VulcanVerse Roadmap — Dev Diary #1 2023
The Latest from our VulcanVerse Development Team
Our excellent and industrious Vulcan Studios team of artists and developers have been working non-stop on forthcoming VulcanVerse builds. The end of 2022 brought fishing to VulcanVerse — a use for those rods! Since then, we tried your collective patience whilst we worked on refactoring; raising the game’s foundations up to the standard we need to bring you multiple features as we move forward. Phase one of refactoring was delivered in early March 2023. At the end of March, we gave you what has turned out to be a much-loved (and needed!) feature, the foraging rework.
So.. what next for our fantasy blockchain MMORPG?
Forthcoming Updates
The teams are working on several aspects of improvement for the ‘Verse. These include:
- Further phases of refactoring
- Server and API stability updates
- Inclusion of new Vulcanites
- Unity upgrade
- Lighting module upgrade
- Terramorphing update
We’ve created a live timeline so you can stay up-to-date on the latest for VulcanVerse.
Refactoring
Some of the next updates you will see rolled out to live VulcanVerse will be visual updates as we push on with refactoring. Expect new and improved landmarks, textures and lighting. The first phase laid the foundation allowing us to bring you a better-looking game, one where we hope you’ll feel more immersed as the non-plot areas are developed. Don’t expect the visual updates to drop in one go though! Phases 2 to 5 of refactoring are all visual or graphic improvements.
Community testers are currently giving the latest VulcanVerse test build a run-through — this build includes changes to the overall look of the game through updated textures and graphics, new landmarks and general enhancements to non-plot areas. Expect a bit of eye candy and new places to explore; some lucky people will find the areas near their plots look a little different! Alongside the visual updates, bug fixes related to renewing the environment are ongoing.
Following the excitement of phases 2 to 5, phases 6 to 8 will be much more focused on optimization. The tangibility of these phases may not appear as clear to players, but things will be happening even if they’re not immediately obvious. We plan to ‘press pause’ and observe before deploying these remaining phases so we can rectify anything that doesn’t work as intended.
Here is a tentative rough schedule we are working towards:
- Phase 2: Visual Updates Hades | End of April
- Phase 3: Visual Updates Arcadia | Mid-May
- Phase 4: Visual Updates Boreas | Early June
- Phase 5: Visual Updates Notus | End of June
- Phase 6: Optimization | Early August
- Phase 7: Optimization | End of August
- Phase 8: Optimization | End of August
Server & API Stability
We’re very aware of recent major issues related to XP distribution problems that appeared after the successful implementation of the foraging rework. For this reason, we have created an entire ecosystem task force that will actively work on evaluating our servers and APIs based on the following premise: we want the entire Vulcan Forged ecosystem to have the ability to seamlessly and automatically flex up and allow 10x the users... Our aim is to have a solution in place by the end of May at the latest.
Inclusion of New Vulcanites
Yes, we’re talking about Mantichora and Helikon, the latter in particular you’ve waited a while for. We can imagine many of you can’t wait to see the oread nymph tear through flesh with those talons- she’s coming…mid to end of July…
Unity Upgrade
As many of you will be aware, VulcanVerse is built on Unity. Both the art and development team at Vulcan Studios will be updating to a newer version of Unity, allowing us to seriously optimize the game’s resources and graphics. What does this mean? VulcanVerse will be less resource heavy. We are expecting this to be ready sometime in July.
Lighting Module Upgrade
If all goes according to plan, this upgrade should see the light of day (pun intended) mid-August. The new environment lighting & weather system will increase realism and allow more natural shading. Also, the new system will dynamically affect the sky and provide the sense of changing weather conditions, making each quadrant a little more unique (sunny day or rain in Arcadia, fog or snowfall in Boreas etc). Time of day and position of sun/moon can be dynamic too, but all these realtime elements require new systems that will keep them in-sync for all players. The dev team is to review performance impact and develop new systems, this may result in different time frames and / or be a separate milestone to the (static) Lighting Module.
Terramorphing Upgrade
This relates to having the ability to merge items with terramorphed ground, allowing for seamless, realistic builds such as walls within tunnels, doorways in hills and so on. This was a previous feature that was removed. With refactoring, it’s now possible to have this back, and having listened to players following it being raised and voted for in Canny, we know it’s a small detail but it’s important so the dev team is working on doing just that. Your world will be different sometime in September...
In Concept
- Workshop economy
Workshop Economy
So you’ve accumulated thousands of resources and your inventory is filling up thanks to the new foraging system. You have bucketloads of fish on ice (advice to Notussians — store them in Boreas). But what can you do with your abundant supplies of jade, limestone and.. cloth(!)? You have such a collection of Riverleaf Rudds the fishmonger needs to hire help and the fish are in danger of becoming endangered! But what’s next?
After careful consideration, review of the games council’s notes (a group of some of the finest minds the VulcanVerse community has to offer) and heated internal discussion we’re looking at the merits of a workshop economy, where you will be able to put your materials to use. Making use of inventory has always been “one for the future”, but we feel the foraging rework and fishing have been so successful it would be a shame not to provide uses for the materials found.
In this first iteration, we are expecting the feature to be computer-driven (ie: you’ll go to dedicated places to trade). That will allow us to closely monitor the economy before implementing the ability for YOU to become a big part of the economy.
We don’t quite have a date for this to go live right now but we’ll keep you in the loop.
For Future Consideration
- Avatar Stats
- Create Your Own Quest
- Increased Travel Speed on Roads
- Automaton NPCs
- God Buffs (edit: added 17th April)
Avatar Stats
Have you ever tried running across an attraction park on a daily basis across a week? We are pretty sure you’d get pretty tired after the first day. If that’s the case for you, shouldn’t it be the same for our avatars? Avatar stats would essentially bring extra depth to VulcanVerse by adding a couple of stats impacted by what you do in the game. Ranging from health, stamina or Food reserve, we are evaluating carefully how that would work.
Imagine getting so tired running around Arcadia that the only way to keep playing is by getting resources (ie: food) to recover. That’s the big idea.
Create Your Own Quest
It’s the dream of many players to have the ability to design and set quests of their own. With the current quest system in VulcanVerse working fine, Create Your Own Quest has been scoped out by the VulcanVerse devs and is one we’re looking at for the future. We just want to make sure we add enough depth to that feature so it doesn’t go stale faster than a fish in Notus...
Increased Travel Speed
The road surrounding VulcanVerse and running like spokes at the edge of each quadrant towards Vulcan City is the Sacred Way. Discussed in the early days of VulcanVerse was providing faster travel on roads. This is something we’re marking down as a future possibility. Surprisingly, this one would require much more dev time than anyone thinks so it’s all about prioritization.
Automaton NPCs
If you know your lore (get the gamebooks!) you’ll know all about the golden automatons of Vulcan City, forged by Vulcan himself. They are the Kourai Khryseai, highly intelligent beings in possession of great reasoning powers, who run Vulcan City on behalf of Vulcan. The Kourai Khryseai will be coming to Vulcan City in the not-too-distant future.
God Buffs
Some community members flagged this one and we have decided to look into it. We see a nice fit with some of the bigger work we are doing so who knows, we might surprise you!
Join Our Community
Are you a member of our community? Do you play VulcanVerse? We always want your feedback. Join us on Discord and let us know your thoughts!
About Vulcan Forged
Vulcan Forged is the company behind Vulcan Studios, a blockchain game studio, NFT marketplace, NFT minting engine and creators of VulcanVerse, Berserk: Vulcanites Unleashed and many other games. Vulcan Forged has also built Elysium, a carbon neutral layer 1 blockchain and MetaScapes, a metaverse as a service (MaaS) engine. The Vulcan Forged family is expanding rapidly, with many Vulcan Studios games now enabled within our blockchain economy.
The native token used within our ecosystem is $PYR, the secondary token $LAVA acts as a play-to-earn token. This dual token economy structure is ideal for blockchain gaming. Scholars or Cedalions are able to earn $LAVA while playing Vulcan Studios games and special NFTs can be earned while in-game. These can be sold on the Vulcan Marketplace for $PYR.
To stay up to date with Vulcan Forged, please follow on these channels:
Discord: https://discord.gg/vulcanforged
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