Azurian Avatars Are Taking Longer To Come To Market. Here’s Why:

Some sneak peeks of some apparel traits within Azurbala

If you’ve been a Writer’s Room member or part of a Tally Labs project for a while now, then you know that bringing things to market at the quality we strive for is our only priority. We’re really proud of the IP that we’re building and of the work that we’ve done in our first ~15 months of business. That said, we’ve also underestimated the amount of time it takes to bring something to market at the quality we feel you, our community, deserves. We will never bring something to market that doesn’t elevate our community and our project to a new height, and make you proud as hell to be on this journey with us.

With that said, we won’t beat around the bush on this post. Azurian avatars are not coming out in August. We expect Book Burning for Azur Roots to begin in September, to run for 3–4 weeks, and then for Azurians to follow directly after.

We know that you all, Bored & Dangerous Book NFT holders, are excited to take advantage of Book Burning and to start your journeys in Azurbala. We have seen the 100+ characters, businesses, guilds, and other groups already organizing around Azurbala, and we’ve never felt so inspired in our lives. We’ve spoken to many of you, and we’ve been working our butts off behind the scenes to build the Azurbala members platform so that it’s ready when your characters are in your hands (and for some features… maybe even beforehand). Make no mistake, while the art is being finalized by one side of our company, our Product and Engineering teams are full steam ahead on all things Azurbala. Post launch, we believe the avatar delays will actually be a blessing in disguise.

In the future, we’ll go faster. There are two key reasons this will be the case:

1. We have a rockstar team that is growing every month. We’re up to 14 full-time and we’ve got incredible people who are completely focused on creative, engineering, product design, go-to-market, and more. Each of these people are stars in their role and the longer they spend time at Tally, the better and faster the work will be.
2. We’re getting better at estimating the amount of QA (quality assurance) needed to meet our standards for the work. In every case where we’ve hit a delay in the past, it’s largely been during the QA stage. Bored & Dangerous was done, but revisions and polish took longer than we expected. Azurians are quite far along, but it’s the polish they’re experiencing now that will take them to another level.

But There’s More…

Beyond the polish of the avatars themselves, there are a few points about Azurians that we want to share with you. There are a couple things that are true about Azurians that you may not know yet…

1. They are 3d. They are multi-species. They are fashionable. Each of these important factors about Azurians means that there are multiple artists who work on every facet of the art. We have an entire team with deep experience in 3d avatar and digital fashion creation. After each artist finishes their portion (an Azurian base species, a piece of clothing, etc), we need to render them all to make sure the traits come together perfectly. Oftentimes they do, but sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, we need to go back to the drawing board, and we can only tell this is the case when we’ve seen the work fully rendered. We will not rush this part. You only get one chance to make a first impression.
2. The burn window will be 3–4 weeks and we intend to roll directly and promptly into Azurian minting. As soon as Azurians are ready, we will launch the Book Burn for Azur Root process. It’s critical that this is a well-defined process and that the Book Burn window is finite. Our intention is to give community members the ability to burn books for Azur Roots and then redeem Azur Roots for Azurians in a smooth process over the course of about a month, without further delays. By rolling it out this way, we will signal better that 1 Book = 1 Azurian, and we expect there to be a lot of fun, energy, and activity around the collections. We could have launched book burning by now, but sticking to the time window we promise for that period is very important to us. We’re waiting until Azurians are complete so that we can guarantee this.
3. Azurbala is a story-world, and so it’s critically important to us that we roll out information in the context of that story. Ultimately that story will impact the decisions you make with your own characters, businesses, and groups. It will inspire you to tell your own stories and potentially even break out your own worlds like we did with Jenkins the Valet. To that end, there is even more work to be done to bring Azurians to market beyond just their polish. We have large ambitions as storytellers, and that takes time as well. The Azurian reveal will be told as a story, not simply as a reveal of images. We understand this isn’t always the quickest, but it is the most fun, entertaining, and immersive route.

So, Where Do We Go From Here?

Azurians are 3d, and they’re high-fidelity. They’re textured. They’re fashionable. They’re multi-species and there are even variations within species. And of course we have some other surprises up our sleeves. Jenkins has a big mouth, so you may want to keep your eyes peeled for him to leak some more alpha leading up to the reveal (speaking of Jenkins, we hope he is doing ok in jail)!

Many of you are already building characters, businesses, groups, and more. We will be supporting all of that with software experiences and other fun and meaningful opportunities brought to you by the team at Tally Labs.

We’re storytellers, and everything that comes to market will be wrapped in story. The burn window will be finite and it will drive a ton of fun, excitement, and activity around the collection. Your guess on how many people burn vs hold/stake is as good as ours, which makes it so special! From there, Azurians will be ready to hit your wallet and we’ll all be off to the races together. We’re launching this world with a decades-long time horizon. We believe a month or two’s delay is a small price to pay for setting this world up to scale.

In the background, Tally Labs is working hard, and more importantly we’re working faster than ever. We have many releases and activations planned for the first 100 days of Azurbala and beyond. Azurbala must be electric, and that is our promise to you.

It’s the same promise we’ve made every step of the way… while this extra time is not what any of us would choose, we assure you that it will net the same thing it always has, which is a product you’re very proud of and one that will be the beginning of a whole lot more.

!Bala

-Tally Labs