Project & Development Update #7

March 2, 2022

Good afternoon, pilots. It's time for the next internal project update.

In this post, we’ll start by covering updated launch timelines and the importance of team health. We’ll then discuss the progress that we've made since our last update, and our current areas of focus moving forward.

Let's dive in. 👇

🔹 Current Launch Timelines

As we approach release after thousands of hours of collective work, we wanted to touch base on our current projections for "wen launch”.

The answer to this age-old question is quite simple: we will launch when the game and its backing resources are ready.

To us, being ready means more than just having a playable game on mint.

We've all seen how projects and teams seem to slow down dramatically after launch, sometimes never delivering again. In our eyes, this is because projects tend to launch the second they're able to, without considering the infrastructure that’s necessary not only to sustain and support growth, but to allow for it to happen in the first place.

It's crucial we utilize the time that we have available to create this infrastructure before launch, so that we can smoothly transition to focusing on the growth of the project, game, community, and ecosystem as a whole.

With that said, we're fully expecting to launch this month with not only a fully playable game on mint that is properly decentralized, but also with a full library of community resources for all types of builders, such as custom developer tools, open-source code, project documentation, proposal templates, DAO organization documents, and the infrastructure to support a community focused around the growth of our ecosystem.

🔹 The Importance of Team Health

Our goal as a team is to deliver as consistently as possible, in as timely of a manner as possible, without subjecting ourselves to the risks of burnout, exhaustion, and poor health.

We’ve found that the most effective way of doing this is to allow ourselves to focus on the work, not the deadlines or marketing. Throughout the project’s progression, we’ve consistently avoided setting exact dates or timelines, and we’ve limited our marketing to avoid unsustainable growth and hype. Too often, setting deadlines ends up with teams crunching and working overtime to meet them, which usually involves cutting corners and sacrificing quality along the way.

The Citadel is first and foremost a passion project, and it's important we don't kill that passion in the pursuit of launching as soon as possible, so that we don’t end up needing time afterwards to recuperate when our presence and activity will matter most.

Here is a great article written by the team from @WGMInterfaces that talks about the dangers of unsustainable growth and hype creating significant stressors for them. It really resonated with us, and served as a reminder that overworking is a very real thing, with very serious consequences.

Rest assured that we've been taking care of ourselves, and prioritizing our health is in best interest of the project.
A healthy team is the best team! 💖 ㅤ

🔹 On-Launch Infrastructure Breakdown

This is the infrastructure that we were referring to above. None of these items are necessary to launch the project, but we believe that all of them are necessary to launch nicely, with a smooth transition to community building and to best guarantee long-term success of the project. All are currently either in progress or done (see Progress and Focuses below)

• A powerful, public, query layer for game data. This will make it easy to analyze and build off of the game state.
• A proper scaling system for mint site, the gameplay site, the backing RPC through which transactions are submitted, and the query layer.

A set of documents on governance, explaining:

• How the DAO works
• How to delegate votes and receive delegated votes
• How to break down and structure proposals
• How to encode transaction data for complex proposals
• A set of sample proposals for the DAO, along with valid transaction data

A set of documents on Polygon, explaining:

• Overview of the network
• How to get MATIC and how much you'll need
• How to switch between networks easily

Miscellaneous:

• Source files for the all of the ship models
• Source for website
• Source for the Discord bots
• Source for the construction bay backend
• Community server back up files

• Plans for the first few weeks of belt generation while we collect data to build a proper algorithm. Obviously, we can’t release the ore breakdowns without jeopardizing the game, but we will provide provenances.

• An improved Discord setup, designed for handling a larger community focused around community governance, workshops, proposals, builders, developers, and integrated gameplay channels.

• An easily accessible UI over the governance system, so that it is easy to see which proposals are active, vote, create new proposals, and review due diligence.

• A professional public Figma design file containing all GUI elements and modals, so that it is easy for community builders to directly access and create GUI concepts around their ideas.

• An economic audit from a professional third party, including Monte Carlo simulations and live modeling of the game economy. This will help ensure balance at launch and for and all future updates.

🔹 Progress

• Completed a draft of the updated yellowpaper. This draft includes additional information on outposts, the onchain construction bay system, instant reveals, new ore types, region position changes, first travel costs, new fuel balance changes, new upgrade time balance changes, updated designation and art system, belt spawn timeframes, and regional belt information.

• Started discussions with Vercel regarding scaling, to ensure that we’ll be able to smoothly handle mint traffic load at launch and as well after for the game.
• Started work on a subgraph for The Citadel. The subgraph is built over the incredibly powerful graph protocol, and allows anyone to fetch connected data on the game and governance with a single request.

• Completed the wallet verification system. This provides the backing for whitelist collection and all ownership-based features, including the regional chat, holder roles, and the kill mail system, and other various discord ⥦ game integrations.
• Completed the Discord bot that will assign holder and player roles based on ownership, in conjunction with the wallet verification system.
• Completed the Discord bot that powers the regional chat feature.
• Completed the specifications for the Discord bot that will power the kill mail system. Once the subgraph is prepared, development will start.

• Completed the backend for the construction bay. This includes the bid signer, the bid publication system, and the winning bid submission system.
• Adjusted the construction bay to use human-readable bid messages instead of hashes for user safety purposes.

• Added relinquishable veto power to the governor contract, with support for “unvetoable” veto removal.
• Adjusted the ship naming system to make custom ship names permanent and unique. S/O to Bongo7 for this idea
• Added ship volumes, cargo and hitpoints for future-proofing.

🔹 Ongoing Focuses

• Completing the GUI.
• Completing the soundtrack and SFX.
• Completing the art refresh.

• Load testing at scale w/ Vercel.
• Completing the subgraph implementation.
• Leveraging the power of the subgraph to optimize our Discord bots.

• Finalizing and publishing the updated yellowpaper.
• Writing the Polygon portion of our community documents.

• Thinking more on how to (informally) structure governance. This is less about what happens with the governor onchain, and more about helping with organization for teams building on the DAO. We’ll share new ideas as we find them, and we’d love your feedback.

TL;DR Launch this month, but no set timeframes. We will launch when ready, once we've ensured the long-term success of the project is solidified. Infrastructure is key, and team health is important. 💯