The original English version of the June 2026 blog is available here
June 2026 Blog (Japanese Translation)
Good morning! There is a mountain of things to do before the summer holidays this month, so I will share a quick update! Now that the documentation work has finally started to settle down, I managed to carve out just a little time for XYM City. I did not have as much time as I had hoped, but I have some small progress to share, and I hope you enjoy it.
Overview of the work completed
Content writing The development of the new Symbol mobile wallet has finally reached the stage where I can start writing a guide, so I got right to work. The interface itself is very intuitive and easy to understand, so most users may not need a guide, but I think it is better to prepare one now than regret later that we should have had one ready.
Review Developer pages(task-docs-dev) Zero is now working full-time on the new NEM documentation site, and the new pages keep arriving faster than I can review them 😄 These NEM developer tutorials are based on the Symbol ones and use the Symbol SDK, so progress is quite fast. I am not joking—they really are fast! Please check the current list.
DARUMA STUDIO June started with an energetic push on XYM City game development. After months of nonstop documentation work, I am sure you can imagine how hungry I was to work on the game! However, it quickly became clear that we needed one more final push to finish the documentation before the summer holidays, so our enjoyable week of game development had to be put on hold once again. You can see what we managed to accomplish in the report on XYM City below.
Management This is the routine administrative work that comes around every month and cannot be avoided. This time, I estimated the work needed to port improvements from the new NEM tutorials back to the original Symbol tutorials, and created a list of guides for the Symbol mobile wallet. On the other hand, I love making lists. If we look on the bright side, this list is what makes it possible to draw the wonderful plot below 😄
Site structure ⚙️ After more than a year of work on this pull request, we are finally ready to merge the new documentation branch into the main development branch of the Symbol monorepo 🎉 Most of this is maintenance work: adjusting to the global repository linting rules, removing the old docs folder, and incorporating the documentation into the build process. Still, I am always happy to have an excuse to put the spellchecker aside and do a little coding. 😊 ☕ Since development of the Java SDK is underway, we re-enabled Java support on the documentation site. This had been planned from the beginning, so there were no particular issues. The new NEM documentation site is also still under construction, so its infrastructure still needs regular fine-tuning.
Learning 🤖 Whether we like it or not, LLM technology is already here to stay, so I continue to explore it. Over the last few days, I have been experimenting with a local environment called Pi, and I strongly recommend that you try similar tools if you have the opportunity. You may gain valuable insight into what language models really are and how we should interact with them.
Here is the relative allocation of time across this month’s tasks:
Documentation progress
Symbol Symbol documentation is officially complete 😄. The only work currently remaining is adding the user guide for the mobile wallet.
NEM I expected the NEM tutorial progress to be faster than Symbol’s, but I did not expect it to be this fast. The planned NEM developer tutorials are already 75% complete, up from 25% last month. The NEM Textbook is also complete and has already passed its review by Jaguar.
XYM City
We are still mainly working on the game design document (GDD), focusing on fleshing out the game’s central theme. This theme is the foundation supporting every other element of the project. For example, to keep every setting and development consistent, we are documenting why everyone in the city is there—not just the main characters, but even the minor NPCs.
We have also written out all the game mechanics in detail. They are organized in a genuinely useful way both for the developer who will implement them (probably me) and for the mission designer who will use them to create missions (also probably me).
But that is the less glamorous work. The truly exciting part is always the idea-generation sessions in our brainstorming meetings 😄
Chris, the Syndicate’s new 3D modeler, has joined our weekly meetings. This means that, alongside the concept art Reid has been working on, we should soon be able to share character models with you too.
By the way, Reid is currently drawing a floor plan of the city. This will finally give us the sense of scale that the project has really needed.
That led to the first building concept for the area we currently call the “Yellow District” (we will keep the details secret for now 😈).
I could not wait, so I went ahead and started working from that concept as it was. Using the game engine and mapping tools, I built the first blockout (graybox) of the district.
The purpose of the blockout is to understand the scale of the city. Specifically, we are checking things like: “Is the scale right?”, “Are the streets too narrow or too wide?”, “Are the buildings the right height?”, and “Is there enough space for all the features we want to implement?” Most importantly, we are asking ourselves whether we can imagine that walking around this city will be fun, or whether getting around will feel tedious. This also includes gameplay checks such as whether it is possible to travel by jumping across rooftops.
Of course, it is too early to draw conclusions about these things at this stage, but this is how I am spending my weekends for now 😋
Next steps
- Continue reviewing Zero’s work on the NEM documentation
- Complete the merge of the Symbol documentation branch into the main development branch.
- Add the user guide for the Symbol mobile wallet.
- Continue the weekly brainstorming sessions for the game and, if time allows, work on creating and revising the game design document (GDD).
- 🌞 Go on summer vacation! I will take a few days off in August, retreat to the countryside with a notebook but without a laptop. The last time I did this, I completed “Astra Ignota”, so I am really looking forward to this trip too! 😄
Thank you for reading this far. See you again next month!
Xavi (Japanese translation by Radio)