DevLog #15: Alpha Updates, Avatar Re/Dematerialization, Portal Guns
Weekly Updates
Another week has come and gone, bringing us ever closer to our eagerly anticipated product launch. Behind the scenes, our team is working diligently to push product updates, develop our business, and prepare for our launch. Here are a few highlights of our activity from the past week:
Realm Co-founder and CPO, Joban Thomas was featured in this article on Coin Journal about how the Metaverse will change our lives.
Realm Co-Founder and CEO, Matthew Larby was featured in episode of the Money Never Sleeps podcast discussing the Realm experience, how to make the metaverse more accessible, transitioning from being a web2 founder to a web3 founder, and raising seed financing in advance of Realm’s IDO.
The community tuned in to another weekly AMA, hosted by our co-founders, and asked a wide range of questions about Realm. If you have questions that you’d like to be addressed, please drop them in our AMA form.
We concluded our community competition celebrating our partnership with LunarCrush and Announced the Winners with the highest influencer scores across the four categories. Thank you to everyone who participated! We really enjoyed seeing your ideas and may just implement a few!
Now… Back to the Dev Logs!
Alpha Updates
We’ve been getting a lot of questions in our community since we launched into Phase 1 of our Alpha launch about how we are progressing with testing and when the community will have access to this early release.
You might remember the following chart from Dev Log #12, where we announced Alpha, it will be a helpful guide as we talk about what we’ve been up to. This chart shows our Social App, the React Native side, on the left, and our game world, the Godot side, on the right. This is a flow diagram of the main processes and procedures that make up the Realm mobile Application!
Alpha Phase 1 was implemented to identify and resolve the lion’s share of the bugs in our application as quickly as possible. The professional QA testers have been scrutinizing our application, UI/UX, and every corner of our game worlds, and they have now spent a huge number of hours testing and providing us with detailed reports of everything they find. Thus far we’ve managed to test Realm on approximately 50 devices from iPhone 6s to the latest generation of Galaxy and Pixel phones.
On the React-Native side, we’ve identified and resolved 12 bugs from very minor issues like an icon failing to display under certain conditions, to larger issues like players being unable to view each-others NFTs in their profiles. Over the past 3 weeks, we’ve built and deployed 3 versions of our app with each round of fixes, and it is looking better every day! We’ve also implemented some significant design improvements in the screen layout for different view modes on various devices.
On the Godot side, we’ve identified and resolved 50 individual issues ranging from mishaps with the menu pop-ups to players getting stuck in walls and swimming through space! We’ve launched 3 new builds, each significantly improved from the last. Aside from the bug fixes, we are steadily rolling out new features including revamped UI, leaderboard integrations, improved on-boarding, re-designed chat systems, and an AR mode. We will be showing some of these new features off in greater detail over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more!
We all make mistakes in life, and what truly matters is how you move forward and leverage your mistakes to learn and grow. Every time we find a bug, we know we are one step closer to achieving the smooth and seamless user experience that we are striving for, and that our ever-growing community will soon enjoy!
Phase 2 is here!
Now that all the fundamentals are working properly in the App, we are happy to announce that today we move into phase 2 of Alpha testing, this will consist of a select set of community testers and key influencers getting early access to the App to enjoy it and provide their feedback!
Over the following weeks we will release many new Alpha builds that will add new features, improve performance and make the environments a lot more pretty. For now we can announce the following community members have been shipped the Realm Alpha App:
These members of our community have been with us since the beginning and continue to demonstrate their clear understanding of Realm’s vision. DefiCenturion, Teejay and Bhattman, we look forward to seeing you in the Realms shortly.
Over the coming weeks many more people will be invited to the community Alpha testing, the aim is to grow the number of testers so that we can move into Phase 3 Alpha testing, where we stress test our servers with many concurrent testers at once.
Keep your eyes out for private invites from the team to be a part of Phase 2 and Phase 3. If you’ve yet to register to be a tester, it is not too late, and you can sign up here to experience Realms Metaverse before our big public launch. Who knows, you might find some special rewards in the Realms that go exclusively to our Alpha testers!
Note that not everyone who registers will gain access right away. We will be on-boarding testers in phases over time.
Avatar Re/Dematerialization
Any good Sci-Fi fan will be familiar with various forms of transportation facilitated by the instantaneous conversion of matter into energy and vice-versa.
The Teleporter in Star Trek is one such iconic example, and while Realm doesn’t have a Scotty to beam you up, we are working on our own advanced mechanisms for interstellar and inter-dimensional travel! Check out the following video for a sneak preview of this process:
Portal Guns
You probably know by now that Realm is a Metaverse that consists of a network of customizable microverses that are connected by portals. Our central Metropolis is full of these portals where players can discover new worlds and experiences. Folks have been buying land in the Metropolis, each containing a portal, that they can customize and use to advertise their land. We have more land sales coming up soon, so stay tuned for that!
Aside from the stationary portals that you’ve probably seen in our promo videos, or even our AR portal videos, the portal guns that we are building will provide additional ways to connect interdimensional space and travel through it. In some cases, these portal guns may be the only way to connect to a particular space, with challenges associated with how you program them to reach the precise location that you desire. This is just one of many NFTs that we have been designing that are not only aesthetically beautiful, but also have valuable utility in the game!
Until next time,
We’ll see you in the Metaverse!
About Realm
Realm is a mobile-first, play-to-earn, social impact driven Metaverse that allows gamers, players and artists to create their own personalized NFT microverse. Creators can bring unique music, art, and games into their realms. Whole living worlds can be minted as an ERC-1155 NFT and traded on the OpenSea Marketplace. Alternatively, players can discover, trade, collect and view NFTs in the environments and experiences their creators imagined.
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