_002 _ Jan-Feb 2023
- The Great Old One
“The house was very quiet, and the fog—we are in November now—pressed against the windows like an excluded ghost.” – E.M. Forster
Greetings human and welcome!
What’s new with Cthulhu Awakens you ask? Lots of stuff!
0. M1 development efforts. A number of things need to be ‘buttoned up’ for M1 to be an awesome ‘early look’ demo. Using our Agile approach we are doing a ton of polish:
We are improving our tools/pipeline/Unity development environments
Bug fixes and playtesting
Adding some new assets / characters / animations / sfx
Building the ‘FREE NFT’ and ‘WHITELIST” pipeline & in-game messaging
Incorporating Firebase / Google Analytics to track onboarding and UX
User Profiles/Logins/Account & Security
1. Cosmic Foundry - New company is fully formed! Rejoice! Our new company that owns Cthulhu Awakens (and all things crypto) has been formed with the help of our partners at DLA Piper www.dlapiper.com . We have transitioned all relevant prior agreements, partnerships, IP, Advisors and staff to the new entity.
New company website www.cosmicfoundry.io
2. Building our Login/Profile management system - We’re using Google Firebase to provide authentication services for our game and website. This will allow us to have a single integrated solution that works across multiple platforms.
3. Technical efforts to support broad client-server functionality are ongoing. We have a full playable combat round happening using the new architecture. This is huge; now we need to refactor the remaining systems. We are moving more code to this model for a few reasons: 1) security, 2) flexibility and 3) extendibility. This refactor is laying the groundwork for future P2P gameplay (M3 demo).
4. NFT Pipeline & Release Strategy – One area of focus over the last month has been buttoning up our pipeline for creating NFT agents. As you are probably aware, each agent has a one-of-a-kind portrait, movie and its own in-game attributes. Our current strategy is to generate an initial run of around 15,000 NFT agents that will be split into (3) buckets of allocation. The first bucket will be given away to those who complete the Cthulhu Awakens M1 Demo. The second bucket will be set aside for a series of weekly raffles for those who miss out on the initial giveaway as well for incentives for viral marketing. The last bucket will be reserved for sale in the first public mint. To create this large run of individually unique digital assets, the content pipeline needs to be as automated as possible. To this end, we have built a custom tool called' PortraitMaker' in combination with several Python scripts and Java program to generate the visuals, data sets and backend support. Also we have enlisted more folks to help hit our goals :) Let us know if you want to help!
5. NFT Mint preparation - getting everything together for our successful mint!
6. Ongoing Strategy Sessions - Cover lots of ground here; major considerations:
Blockchain - is IMX really best for us? Looking deeper at Polygon
Target audience analysis and segmentation - how do we do both web2 AND web3 well?
Custodial vs. Non-Custodial wallets - Evaluation of blockchain service provided byStardust.gg is ongoing in an effort to build a low-fraction way for non-savvy crypto users to participate in digital ownership. This means no browser plugins, no complicated pass phrases, no ETH addresses. Just email/password is all that’s required to participate and get/buy NFTs.
7. “NFT is a bad word” - We are aware of discussions in the gamer community and culture broadly that NFTs are “dead” or “a scam”. To address this public perception issue, we are using the term “Digital Collectable” in our marketing materials. We are also developing strategies to optimize the new user workflow and streamline digital asset ownership for non-crypto hardcore users.
8. Investigating Credit Card payment and processing solutions. (Suggestions welcome
9. High-res character models. We are working to bring in new high-res models.
10. Ongoing research into AI tools for content creation including Audio, Motion Capture, image creation and 3D asset creation.
11. Creating new marketing materials; checkout the Media section of our website!
12. Ongoing legal & compliance work. Developing legal PP/TOS documents and various internal policies. This includes adapting the “Can’t be Evil’ framework detailed here: https://a16zcrypto.com/introducing-nft-licenses
That’s the wrap-up for this one! If you have any questions, concerns or interest in helping please do not hesitate to contact us: contact@asylumlabsinc.com
In service to The Ancient Ones,
(and all puny human Stakeholder too)
@BaronVonNift33