Following our most recent developments and in anticipation of upcoming events, we thought that you might like to have more details about our team, how it is organized and how we hire talented people to build the game distribution platform you are waiting for. In the second part, we’ll give you an update about our blockchain and the milestone we’ve reached!
Team Update
At Ultra, we rely on the Scrum methodology to maintain our pace and to create order. In a few words, Scrum is a framework that helps teams work together. Much like a rugby team (where it gets its name) training for the big game, Scrum encourages teams to learn through experiences, self-organize while working on a problem, and reflect on their wins and losses to continuously improve. It is a powerful methodology for software development which is both strict and flexible.
Most of our 60+ employees are developers divided into 5 main groups: the Blockchain team, the Client team, the Devops team, the Data team and the Core team. The Core team is organized in what we call squads. Each of the 4 current squads has various goals (see the details in the article written by our team two months ago) and the result of their work is presented in a bi-weekly meeting called “Sprint review”. We also have sprint planning, retrospectives, and backlog refinement meetings that help us stay on top of the tasks we are working on.
As you know, our objective is to reach around 100 team members and that’s why we recently hired Mathilde Kurzawa as our new Talent Acquisition Manager.
Her role is central to Ultra functioning well, as she has to face several challenges such as finding skilled developers for specific tasks and ensuring that our new team members will be integrated efficiently so our overall workflow is not affected by the regular cadence of hiring.
Our hiring strategy isn’t only focused on accelerating the development of the Ultra platform, but also about scaling our team so we are ready to fuel our post-release journey, managing this aspect is not an easy task as positions we want to fill are really specific.
On the other hand, Ultra is an attractive company with a lot of potential. The people who are joining us are passionate and looking for that once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity. The industries we are working in (blockchain and games) are currently the fastest growing in the virtual economy and entertainment industry, despite the various crises the world is currently facing.
Development Progress
This period is a critical one for Ultra and it increases the management and organisation workload. While the devs teams are continuing to add features to the Ultra Platform, we are currently preparing the ground for the launch of our testnet. Managing different timelines needs rigorous prioritisation, and we are pretty satisfied with how we’re currently reaching our various milestones.
Update from the Blockchain Team
Our blockchain team has been moving forward with the launch of our public Testnet. They have been steadily adding the core features that are needed according to the plan our executive team has laid out. Since we are creating a divergent and unique version of EOSIO, it is critical that we ensure security and performance at each step.
We have been successfully running an internal Testnet for a while now, resetting and relaunching that chain for each major release. That’s fine for an in development product, but not ideal for our partners who expect stability. Rigorous testing and feedback are the key here. With a keen eye towards measurement and verification we can ensure that the Testnet is a success, with the Mainnet to soon follow in its footsteps.
Getting the technology just right is our primary goal. This includes some core features that we are still keeping under wraps. These pieces are all falling into place and it is exciting to see it all unfold. Our own iteration of EOSIO will probably be the most unique blockchain based on this technology.
Our next milestone is focused on benchmarking and should occur this summer. We will be launching an internal testnet with many of the new features we have been developing, and then performing rigorous testing with our partners, to confirm that the changes we have made are inline with our expectations. Once we have that dialed in, we will aim for launching the public testnet with all the bells and whistles.
SDK Milestone Reached!
We are pretty happy to share with you some progress we have made with our SDK. One of the promised advantages of our Software Development Kit was to reach “Steam feature parity” for the first version. We are glad to announce that we have just reached this point and that we are currently fully integrating it into Ultra. Since we have all the Steam features in our SDK (leaderboards, rewards, etc.), game developers will now be able to port their games to Ultra without much burden. It is a major step forward that is helping us to convince game developers to also publish on Ultra and take advantage of our exclusive and unrivalled suite of blockchain features.
We are building a seamless experience not only for gamers but also for developers, studios, and publishers. We can’t wait to tell you more about our SDK in an upcoming blog post.
Get Prepared
The release is getting closer, so don’t miss your chance to get on board and subscribe here if you are a gamer and here if you are a developer.
We have just joined Blockfolio Signal, add UOS there and you will receive incoming updates directly on their app!
Also, don’t forget to regularly check our Announcement Channel on Telegram, or come directly Chat with our community or ask your questions to the team.
About Ultra
Ultra is the first entertainment platform providing all key games industry services under a single roof, accessible through a single login.
Built around our PC games distribution store, Ultra Games, our platform will provide access to countless centralized and decentralized services: Discover, buy, play and sell your games and in-game items, watch live-streaming feeds, interact with your favorite influencers, participate in contests, compete in tournaments, and much more.
Ultra has been built to provide endless value for players, a fair playing ground for developers, and a whole new world of opportunities for the games industry.
For more information, visit ultra.io and onultra.io and follow along on Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, and Discord.
