Hello there Wolfpack!
This week we bring you updates covering game developments, competitions and updates around the development of Shiryo’s Card upscales.
Our Game Development team is actively working away, though as mentioned in a recent announcement, some personal matters have affected work schedules as of late.
Given these events our Game Development team is taking time conducting meetings and bringing workflow back up to speed, meaning this weekend’s update is brought solely from the Shiryo core team.
All this means is that we have some varied updates this week — and next weekend we’ll have our usual more Shiryo game-specific updates.
This said we think you’re going to like what you have to see.
Now, let’s get into things!
Game Development: The Shiryo Portal is back in active development!
Our Shiryo Portal began development initially some time ago, you may recall previous articles of Rick addressing bugs with communication to the portal here;
https://medium.com/@shiryo/weekly-shiryo-update-from-the-lead-game-dev-shiryo-team-11-ba7b59e1b38c
However, different aspects of the game’s development have had to take precedence at different times. We’ve had more resources allocated towards bringing vital aspects of the game up to standard for the Alpha Test release such as our new board and UI.
Now that Portal development has resumed, we thought we’d refresh memories on what the Portal means for Shiryo and how it will allow us to integrate crypto seamlessly within our game.
We had our Dapp developer lend a few words in layman’s terms.
Dapp Dev: “Every time you open the game, you want it to recall various pieces of information from your last login. The issue is that the game itself doesn’t have a memory of what’s happened, it doesn’t have what we’d call ‘persistent storage’. When we create the portal, it saves the information and recalls it for the next time.”
To quote Rick from an earlier update where our Portal was referenced;
“The first “Server” implementation is for the player to be able to “create an account” / “Login”. This involves communicating with the secure “Portal” and is the interface between the Game Client, Database, Socials (adding friends, inviting to game…etc), and the Blockchain when a new player creates an account, this process creates a secure location to hold the player’s relevant “Game” information that needs to persist after they have logged out or closed the game client. Information such as their NFT collection, Story Progress, Decks built, Game stats (Wins losses… etc) Events entered…..etc.”
Dapp Dev: We’re also building the portal so both crypto people and non crypto people can create accounts in the Shiryo game seamlessly.
So users will be able to create their gamer tag/username — and allocate to the gamer tag either an email address, phone number or crypto wallet.
That means you have your gamer tag and password to log in, which is great, but the problem we had was ‘What if users forget their password?’, how do they reset it?
You originally just signed up to the game with a crypto wallet, but we didn’t want the game to be ‘Crypto focused’, we wanted the game to be as friendly as possible to non-crypto users with crypto integration running in the background.
So now you don’t need to use a crypto wallet, you use an email address and behind the scenes, a wallet would be created for you to handle all things related to the Shiryo token.
So normal people can create a gamer tag and just use their email or phone to recover their password if they lose it and log in that way. Crypto users have the option of being able to use their crypto wallets.
These functions are being built right now.
Another way to ‘think’ about the portal is — anything that requires metamask needs to be done where someone can authorize a transaction in their wallet and that’s done within their browser with the metamask extension, that’s essentially what the portal is.
All the stuff where you want to interact with crypto has to be done using the portal and not the game itself (because the game itself doesn’t have metamask integrated, metamask is only in a browser, quite straight forward), most people use metamask which can only be used from a browser.”
To quote Rick from an earlier update where our Portal was referenced;
The portal is responsible for interfacing with the blockchain, authentication, the creation and allocation of a default Shiryo wallet, the importation of a player’s pre-existing wallet, managing play to earn functions, the wagering of cards…etc)
With all of this, security is paramount. This is why all of this functionality is not held on the game client itself but is the responsibility of the portal. This ensures that we do not need to validate the whole engine itself and instead use the worlds converged upon, tried, and tested security methods used by the leading Dapps in today’s crypto space.”
Shiryo Competitions + Events
We’ve mentioned through our articles several events and competitions to be conducted, so here we present dates for events going forward.
1: Shiryo AI Wolf Image Generation Competition:
In this competition our community will be requested to upload their best-themed wolf to Twitter on our submission dates, 8 submissions will be chosen by the Core Team and entered into a Telegram Battle Royale to compete for cash prizes and Founders Packs.
The theme is: Wolf in Knights Armor!
The date for the submissions will be: 21st-23rd of July
You may only submit one entry for the competition, only entries between July 21st 12AM UTC and July 23rd 11:59pm UTC will be accepted.
Each entry must be uploaded with the hashtag: #ShiryoAIComp
The prizes will be as follows;
1st Place: $200 + 3 Founders Pack
2nd Place: $100 + 2 Founders Pack
3rd Place: $50 + 1 Founders Pack
2: Charge — Ability name submissions!
In this competition we’ll be requesting the best names for the ‘Charge’ ability on Twitter. Our Game Development team will pick out their 3 favorites, these will then be put to a vote in our Telegram channel. The submission with the top votes will become the official in-game name.
1st place: 2 Founders Pack + 1 Base Pack
2nd place: 1 Founders Pack + 2 Base Pack
3rd place: 3 Base Packs
The date for these submissions will be July 17th-19th
You may only submit one entry for the competition, only entries between July 17th 12AM UTC and July 19th 11:59pm UTC will be accepted.
Each entry must be uploaded with the hashtag
3: GOTW
Shiryo will be having 2 prize stacked editions of GOTW this month — each with cash and Founders Packs cards to be won!
To enter, all you need to do is join our GOTW room, follow the rules and play along with other members of the community for juicy prizes.
4: An AMA with Jordan is coming soon, full details soon to be announced.
Shiryo’s Card Upgrades
This section contains many images of card upscales, for full resolution please download the zip file on our announcement channel.
Another aspect of the project that we’re aware the community were eagerly awaiting updates for is our upscaled cards development progress.
Only a handful of cards remain to be upscaled, we’re now beginning the process of our team going through all of the upscales we’ve completed thus far with a fine-toothed comb to check that everything fits thematically and matches the vision we’re looking for with the cards.
When we look at the cards we’re not trying to fix what isn’t broken, if a card has great detail then we’re providing minimal adjustments or none-at-all. For example, our Mythics have such relentlessly great detail and artistic quality that we’ve entirely left them alone.
We’re looking for things such as anatomical faults in a wolf, i.e we have some card examples where a wolf’s paw has had little to no shape, a head may have a mouth or snout missing, fur may look too ‘blocky’ so we may add some detail.
Other things include low-resolution backgrounds — we’ve sought to bring these areas up without taking any attention away from the wolf itself. There are also cards where color enhancements or lighting adjustments could work well (i.e glowing eyes).
Take a look at the kind of changes made here;
You can see that this is simply a cleaner, more refined version of the original. Color and shading have been enhanced throughout the wolf and the background. Detail has been added to the fur, shape of the mane, mouth and eyes are enhanced.
However despite the clear difference between the before and the after — you can see that we haven’t tried to take anything away from the card, we have only tried to present what is already there with more clarity.
Some upscales have been more casual, such as here with the Molten Harbinger.
As you can see the magma lines running through the character and the overall shape have been kept virtually the same, although coloring has been slightly adjusted. The face has been altered for a cleaner look with more expression, the outlines of the wolf have been made jagged for a more ‘rock-like’ appearance and the background has been altered, yet it’s still very much the Molten Harbinger.
As we review upscales we’ll collectively decide what changes are simply unnecessary, whether it’s not in line with the rest of the collection, maybe the original’s detail was already more than good enough, does the new change add to the character or take away from the character, is the answer somewhere in the middle?
Nevertheless, here’s a showcase of many more of our Card Upscales. Please note that as all of our cards are subject to review — further changes may be made to these cards.
Click the image to expand to full scale, you can also check our Telegram Announcement channel for a high-resolution zip file.
View more on the Medium – https://medium.com/@shiryo/weekly-update-from-the-shiryo-team-17-4f7a1688f603
