This is the first of our regular articles and dev updates about Aten7 or A⁷. We will review particular features in each piece as we lead up to alpha release; if you have any questions, ask anytime on our socials.

So, what is Aten7 exactly?

Well, you could say it's an 'epic solarpunk sci-fi odyssey with friends' or maybe 'a multi-generational journey into the unexpected' ... and that would be pretty close.

But it's also a few other things;

Aten7 is both the story experience and the system that runs it. It is a rich world of incredible depth mixed with a state-of-the-art system built for players and creators alike.

It has a mix of Table Top Roleplaying Games (TTRPG) and RPG video game features. Designed as a transmedia gaming experience, while it has some familiar elements, it is unlike anything that has come before.

Like the Dungeons & Dragons game system, the focus is on party-based co-op play, with player persistence over multiple adventures, the same way players do with TTRPG games.

Each adventure is a different game, like a module in D&D. A player creates a character, and that character could be with them through many modules.

Characters are created outside of the games themselves by our standalone character creator. The character creator is included with all game downloads for convenience, or you can use the upcoming web UI.

Once you have a character, this gives you access to the game world modules.

The Vibe

If you're looking for a gritty dystopian cyberpunk sci-fi world, you've come to the wrong place. We're not telling that story; quite the opposite.

Aten7 is a generally positive world full of variety, an expression of what happens when things are 'pretty great.' Many of our old problems have been solved, but of course, we insist on creating new ones.

It's a story about humanity and AI, living and working together, discovering what lies in the heart of creativity and chaos.

And some rather insane weapons.

If you are familiar with Iain M Banks Culture novels, it's like having one foot in the Culture.

So expect the unexpected!

Our goal is to provide a similar experience to TTRPG, where a group of friends can adventure together (sometimes in unusual ways), guided by a Games Master (GM) who an AI assists. The focus is on co-op adventuring, not competitive play, again a common feature of TTRPG.

There is plenty of room for things to go awry, as you will find out in Gateway Guardians. Our starter module is focused on combat only to give you (and us) a chance to refine your combat strategies against enemies. We will go into more detail about the module in a dedicated article but in a nutshell there are a number of unusual weapons and combat layers, so strategy really is key to success.

Outside of combat there are a number of other avenues for story and character progression, this is really our focus. Crazy combat is fun, but it always must be backed by story driven emotional involvement, otherwise it's just a boring grind.

The Game

As a player all you need to do is create a character to play, your character is your entry key. You can think of it as needing a body to enter the space (if you're playing as a character that is).

If you've read the intro story you will know that almost everyone has an AI companion. These are mostly called Comps, short for both Companion and Computational Intelligence.

Dual meanings are a much used current fad in the A7 world, it's good to keep that in mind.

Comps are often bonded with a single person for most of their lives, in game you can change your Comp and technically your Comp can disown you, but this is rare.

A Comp that is bonded with a character provides an interface to a variety of functions in the game world, some of these are driven by AI and some are simply part of the game story. Comps interface with various forms of equipment and can talk to you through a language model UI (so you can just talk to them).

We won't spoil the other surprises there but it's going to get interesting.. and weird.. but fun!

Both characters and Comps are available either by simply registering and creating one, or creating it as an in-game item that you can sell or transfer to others if you wish.

Of course you will want some gear, this is available from a number of sources which we will dive into in a later article.

Our focus is on providing great entertainment value and everything from characters to equipment will be priced accordingly.

The Tech

Aten7 is a transmedia gaming experience; we thought we'd have some fun and break the mold a bit when it comes to gaming.

We are developing for an Extended Reality (XR) experience; while our initial builds are for both PC and VR gamers (and will continue to be), the underlying architecture is geared heavily toward merging the physical and virtual worlds.

It has been essential for us to build this into the system from the very start. The story has been written to be merged with the later XR in quite a meta fashion, and tagging on features later to chase a new idea is not the way we do things.

The same is true for the character system; in order to fully leverage the benefits of it, we needed to have it in place first. This is why we spent time building the system and infrastructure before focusing on fun things to show the community.

We aren't the writers of the show 'Lost', making stuff up as we go from season to season; as much as that can be fun, it can also be highly disappointing.

The best payoffs are when everything is planned from the start; we all know that.

We have developed an underlying technology layer (and will continue to extensively) which provides a number of features:

• The world's best current gaming industry interoperability solution (we don't say that lightly)
• An advanced machine-learning (ML) interface that offers some novel features never seen before in gaming (we are utilising this for future development)
• An integrated advanced creator toolkit
• A novel solution for cross-publisher character interchange

We also utilise ML heavily elsewhere in the game itself, helping drive the interaction with players among other more secret sauce areas that will expand in the future.

We are not talking about plugging Stable Diffusion into something to make pictures here. ML has a broad variety of use cases, and we are using it in a number of ways, including some novel implementations.

The Team

Aten7 story and technology architecture has been designed by Sylvan Dieckmann and built with a dedicated team of AAA artists from games and film vfx.

Sylvan is a veteran in the CG industry, with a 25 year background in film and games. He has been building and designing stories with computers since he was a wee lad, from GMing D&D and LARPing in high school to building a pretty rubbish HMD in the 90's.. he's tried a lot, and failed a lot.. but got there in the end.

Everyone has an agenda, with Sylvan it's biomimetics, this is the scientific field concerned with using design principles and ideas from nature, to build better solutions.

So you will find a fair amount of it in this world.

And music.. you can't have too much music.