Undra

Hello and welcome! I’m thrilled to introduce a new series of posts that will take you behind the scenes of Undra and explain how we are building this studio and game.

For those of you who don’t know me yet I’m Alex / @Sazerac_eth. I’m the director of Studio Decent, the team behind the game of Undra. If you’d like to subscribe to updates, either join the Discord, or follow us on Twitter.

A quick recap

Many of you will be joining us for the first time, maybe you’ve seen us on Twitter (@undra_game) or been to our website (https://undra.game). So here’s the nutshell.

Studio Decent is us. Hi! 👋
- We’re an independent studio, incorporated in the UK, and we’re still very young (we officially formed the team in August 2021)
- Our team are veterans across gaming, content production, software and more. Most of our identities are public. There are zero rugs involved - hardwood floors only 👌
- The team is about ~20 people so far
- We’re working on a flagship game called Undra
Undra is a strategy MMO, with realtime gameplay and 2D platformer-like graphics.
- It’s in very early development and we’re planning an early-access release next year.
- Undra will be primarily on-chain. We’re currently aiming at Ethereum mainnet (after shard-chains roll out), probably in conjunction with some L2 solutions. But we’re keeping our options open as the crypto landscape evolves.
- To fund the game and seed ownership amongst our players, we’re issuing a series of public NFT sales. Each of these ties into an overall storyline, ready for the launch of Undra itself. We call that storyline Undraverse.
Undraverse is an interactive story that explains the lore behind our NFT drops.
- It’s split into seasons. Season one is running now, it’s about 2 weeks long with daily updates.
- Each season sets the stage for the next drop of NFTs, explaining the background behind the world of Undra.
- The first set of NFTs are a collection of secure, locked rooms, that have been abandoned underground by the Dauntless Excavations company. They will be released on Ethereum with minting ~~starting on November 4th.~~ [Edit: We delayed this to December 1st to finish polishing everything]

Launch planning

We’re working full-steam ahead for launch, getting all of our artwork finalised and generated into the 10,000 different rooms that are going up for sale.

We revealed the first art preview this week!

You can also view this (with more story background) at [https://undra.game/art](https://undra.game/art).

You can also view this (with more story background) at https://undra.game/art.

Next week you’ll see a few more previews, along with something really special… The animated video versions 📽️ 🔥

Team updates

As a rough hiring update, we’ve just passed at 20 people in the team

Artists - 7
Writers & Undraverse planners - 3
Social/Community team - 2
Design / UX - 2
Developers - 4
Leadership/admin team not fitting into other categories - 3 (including me)

Roughly half are full-time, the rest are part-time / freelance. We have been very lucky with our full-time team, either folks were already freelancing and interested in a full-time role, or we managed to get some early warning out so that some could wrap up existing work and join us.

But for a lot of people, it’s just not feasible to quit a stable job and join a pre-launch team with only 2-3 months runway. That’s why our NFT launch is such a big milestone, it helps create the financial footing and runway we need to offer long-term permanent roles to everyone.

Hiring

We’ve completed our pre-launch hiring so there are no open roles right now. We do have soft offers in place with a handful of great people, ready for after launch.

I’m looking forward to talking more about our post-launch goals, team structures, and hiring plans in a future post 🙂

Top priorities

The next 2 weeks are all about promoting the Undraverse content, getting players and fans into our Discord channel, following us on Twitter, and preparing for the best possible sale on ~~November 4th!~~ [Edit: December 1st!]

Up next

Our NFT launch is two weeks away, and next week I’m going to be sharing more about the art itself, the NFTs that will be available, and a peek into how we have been organising and generating them.