Project & Development Update #19
April 15, 2023
Good night, pilots.
We've prepared this special update as a bedtime story to help you fall asleep. That's why we're posting so late.
There’s no other reason. Recommend no more questioning of this statement, for the sake of the people, our industry,
(and your role) 
Let's get cozy 
🔹 Progress
- Completed the latest audit batch
- Performed testnet deploy and started connecting internal frontend
- Set up deployments for contract documentation site
- Cleaned up subgraph entity structure, handlers, and tests
- Started researching alternate GraphQL frontends for the graph node
- Built and tested multiple iterations of the documentation chatbot (CAIS 2.0)
- Drafted economic standard operating procedures
- Drafted weekly economic report framework
- Drafted economic article
- Implemented partial fuel refunds for travel redirects
- Polished zoom and pan gestures for the map
- Cleaned up the belt generator project
- Outlined in-game achievement/unlocks system
- Updated canvas size of frigate & interceptor classes (64x64 → 80x80)
- Refined officer ship sprites
- Completed background animations for player profiles
- Reviewed securities risks re: ore and ship tokens with legal counsel (good news!)
- Formed an amazing, long-term partnership for UI/UX design work (details to follow in next update!)
- Published our first twitter thread outlining our end-game vision for onchain games
- Welcomed PhyzixTeacher and Mining Officer to Los Angeles (who visited from Italy!) for some work in the Citadel HQ office
- Died a lot in Diablo 4 Beta Hardcore
♦️ Audit Batch Results
Ladies, gentlemen, and Micropeen, our latest report from Macro has arrived!
We'll break the news here first... all of the changes and upgrades we made passed in their initial implementation! As a refresher these changes were:
Developer Improvements:
- The diamond pattern
- Modular auth system
- Query-friendly events
- Ships contract URI setter
- Ownable ships contract
Player Improvements:
- Session Keys
- Onchain player profiles
- In-game banking
- Freedom of Travel
Macro's team provided two code quality recommendations, which we've addressed, in line with their suggestions.
If you’re curious about the details, you can find the full report here.
Audit Costs
As always, we like to be as transparent as possible about the costs of these types of things.
The audit took two weeks to complete, resulting in a total cost of $50,000.
Considering that the cost of applying the same structural improvements post-launch would have been significantly higher (in both time and money) due to increased complexity, we felt confident in making this decision. Additionally, these changes make building on top of Citadel much more straightforward, which should save time and money on future community contributions.
As it stands, we've covered the cost of the audit ourselves. However, we'd like to request that The Citadel DAO consider splitting the cost with us.
We want to emphasize that this is not an expectation. Instead, we will submit a proposal for reimbursement after launch, and the decision will be made by the voters (i.e., you guys). That being said, we'd really appreciate it, and it would go straight back to building more cool shit for Citadel!
🔸 CAIS GPT (It's alive!)
We've recently given CAIS a few cybernetic intelligence implants to increase its conversation and reading capabilities,
in order to compensate for all of y'alls. 
Our hope is that CAIS 2.0 will grow to become a
useful tool for navigating The Citadel Library.
Feel free to ask CAIS 2.0 a question about the project here.
Collecting feedback
The crucial factor that determines CAIS’s accuracy is its access to relevant documentation. It’s currently trained on the full content of The Citadel Library, but there are clearly some areas that we’ll need to polish.
Our goal in releasing this experimental version is to collect information on its responses to a broad range of project questions. With your help and feedback, we’ll be able to measure and close gaps in our documentation and improve its overall accessibility.
Response Disclaimer
This version is still highly experimental and may respond with misinformation or crash. We appreciate your patience, and please feel free to ping us with any issues or bugs!
🔸 Updated Sprite Art Showcase
While we've been focused on development, Nemesis and the other art team gangsters have been continuously iterating on our sprites to push them to the highest caliber possible. We’re consistently blown away by the results.
Most recently, they have been:
- Updated canvas size for smallest ships in our fleet: Frigates and Interceptors (64x64 to 80x80)
- Refreshed art across several ship manufacturers (Zel'Adun, Atlas Industrial, Quark Robotics, Order of the Black Dawn)
- Refreshed art for multiple officer ship lines
For your viewing experience, we've put together comparison gifs below. Keep in mind the sprite images between classes have been scaled up for ease of viewing and are not true to size.
Let us know your thoughts!
🔹 Avatars Progress + Officer Avatars
As we were outlining the unlocks for player profiles, we realized that our options were fairly limited with only four avatars per manufacturer. We wanted to give players a good number of options by default while still keeping unlocks unique and meaningful, but we just didn’t have enough avatars to go around. To solve this, we’ve doubled the number of avatars, so that there are 8 per manufacturer.
Additionally, we've created an exclusive line of officer avatars, which will be directly tied to players’ ownership of officer ships. We won't spoil all of them now, but here are a few of our favorites. The rest will have to wait for launch and construction bay auctions!
🔹 Background Animations
Previously, we showcased 6 animated backgrounds as part of one of our art experiments to further flesh out player profiles.
…somehow, this turned into 54 backgrounds, whoops! Now, every background will have an animated counterpart that can be unlocked through in-game and governance achievements.
🔹 Autonomous Worlds & Onchain Games Summit
What is the summit?
As the name implies, The Autonomous Worlds & Onchain Games Summit is a conference focused on building onchain games and autonomous worlds. It takes place in Lisbon, Portugal in late May and is meant to spark discussion between teams that are actively building onchain games. To ensure that this happens, the attendee list has been kept extremely small (~30 people), and every team that has been invited is actively building an onchain game.
Why is it worth it?
We were extremely grateful when our friend Peter from 1kx invited us, but we were also a little skeptical of the benefits of attending another conference before launch.
After some consideration, we came to the conclusion that attending the summit would be well worth our time. As we’ve been building, we’ve intentionally kept the community small and our social profile low. While we believe this has been beneficial for our rate of development, we’ve admittedly lived in a vacuum of our own strong opinions, where it has been easy to get tunnel vision on what we’re building and how. We believe that this summit will be a good way of exposing ourselves to new and potentially conflicting ideas and a catalyst for connections with other onchain game teams.
We can’t wait to share what we’ve been building with the other teams in attendance, and we’re looking forward to having some heated discussions about the philosophy of onchain games. Because the event is designed to be small and intimate, it’s unlikely that there will be any live-streamed segments, but we'll be sure to share any highlights with you guys!
🔹 Update #18 Team Q&A Recording
Our recording of the previous team Q&A has been published for those interested. We've embedded topics and key points as
chapters for your convenience.
