[Axie] October Dev Update
A massive collection of updates and announcements from the first AxieCon!
Key Points
The first AxieCon was a major victory chock full of new friends/allies, product announcements, and electric esports.
Origins gameplay and economy continue to improve with the launch of Season 1.
We plan on releasing a Land Alpha for landholders in Q4 2022.
Ronin has quickly evolved into a battle-tested blockchain optimized for gaming and we put forth a vision for its future at AxieCon.
As we catch our collective breath from the first ever AxieCon event in Barcelona, Spain, we wanted to take a moment to share our heartfelt appreciation for each and every member of the Axie Infinity community. Throughout 2022, we have gone through considerable change, growth, and yes… struggle. However, the AxieCon experience clearly demonstrated how this journey reinforced, refined, and strengthened our community in amazing ways. Our community is our secret weapon! We know that many of you were unable to join us, and given the massive amount of announcements and updates that occurred around the event, we wanted to summarize them here for you. So hold on, here we go!
Games
♻️ Ecosystem
Axies are the primary characters and the “keys” which unlock infinite experiences within our gaming ecosystem. Today, these fierce creatures that love to battle, build, and hunt for treasure are all uniquely defined by a series of Ronin on-chain genetic characteristics. However, our vision has always been that Axies become truly individualized through both gaming achievements and experiences, as well as the imaginations of their owners! At the AxieCon day one keynote, we gave our community an update on our progress in Axie customization.
As you likely know, all Axies have six body parts. Our plan is that each body part will have multiple levels of upgrades that can be unlocked through both effort and achievement. Part upgrades will bring new stat boosts and abilities, further rune and charm optionality, and of course new art and aesthetics! During AxieCon, we showed off some of the work-in-progress art for part upgrades, as shown below!
Additionally, we unveiled a series of examples of Axie cosmetics and accessories! We hope that community members will use these to truly personalize their Axies, and make them stand out as one-of-a-kind citizens of Lunacia. Players can earn these types of customizations through things like seasonal gaming leaderboards, crafting, or perhaps even as rewards to those who spend time collecting different types of Axies. We asked Puffy, Buba, and Olek to model some of these items for the event. Take a look!
As hopefully you can see, Axies will truly become one of a kind characters within the universe. Each of these truly unique “citizens” will live within a rich, well-defined world filled with deep narrative foundations, engaging stories and infinite experiences. This world will be the canvas on which your Axies’ story will be written. The universe will be fully realized by us all, each of us collectively contributing to the overall lore of Axie Infinity. We continue to work hard on establishing the foundations for Axie world-building so that everyone within our community is empowered to both contribute to and participate within the world of Lunacia. Thanks to emerging partnerships with community members and partnerships with seasoned veterans like Strider, we believe incredible things are possible. During AxieCon, we hosted a session on Axie Infinity world lore to give the community a sneak preview on what’s planned. Take a look!
We believe that all of this work is essential to making Axie Infinity an ecosystem that is accessible and continuously engaging to everyone no matter how they might like to play.
🌋 Axie Infinity: Origins
In the past few weeks, we formally launched the first season of Origins! This follows a valuable Season 0 warmup that allowed us to introduce ERC-1155 runes/charms into the game. These items add considerable complexity to the game’s meta and win conditions, and have been well received by the community. They also have introduced an additional form of economic balancing, and we were happy to announce that Season 0’s SLP burn rate (155 million SLP over the season) was 4x the mint rate (43 million SLP). These early results are promising, so thanks to inaugural game testers who played a critical role in helping refine these mechanics.
Season 1 introduces our largest and deepest prize pool yet! Over 112,000 AXS will go to the top 40,000 players throughout the season:
We are committed to producing an ever-evolving gaming experience around Origins that will surprise and delight its players. The game will host a multi-chapter story mode that introduces a series of protagonists in the world of Lunacia. It will host a robust competitive gaming scene. Additionally, as one of our initial bedrock ecosystem games, it will also be the inaugural host to our planned live operations model of game development. In short, live operations is an agile approach to game development which continuously presents players with events and experiences on top of a game’s core loops. We believe this keeps games fresh and exciting.
We were excited to announce at AxieCon that by the end of 2022, Origins will add “Contests”. In short, Origins contests are missions or challenges that players can complete to earn Contest Points. There are almost infinite contest possibilities. In fact, we’re hoping to work with the community to realize your ideas! Contest Points can be used to unlock personal milestones and earn rewards. Additionally, those with the most contest points can climb a contest leaderboard and earn even more rewards!
Want to learn more about our vision for live operations? Take a look at Vince’s (Zoser) excellent AxieCon session!
🌾 Land
AxieCon provided those hungry for more Project K info much to digest. Between an expansive presentation from our Game Product Lead Phil aka GreenRanger, and a live on-site playable demo of the game at the event, community members got a detailed view of not only what to expect from Project K in 2022, but what our project vision is over the years to come.
Project K will be a first-party core Axie Infinity gaming experience, which will serve as a gathering place for the Lunacian digital nation to play, socialize, and build. We learned that the initial release of the game actually takes place in the time before Axie Infinity: Origins, and represents the early stages of their civilization. As the community works collectively to build that civilization, Axies will get help from a number of other native Lunacian clans as well.
This 2022 initial release (which we’ll refer to as Phase 1), will allow owners of land to both gather pre-existing resources, and produce more complex items either by growing or crafting them.
All of these items can directly or indirectly be used to build and upgrade one’s territory, as each can be bought and sold through a sophisticated trading system called the Auction House. As a player’s crafting ability gets more refined, you’ll have the opportunity to give some of these battle items to other native Lunacian heroes. They’ll use them to hopefully win battles and reward you with both tokens that can accelerate the development of your property, and points that allow you to climb the leaderboard!
We’re excited to share our first release of Project K with you all, and if you didn’t get a chance to try it out in Barcelona, hopefully this video gives you a sense of the experience to come:
Our plan for Project K is to continually release additional features and refinements through a series of phased releases. Here are some highlights of planned future game features:
Socializing: community will always be central to the Axie Infinity experience, and Project K will provide our members with lots of ways in-game to continue fostering those relationships! In the future, you’ll be able to select one of your Axies and walk around Lunacia. You’ll also be able to chat, hang out with your friends, and play mini-games together! You’ll even be able to add NFT Axies you own and make them active members of your village.
Token Gameplay: on-chain assets will ultimately be a fundamental underpinning of Project K alongside the various off-chain items described above. Over time, AXS will be rewarded in idle combat as well as from beacons. We will also introduce a new Land utility token that is unique from Smooth Love Potion (SLP).
Delegation: our community has helped us prioritize features that allow current land owners to engage others who might want to help develop their land plots. This feature will allow land owners to select “stewards” who are eligible to play the game on their behalf. While off-chain resources will remain with the land plot, on-chain assets can be shared in ways mutually agreed to by both parties. We believe this function will allow Project K to be a more accessible experience in the short-term, while we build out further non-owner gameplay.
Non-Land Owner Gameplay: our vision is that anyone can participate in Project K. Over time, we will introduce asymmetric gameplay unique from the core experience that interacts with the Lunacian world.
Dungeon Battles: over time, players will be able to send their Axies to dungeons throughout Lunacia, where they will battle chimeras and advance the story. These dungeon raids also introduce party dynamics where non-landowners can help form larger groups to increase the odds of victory.
Our aspirations for Project K remain massive. Stay tuned for more information, or join the #land channel on Discord to participate in the community dialog! While the above is a quick summary of what we announced for Project K, it might not be enough detail for you. No problem… watch Phil’s entire presentation for even more details!
🌅 Axie Infinity: Raylights
We were excited to announce an additional surprise bonus mini-game for Lunacian land holders during AxieCon! Axie Infinity: Raylights is a relaxing, casual, and inherently social experience, where your land plot serves as a foundation of garden discovery and creativity.
Raylights has been designed in collaboration with Quicksave Interactive as a HTML5-native game, playable in any browser. Check out the AxieCon announcement and presentation below:
We are currently in final testing and optimizations. We look forward to rolling out Raylights to landholders soon!
Raylights is an important addition to the Axie universe, as we seek to create an IP that attracts new archetypes of gamers. Decoration and cultivation will appeal to gamers that are more interested in exploration than intense PVP combat. This demonstrates how the circle of gamers our products appeal to will widen with each addition to the Axie content universe.
👷 Builders Program
For anyone who hasn’t been following along, the Axie Infinity Builder’s Program is a groundbreaking initiative that empowers interested game builders to leverage Axie Infinity IP, build experience in game development, and generate revenue along the way! This “incubator” is designed as a tight collaboration between project teams, Sky Mavis, and the entire Axie Infinity community. Our community is a rapidly growing hive mind of rabid, committed game players from around the world. They’ve worked alongside these builders to influence designs, give critical feedback, and refine these games. We’ve been amazed by the results of this community collaboration to date, and we’d like to give you assorted updates on the 13(!) games in various stages of design, development , and broad release:
Axieology
The team recently released the first version of the game on the Apple app store! This is a tower defense game at it’s core, with ambitions to add additional gaming modes over time:
Defenders of Lunacian Land
The DoLL team has recently released it’s 11th alpha game update. That update unlocked a number of community requested features, including player profiles and unlockable achievements! The team continues to refine core gameplay from live player data and user feedback. Stay tuned for more information on upcoming DoLL community esports tournaments!
Inter the Dungeon
The team is deep in building and testing core gameplay after receiving really valuable feedback at the awesome AxieCon event. Here's a link to the trailer with some alpha footage:
The team also wanted to share some recent screenshots to show graphic updates being made to the game:
Lunacia Cup
The team behind the game is sprinting hard towards making an alpha game demo available to the community. Currently, there are team members building background scenes, music tracks, visual effects and much more! As you can see from the screenshot below, they are refining the visual style of the game, and if you didn’t catch our game trailer at AxieCon, take a look below:
Mech Infinity
The team is incredibly excited by the feedback received during AxieCon, and over the past couple of months on social platforms. In fact, some of these data suggest that interest in the game is outperforming many competitors in the blockchain gaming space.
The game is currently in closed alpha, and there are plans to release a public version in 2022. In the meantime, the team wanted to share some concept art for the game with the community:
Axie Brawl
The team is pushing towards a demo release of the game by the end of 2022! Take a look at the AxieCon gameplay update:
Axie Blitz
The team recently launched a pre-alpha version open to all community members in order to start tests and get valuable feedback from the players. Infrastructure tests were largely successful and the team’s focus is now around scalability. Additionally, gameplay data we collected alongside player feedback have resulted in some game mechanics adjustments. As a result the team is going to focus on new player accessibility, rewarding skilled players, and Axie class-based unique gameplay that allow players to choose a style of play that fits them.
Look out for a new version of the game with these adjustments in the next two weeks!
Run Axie Run!
Run Axie Run! is inspired by games such as Temple Run and Sonic Dash, and a heavy dose of Lunacia. The team is hard at work, and are actively seeking new team members with 3D modelling and/or animation/rigging experience. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, send a note to: zimri@axieinfinity.com
TactiCards
After a successful surprise announcement at AxieCon, the TactiCards team is now focused on building the digital version of the game. If you missed the full length trailer, take a look:
Those who want to try the game right now can download and print the prototype at TactiCards.net. Make sure to follow the team on Twitter to keep up to date with their progress and plans on upcoming local tournaments!
⚽ Esports
In the weeks preceding AxieCon, the community began to sense something special emerging within the Axie Infinity esports scene. Excitement built through a series of events and pre-qualifiers which culminated in highly competitive on-site competitions live in Barcelona. By all accounts, conference participants witnessed an incredibly exciting and entertaining series of tournaments that demonstrated the true potential of esports within Web3-based gaming ecosystems. Let’s recap what happened:
The Axie Classic World Championship
The Axie Classic World Championship featured a $500,000 prize pool and open qualifiers from July 28th - August 7th. Thousands of competitors were broken into 2 regions, East and West. They competed until only the top 16 remained. Each of these finalists received a paid trip to Barcelona, Spain to compete in the finals. This on-site tournament culminated in an epic main stage finale between Seb from METAT8 and Axie.gg's Thunderstruck. Perhaps a poetic sendoff to Axie Classic, the match went to its final seventh tie-breaking round. Seb used a “double scaly spear” comp with a mosquito bug on the back line, which landed a devastating critical strike turning the tide of the final match. Indeed, it was the “Crit heard round Lunacia!”:
It was a most fitting send off to the Axie Classic product era. Seb shared his thoughts on the big win:
Origin Global BYOD Tournament:
The Axie Origin Bring-Your-Own-Device Series ran exclusively onsite at AxieCon. There the competitors battled for $400,000 in prizes over 3 intense days. This double elimination tournament had a unique format. Axie trainers declared their best 10 Axies at the onset of the tournament, and were forced to use any combination of these 10 for every single battle. This means that competitors were able to see each others Axies at the start of the match and some were able to counter accordingly.
The Finals saw Spamandrice from Qu3st take on METAT8’s 1437. Spam had actually lost a battle beforehand so he was clearly determined to brave a grueling trek through the consolation bracket to make it to finals. The series started off with Spam winning the first two battles, but then 1437 won the final three consecutive matches to take home the title. Witness the final moments of battle below:
1437 was the inaugural champion of what we anticipate will be a rapidly growing and vibrant competitive Origins Esports scene. The room that afternoon in Barcelona was electric, and all who participated left with a sense of the emerging potential around this game. 1437 shared his thoughts shortly after his win about the tournament and the future of Origins Esports:
Both of these events were the centerpiece of a Esports track on day 3 of AxieCon. Additionally, we hosted world leaders in the esports industry at the event, some of whom shared their vision of Web3 esports. If you didn’t get a chance to watch it, we highly recommend taking a look at the fireside chat session with Jason Lake, one of the “founding fathers” of the Esports industry:
Last, but certainly not least, we formally announced the launch of Axie Infinity Esports Grant 3, where we are putting 160,000 AXS on the line to continue expanding the competitive scene and show our confidence in Origins as a serious competitive play platform. So what are you waiting for? Join the battle!
Community
📈 Growth
Axie Infinity: Origins has hit 1 million total downloads! The growth team could not be more pleased with how our community has been enjoying the recent updates and game improvements. We’ve now crossed over 4 million downloads of the Ronin Wallet, have 2.1 Million Axie Holders, and witnessed 750 thousand monthly active addresses for most of Q3 this year. We went over these key metrics during the founder’s Keynote at AxieCon:
To double down on our community-centric growth strategy, we’ve launched two key initiatives which concentrates on reinvesting in you all. Let’s check in to see how they're doing.
The Creator Program, designed to identify and support all kinds of Lunacians (artists, players, singers, etc.) has had a huge impact so far. Participating creators have access to special art assets, Lunacian Codes, and the ability to apply for grants! We’ve surpassed 2500 creators in the program, which means it’s the single largest Web3 creator CRM in existence. This is a testament to our community’s drive and passion as well as the tireless efforts from our friends at Qu3st.
If you’d like to join the Creator Program, it’s simple!
Head over the Axie Infinity Discord
Introduce yourself in the Creators Program chat (#creator-central)
Hear more about the future of the program below.
Our second integration, the Nas Academy’s Creator Fellowship, just kicked off at the end of September and the students are hard at work! Initial curriculum sessions have focused on filming, video editing, and thumbnails. We’re excited to see what the future holds for these talented individuals.
Transitioning to Origins Phase 3 has also been a huge catalyst, propelling us closer to our destiny. The ERC-1155 Runes & Charms implementation brought incredible variety into the meta, leading to increases in Axies bred…and of course SLP burn. We recently burned the SLP supply which was spent through the Origin Game portal! This means the SLP burned through Origin is now reflected in the on chain supply. Keep in mind, this Origin Portal SLP spend is specifically limited to Runes and Charms, not breeding.
If we include breeding, since the beginning of Season 0 on August 13th, we’ve witnessed a 12x in the amount of SLP burned to minted. 974 million Burned to only 80 million mints.
⚖️ Governance
The Axie Infinity community Town Builders wanted to share a couple of brief updates with the community:
Contributor Recognition Season 0:
The community recently ended the application period for the pilot season of the contributor credentialing program. As a reminder, the intention of this pilot is to start formally identifying community members who make concrete contributions to the community, and empowering them to begin participating in community governance process. Town builders are working alongside an early team of contributors (known as the Contributor Electors) to complete the community peer review of the hundreds of applications received. Stay tuned for more information and announcements regarding the inaugural class!
AxieCon:
Town Builder Artic participated in a day 1 AxieCon keynote alongside Jihoz and Syntax, apprising the community of the longer term strategy for progressive decentralization of Axie Infinity. If you’re wanting a quick overview of the anticipated steps the community will undertake, take a look:
Town Builders:
In mid-2022, 5 individuals (Odin, Artic, Baronar, freak, and Zee) were identified as community members who have consistently contributed to Axie Infinity, particularly ideas and/or contributions in Axie governance. This inaugural cohort of Town Builders has overseen developing community process, and are looking to grow their ranks. Recently, the Town Builders unanimously voted in Mystic from Qu3st and Syntax to join this team. If you are interested in being a part of this growing group, please reach out to the Town Builders directly.
🌎 Regional Updates
Our ongoing quest to introduce and welcome each and every person worldwide to Axie Infinity continues! Axie Infinity regional community representatives are eager to share a number of updates on what’s been happening since we last caught up!
Philippines: In partnership with Coins.ph, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the Philippines, we hosted an AxieCon Watch Party in Manila. Over 100 members of the community attended live, and the Grand Finals of the Axie tournaments was also shoutcasted live at the venue. Check out this highlight video!
Additionally Indonesia, the Philippines' good neighbor also hosted an AxieCon Watch Party at Lunacia Coffee, owned and operated by community member Papuyu! We saw dozens of Lunacians gather around and forge new friendships. Jiho also made an “appearance”.
In the days following AxieCon, Philippines Region Lead Nixtape was also in Bali, Indonesia, representing Axie Infinity in a panel about web3 gaming at Nexticorn, the largest startup event in Indonesia.
Shortly after AxieCon, we celebrated Axie Origins Season 1 launch by having a community gathering, plus the first Season 1 LAN tournament in the Philippines. Zyori was also in attendance! We had over 150 people celebrate the Axie Origins kickoff party with us, and congratulations to Hashekii of MT8, who took the grand prize!
Japan: The country cheered on Japan’s own YUU, who placed 4th at AxieCon Axie Origins BYOD series and competed against Spamandrice on the main stage. We also hosted a AxieCon watch party in Nagoya, Japan at a Spanish restaurant, where lots of community members joined the night for a nice Spanish dinner, a mini offline Origins tournament, and an Axie Infinity trivia tournament!
Axie Infinity also had quite the presence at the Tokyo Game Show 2022, winning both “Most Outstanding Game” and “Guild Award” at this prestigious event.
We were also glad that our friends at YGG Japan organized a booth and hosted an Axie Origins tournament at the Tokyo Game Show with Japanese top players YUU and Mino shoutcasting the battles.
Axie continues to make it’s way into Japanese media, as Aruchan appeared on one of the biggest and hottest business/finance YT channels in Japan. News Picks, which has about 600K subscribers, hosted our regional Japanese Lead, where he talked about Axie and how the play-and-earn movement is evolving in Japan.
LATAM: Continuing with the momentum of AxieCon, hundreds of community members gathered at the Axie Infinity Origins Booth at the Unified event in Buenos Aires. The experience was electric and exciting! During the event, our regional LATAM representative Lima and guild founders discussed the future of our digital nation in Latam. ¡Vamos por más!
Infrastructure
🐦 Ronin
There were a number of important updates shared around the current status and future of the network in a keynote presentation at AxieCon called “Ready Player RON: the Future of Ronin”. In short, we believe that Ronin has quickly evolved into a battle-tested blockchain optimized for gaming paired with a passionate community, eager for new Web3 gaming opportunities.
Over the past few months, we’ve welcomed a large number of new validators, and are approaching our near-term goal of 21. These validators include a broad assortment of Axie gaming community representatives, crypto-experienced organizations, and large-scale enterprise technology companies. During the event, we announced that Google Cloud is joining the network as a validator, and we hope this gives the community a better sense of the breadth, quality, and diversity we are targeting for Ronin network growth over time.
Our larger roadmap for Ronin was also formally revealed during this presentation, and as you can see below, upgrades will occur through a series of release phases that will progressively decentralize, scale, and load the network with projects both within the Axie Infinity ecosystem and for all new IP developed by other gaming studios and communities.
We’ve included a video of Aleksander’s presentation below if you’d like more information. We were also excited to share the good news that our continued collaboration with international law enforcement agencies has frozen approximately $30 million USD, which over time will be redeposited back into the Community Treasury. We anticipate this recovery process to continue for some time to come, and will continue to share information as we are allowed.
Since AxieCon, we’ve also released some core updates to Ronin ecosystem tools:
Ronin Explorer: we’ve deployed a new update to Ronin Explorer that includes long-awaited functionality to view ABIs and interact directly with verified smart contracts. You can access them in a newly added tab on the smart contracts page.
You can also now interact with any verified smart contracts’s ABI by viewing it’s source code and reading or writing to it from within Explorer. We’ve also added name tags for addresses!
Ronin Bridge: new user experience updates to the bridge help those withdrawing assets better understand pending transaction information. We’ve also included a new function that allows you to ask your friends to pay gas fees for pending withdrawls.
👜 App.axie
The marketplace team was incredibly excited to publicly reveal App.axie just prior to AxieCon. Hopefully it’s becoming apparent to our community that App.axie is far more than a visual refresh, or a collection of new features for the Axie Infinity marketplace. Over time, we envision that App.axie will become a core place where all of our community members will interact with our ecosystem!
App.axie will become a central hub for a series of new functions and activities that are core to the Axie ecosystem:
User Profiles: your public Axie homepage on the web! Showcase your inventory, your earned badges, and even your favorite Axies
Events: a place to check out all of the various in-game and live ops Axie events such as breeding events or contests
Esports: here, you can track upcoming Esports events and tournaments, as well as player rankings, and members of the Axie Esports Hall of Fame!
Community: a dedicated page to highlight the community, and it’s contributors whether they are creators, streamers, artists, community developers, writers, or builders of the ecosystem.
LunaLog: a central information compendium for the Axie Infinity ecosystem
Of course, App.axie’s initial release has also introduced new marketplace features as well!
Collections: Bringing deeper, richer support for asset collections within the marketplace, each “collection” will have a dedicated homepage with dedicated analytics and collection-specific transaction information. This is a fundamental pre-requisite to hosting many different kinds of assets, including from 3rd-party gaming assets within a common presence. It will also allow us to more prominently feature key, highly prized asset collections such as mystic axies.
Offers: Probably one of the community’s most requested features, offers allow any community member to make a bid on any ecosystem asset. This will allow the community to establish fair market value for assets, and enhance both the liquidity and activity to the marketplace. We also anticipate extending offers to collections, which would allow an individual to make a base offer for any member within a collection (such as an offer for any Japanese Axie with Origami wings).
Last, but certainly not least, we’re particularly excited to announce our “Buy with card” feature, which will allow any community member to use debit or credit cards to make purchases from our marketplace. Thanks to our emerging partnership with MoonPay, we hope to extend into various other methods of payment based upon community input. Our hope is to drastically reduce the friction for people who want to own a part of the Axie Infinity universe!
Sky Mavis
We have massive ambitions for the Axie Infinity ecosystem, and what we intend to build requires significant dedicated effort from a growing constellation of partners and community members working alongside Sky Mavis. Our organization continues to scale rapidly in response. The organization ended the 3rd quarter of 2022 with 198 employees worldwide. As of this update, we are now over 200 strong:
Of particular note is our rapidly growing engineering team. Our intentions are to end 2022 with a minimum of 105 engineering team members, and we also anticipate significant expansion of both the art and growth teams as well.
Scaling rapidly in this way is complex, and requires rapid deployment of processes, conventions, and training infrastructure. We’ve made considerable investments on these fronts over the past 6 months, and we’re excited about the recent outcomes.
We additionally have begun a series of partnerships with technology and game universities to introduce them to Web3 and blockchain-based gaming early in their career. We recently onboarded 10 students with high potential into our new “Mavis Seed” program which allows them to intern alongside us and work inside the organization intensively with the goal of graduating into full-time engineering roles.
We hope this initiative will expand into the future, and we have reached mutual agreements with local universities to sponsor future students for scholarship and workshop education.
As this month’s development update comes to a close, we hope everyone within our community is getting a clearer sense of where the Axie Infinity universe is headed. We believe that incredible ambition, incredible growth, and collective commitment to our digital nation’s mission will help us realize a new form of social contract in gaming. If you haven’t already, come join us!