TL;DR
We will create a set of tools that will help big groups of people (1k+) to create imaginary worlds and live through adventures inside those worlds. Imagine Dungeons & Dragons or Microscope with a fully on-chain world & characters and smart contracts based game mechanics and events managed by the community DAO.
To make it happen various NFT and DAO tools will be developed for creators to be able to launch creative NFT and DAO projects smooth and easy.
Why
I was always been fascinated by stories - I think they are deeply ingrained in our DNA and that everyone could be a storyteller. Stories engage, influence, teach and inspire listeners and during the last few years, I’ve discovered the joy of playing TRPGs or writing collaborative novels with a small group of friends.
While it was a great experience we’ve faced various problems along the way:
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How do you make a safe and inclusive environment?
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How to incentivize people contribute according to guidelines so the story will not go sideways?
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How to keep people engaged?
And when it will be not 5 but 500 people contributing to the story all those problems will become truly painful.
And I think that DAOs to control different characters/nations/creatures inside this world mixed with tools for NFTs creation are perfect tools to solve those problems and make sure everyone could freely interact with each other but not ruin the experience.
But creating the DAO or even mint a series of specific NFTs from scratch for your own story/world without developer experience is a really steep learning curve, thus core goal of this project is to have a platform where you could create/join an imaginary world as smooth as possible.
Even beyond that - we plan to make those tools generic enough so others could widen what is possible with NFT and DAO by allowing them easily launch & experiment without prior smart contract development experience.
What (roadmap + metrics + $50k funds distribution)
Interactive NFT tools ($16k & 12 weeks in total)
Roadmap
An initial set of tools that will be released:
- First of all, we need to create tools to make experiments with complex/interactive/dynamic NFTs easy to launch. We will create https://www.nftarmory.me (also take a look at https://transmuter.gg) kind of service for easy experiments with NFTs and metadata for developers and artists. (4 weeks before mainnet launch, $6k budget)
- After NFTs experiment platform will be ready we will launch a series of NFT experiments (6 weeks for all stages, $8k budget, 1.5-2k people onboarded):
- Create a series of dynamic & interactive HTML NFTs - when NFT visualization depends on the time of the day & year. That will act as a promo for the overall project - we will hide puzzles inside those NFTs that you could solve by interacting with NFTs in a certain moment of time to discover more NFTs to mint as an incentive. (1 week)
- Experiment with interactive NFTs when you could not only interact with your NFTs but collaborate with other NFT holders from within your NFT. In v1 we plan to create a “tavern” NFT that you could own and other “characters” NFTs could visit it by using their interactive stateful NFTs. So it’s an exploration of NFT capabilities in regard to fully decentralized gaming/interaction when all you need is just a few NFT holders who want to interact together. This part will act as a promo for the overall project and ability to create such kinds of NFTs on your own will be added to the tool from 1st step. (2.5 weeks)
- Evolving NFTs - create mutable Tamagotchi-like (or Pokemon if you want
) NFTs that evolve based on different rules (also add a feature to create such kinds of NFTs to the tool mentioned in 1.). So basically that combination of stateful and interactive NFTs. In parallel will be added feature to create them-able NFTs - when only critical metadata is minted on-chain along with the current theme link, with the ability to change NFT “skins” in the future (skins/themes will be stored on-chain as sprites in common format). (2.5 weeks)
- NFT factory feature will be added to allow store heavy NFT assets (like sprites & code) separately from the code which is used to reassemble NFTs. That will allow reduce NFTs to their essence and have multiple “interpretations” - for example your character in Lord of the Rings universe will look totally different from Star Wars universe while preserving key traits when you transition it between those worlds/games. Also, that’s important for scaling fully on-chain NFTs - you only need to mint assets once and then could create thousands of generative NFTs with metadata only and still have everything on-chain ($2k budget, 1.5 weeks)
All experimental NFTs will be released under CC0 to allow all kinds of derivatives.
Storytelling DAO tools ($34k & 24 weeks in total)
Roadmap
When all the NFT parts will be in place next step is to launch a toolkit that will help people create DAOs focused on minting and management of NFTs to actually create stories and TRPG worlds.
The current biggest problem with the majority of DAOs is engagement - so the core purpose of the platform will be to make it super easy to contribute, stay informed without information overload, and also create a set of custom worldbuilding and TRPGs smart contracts that could be used as plug’n’play addons within DAO. But first of all we need to define a minimal set of smart contracts, so we will launch more experiments with users who own NFTs from all previous experiments (also to get more users and more feedback to understand what people want the most):
- Dungeon crawl DAO experiment - the first experiment will be collaborative dungeon crawling where participants will enter the dungeon using their NFTs and vote for which decisions they should take as a group. Will be created in “5 room dungeon” format. The experiment will be based on stateful NFTs and managing the state of those NFTs through DAO will be the first feature in the DAO toolkit (also “burn approval” will be added to NFT toolkit so people who enter the dungeon could approve that if things will go sideways and their characters die it’s NFT will be burned). ($8k budget, 6 weeks)
- Experiment with worldbuilding and storytelling with 100 people grouped in multiple DAOs playing in a small world encapsulated as NFT trying to reach their goals during 1-2 weeks of collaboration facing various events happening in the world. During this step core smart contracts toolkit will be created to have more sophisticated DAO tools for playing TRPGs. ($13k budget, 8 weeks, not including 2 weeks of running the experiment)
- Bigger experiment with around 500 people (if the 3.2 will run well) with splitting control on NFT state between multiple DAOs (i.e. enabling few people to control one in-game entity) to see how well this solution could scale and to test how multiple DAOs could collaborate and what exactly needed for effective collaboration. (To be honest, this stage is still not crystal clear for me in terms of which contracts are 100% needed, but I think it will take around 2 months to fully launch the experiment and narrow down the set of contracts, so I estimate to spend about $13k during this stage).
- After 3 will be finished and an initial set of tools will be in place we plan to finally start building a bigger world where people will be able to freely join DAOs from 3rd experiment and expand the world and the story. If things will go well we plan to onboard about 3-4k people (including the 1-2k from NFT experiments) during the first month.
Final words + links
If we could hit 1k WAU at the end of the year and not explode or become a total mess in terms of created worlds that will be a pretty big success
Right now it is still very early and there are some problems that could break everything, but even if that will be the case the tools to simplify NFT and DAO experiments will be here to stay to help creators to launch their ideas on Harmony fast and smooth.
Since the project is still very early there is no demo yet, so instead I will provide a link to my own portfolio so you could see who I am and what I’ve built in the past (long story short - I’ve spent the last 7 years in startups, building products and teams, mostly in pre-product-market fit and early growth stages as a founding full-stack engineer or engineering lead).
Also because the project is split into milestones with multiple smaller launches I’m not sure how I should ask for funds to be released (obv if you also think that this project is a good fit for a grant)?
