Civitas Monthly Review No. #4
Greetings, future citizens,
In many countries of the northern hemisphere, August is usually associated with vacation time. Workers leave their offices to enjoy the warm climate, students have their last streak of freedom before returning to school, and game devs go to Gamescom. It was no different at Directive Games, with many of our core members from Iceland out of the country to enjoy some sunbathing before being once again engulfed by the northern darkness.
All of this is to say that August has been a rather quiet month on our public channels, but, as you will be able to tell at the end of the article, it only means we were busy scheming for an exciting Autumn.
Leaks to the next level
Since we publicly announced Civitas back in April, we have revealed quite a lot about the characters of Civitas but not much about its lands; this is our only major leak of August is quite significant, as we finally unveiled new concept art about the tower.
In Civitas, towers represent the centerpiece of each city, and their aspect will be influenced by the era the city inhabitants live in and by the customizations the subDAO will provide to it.
While developing a large-scale community-driven MMO is serious business, we don’t always want to take ourselves too seriously, and now and then, we leak bloopers and funny creations from our team. Such was the case with Bendy Snake Man™, an u̶n̶happy accident from our art team that got an unexpectedly high reception.
On the day-to-day side of things in the community, we have decided to enable XP levels in our Discord server. Anyone savvy enough on web3 communities is familiar with the idea, which is somewhat controversial as it often spurs meaningless engagement. However, we believe our implementation of XP levels has been quite healthy because of one critical difference to most other web3 community servers: levels are not a gateway to whitelisting but just a way to reward the most engaged users.
Sure, there are some attractive perks and rewards on the top levels, but you need to be a true Civitas fan to find them interesting.
As we delve further into September, leaks and updates on our community channels will get more frequent.
Meet the growing team of Civitas
At Civitas, we pride ourselves in being fully doxxed, which is why you can find most of the team listed in our whitepaper. But a list of names goes only that far in building trust, so we initiated the Meet the Team series to introduce you to individual team members. During August, we published two new issues in the series, one about our tech artist and passionate photographer, Ólafur, and our art director and multi-talented artist, Ásgeir.
And while many of our “old” members were vacationing, many new ones joined our ranks. Among them are some true stars: we are talking of people who have been in the industry for decades, working on the original net code of EVE Online back in 1999 or contributing to legendary games such as Dungeon Keeper and Black & White. Not going to spoil the fun, though, so if you want to know more, make sure to have your Medium notifications on.
Want to become the subject of a future Meet the Team article? We are looking for several professionals to join our team! Check the open positions on our website.
Community Spotlight
A chunk of our team might have been out of the office, but our community seems never to sleep! This month’s spotlights go to two very active users of our community, DimenoTheOne, and idioticsavant. Dimeno impressed us with his woodworking and painting skills by making some absolutely adorable matryoshka dolls representing some of the characters Civitas of Civitas.
Savant managed to equally surprise us with his writing skills by creating his own Civitas character, complete with lore. Maybe someday we’ll see community creations becoming officially part of the Civitas universe?
Our first “collab”
We closed August with our very first gaming “collab,” which was quite unusual given that it’s with a game made by ourselves. Sounds weird? Maybe, but there was specific reasoning behind this. It’s “easy” to tell the world you want to make a web3 game, but can you deliver upon that?
That is why we decided to introduce The Machines Arena to the Civitas community, which is what part of the development team has been doing on the web2 side of things.
While The Machines Arena it’s a radically different game than Civitas, we still feel it’s a good proof of capability as it’s built on the Unreal Engine (the same used by Civitas) and still requires quite the expertise to be an engaging, competitive game.
At the time of writing this article, The Machines Arena public beta playtest can be freely accessed.
What’s next
As our roadmap is approaching another major milestone, our marketing department is pushing hard to build anticipation for our new mint. Such pushes include our first NFT giveaway, which allows people following us on Twitter and Discord a chance to win one of the few Shaman characters left in the Civitas treasury.
We also have begun revealing the characters that will be the protagonists of the next collection, starting with one that should be familiar to the people who have been following us closely since the beginning.
You can expect many more characters revealed in the weeks leading to the new quarters, as well as live streams, AMAs, and new in-depth articles about several subjects.
Final words
As always, I’d like to end the article with a call to action for all our community members. The only way a collaborative-MMO game can work is with everyone’s effort, so I once again renew the invitation to contact me personally for any feedback or suggestion about Civitas. Tag me in our Discord channel, or send me a DM via Twitter — I always do my best to respond to anyone.
Until the next time.
— Giorgio “Error 404” Crosali
More info about Civitas
WEBSITE — http://playcivitas.io
DISCORD — https://discord.gg/civitas
TELEGRAM — https://t.me/civitasofficial
TWITTER — https://twitter.com/playcivitas
INSTAGRAM — https://www.instagram.com/playcivitas
TIKTOK — https://www.tiktok.com/@playcivitas
TWITCH — https://www.twitch.tv/playcivitas
YOUTUBE — https://www.youtube.com/c/CivitasGame
REDDIT — https://www.reddit.com/r/playCivitas
OPENSEA — https://opensea.io/collection/the-chosen-of-civitas
WHITEPAPER — https://docs.playcivitas.io/whitepaper/game-overview
