Battle Racers update (January - March 2020)
Welcome to our Battle Racers Update! In these updates, we’ll share with you the status of the game and how development is going. For this joint update covering January to March, you’ll get the latest on the Decentraland build, parts trading, and an upcoming open tournament.
The update is divided into the following sections:
- Build Update
- Website Update
- Press and Events Roundup
- What’s Next
Build Update:
We are working closely with the Decentraland team to synchronize the performance of our Early Access build on play.battleracers.io with our arena on Decentraland. Following the treasure hunt event last February, this has been the focus of our 3D/client team with the intent of smoothening gameplay within the Decentraland experience.
Alongside this, the design team has been iterating through different options and scenarios of introducing the upgrade system — how you can earn the materials to upgrade your parts by racing in Battle Racers, and a few other methods — in preparation for the 2nd quarter of 2020, which is when we plan to roll out parts progression.
In light of this, Competitive Races has been intended to be one of the modes that will reward players with crates and upgrade material, and the team has elected to roll out this feature together with parts progression for a more holistic approach, so that players will immediately have a source for materials to upgrade their parts with.
Website Update:
Parts trading’s relaunch is just around the corner as we continue on testing transfers in the new Matic Network environment. We’ve had a little difficulty with managing to track states accurately and securely across the new sidechain, to Ethereum, and back, but we’re now on track with launching the parts transfer UI/UX this April 2020.
Development on crate trading requirements (ERC-20 NFTs) will follow suit after that, and then we’ll work with the OpenSea team on applying this to their market.
On other website features such as the Garage and Loadout UI, we’re polishing the UI and UX before the final development stage commences, and we’d like to show another peek at how parts can be arranged together before even stepping onto the game itself:
We are keen on allowing players enough options to see all the stats (with numerical figures, to be more indicative of a part’s capabilities) and to mix-and-match parts without hassle. The goal is for players to be able to save their cars for ready use in-game. We are going to continue working on both the website (assembling and saving a loadout) and in-game integration (selection of saved loadouts) of this feature in the coming month.
Press and Events Roundup:
Here are some of the exciting news and announcements throughout the quarter:
January
- January 1: We published our official trailer for Battle Racers!
- January 9: The first ever issue of Zima Red’s NFT Proof of Work newsletter was published, featuring Battle Racers and other projects in the NFT ecosystem.
- January 10: ZENZO’s Battle Racers Giveaway was completed! Congratulations to the winners: @Barnicl3s, king_dnk, Kiri7se7en7, techhead, SpencerVogel3, EvanBro6, and flipzide.
- January 13: Crate rewards were sent out to the creators who participated in the Season 1 Bounty Campaign and the 85 winners from our Early Access Giveaway.
- January 15: Our online suggestion box went live!
- January 16: One of our community members, toosadtotell, ran a Battle Racers ad at Sugar Club, a popular meetup venue in Decentraland.
- January 21: During Pocket Gamer Connects London, our Product Manager, Patrick, was one of the panelists for “NFTs Past, Present, and Future” at Blockchain Gamer Live!
- January 21: Our company, Altitude Games, ranked 12th in the list of Top 50 Blockchain Game Companies for 2020.
- January 21: We announced our development roadmap and it was shared by various media such as 0xzx, egamers.io, Happy Coin Club, and SludgeFeed.
- January 27: Community developer DSM shared a sneak peek of the avatar-sized Battle Racers track in his land Chicago on Decentraland.
- January 29: An early concept for the new Garage feature was shared with our Discord community!
- January 31: XAYA’s Taurion Treasure Hunt #2 was completed. Congratulations to Tendoz, VonMitchel, and vikki for winning one Bronze crate each!
February
- February 4: Last year’s CryptoKitties event featuring the MK Robo-Kitty cars was one of the examples of interoperability in an episode of DCLBlogger’s NFT Daily.
- February 6: Battle Racers was once again part of Zima Red’s NFT Proof of Work monthly newsletter.
- February 11: We shared a sneak peek on car customization, which included a brief overview on minting and recorded history.
- February 13: Battle Racers was featured on Chinese cryptocurrency site, Chain News!
- February 18: Our Technical Director, Paul, was part of the team behind Die Kitty Dai, which won the Judges Choice Award at ETHDenver 2020.
- February 20: Josie’s Yours Truly Puzzle Hunt launched during NFT NYC and we were proud to contribute some crates to the enormous prize pool!
- February 20: Decentraland publicly launched and we joined the massive in-world Treasure Hunt which lasted five days! Matic Network also included a Battle Racers showroom at the Matic Haveli! Meanwhile, CastleCrypto.gg made sure everyone was prepared beforehand through this article.
- February 21: NonFungibles.com published its NFT Yearly Report for 2019, and one of the milestones is the Battle Racers presale raising 597 ETH!
March
- March 3: Blockade Games (the developers behind Neon District) announced its team up with Claymatic and our company, Altitude Games, in building “Metaboss”, a strategy MMO that lets you use your existing NFTs in a week-long boss fight across the metaverse! The news was all over Twitter and was shared by news sites like BlockchainGamer.Biz, CryptoKnowmics, Play to Earn, SludgeFeed, and Token News Asia.
- March 10: Maker announced the Dai Gaming Initiative and gave a shout-out to Battle Racers as one of the games currently accepting Dai.
- March 18: Our exclusive interview with DappRadar was published!
- March 24: Battle Racers was mentioned in the Zima Red’s NFT Proof of Work — March 2020, and NonFungible.com’s “When sports go blockchain”.
What’s Next: Battle Racers Duel Cup Open
A new tournament will be taking place as soon as parts trading relaunches next month. The Battle Racers Duel Cup Open will be an open tournament for all our NFT holders, and will have a two-player best-of-3 format.
Registration will take place in the #tournament channel on the official Battle Racers Discord server. This tournament will be self-run, allowing participants to schedule their own duels once the brackets are announced. Each leg will have a dedicated schedule within which players can complete their duels. The complete mechanics, including sign up instructions and prizes, will be revealed in a separate article. So keep your eyes peeled for some upcoming announcements!
Thanks for reading our update — please clap or share if you like it. Follow us here on Medium or join our Discord to get the latest news on Battle Racers. And more importantly, stay safe!
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
