: The ConsenSys Philippines team dropped by the Altitude Games office and played Battle Racers with us!
- August 18: Battle Racers was part of NFTlondonUK’s crypto picnic at HIghbury Fields, where attendees could play a beta build
- August 6: DGaming — GIVEAWAY: Featuring Decentraland, Chainbreakers, Battleracers & Blockchain Cuties Universe — We joined fellow Decentraland games in DGaming’s awesome “AMA with DCLBlogger” giveaway. Congrats to zinkcity, mimichiel, and Motjaba for winning Silver Battle Racers crates!
- July 23: Our CEO Gabby Dizon was on a panel at Buidl Asia in Seoul to talk about NFTs with OpenSea, Enjin, Neon District, and Block Crafters Capital
What’s next: CryptoKitties sale event
As previously announced on Discord, we are working with CryptoKitties to bring you an exclusive sale event in both games. During the event, CryptoKitties players breeding Bionic Kitty purrstiges will have a chance to get a Battle Racers Kitty trick. You can use the trick to get a free limited-edition crate containing parts for the Battle Racers Robokitty car! Watch out for more details on the CryptoKitties sale event in the next few weeks.
Thanks for reading this month’s update! Follow us on Medium or join our Discord to get the latest news on Battle Racers. And please clap or share if you like this article.
Battle Racers: https://battleracers.io
Discord: https://discord.gg/gfEPSra
Telegram: https://t.me/battleracers
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/battleracersgame/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BattleRacers
