Duo is the flagship game being built by Revelar, the NFT Game Engine on Cardano. We started by exploring many different game mechanics and designing a fun and repeatable gameplay as a quick fun social humor game.
For Alpha we are adding in our tokenomic research to build a full play-to-earn model. Initially this will start with test tokens to balance out the in game economy, while pressure testing how players try and break things. (Our favorite part too) We believe it’s important to use the tools you build, but Revelar was born out of a lack of tools that served our needs as NFT Game makers.
This Duo mobile app will let us explore how players want to primarily engage with our game - either via web app or a native mobile experience. The acceleration of a mobile app build allows us to increase access around the world (like with our language translation proposals) to emerging ecosystems and find a fit for our game that helps grow the global gaming focus on Cardano.
Large, well known Ethereum titles like Axie Infinity found product market fit in the Philippines where they had ~10x the Daily Active Users (DAU) than the US market. If we don’t enable mobile support in these emerging countries we don’t have good data on demand around the game since an overwhelming majority of their online time is spend on mobile devices.
This mobile app will have feature parity with our web app allowing the user to play Duo through the following core phases:
- Connecting and verifying wallet assets (Duo Cards)
- Putting Cards into Gameplay
- Joining Rounds via open Matchmaking
- Voting and playing a round of Duo
- Earning test tokens to simulate rewards
- Community voting of ongoing rounds through Fan Favorite Selections (FFS Points)
- Purchasing new Cards
Gaming is a core attraction to any modern blockchain and we believe short social gameplay experiences like Duo add a rich flavor to onboarding the casual gamer category. Beyond this, once they experience a Play-To-Earn mechanic that is based on a Cardano native token, players are less likely to completely move off the Cardano blockchain.
We believe that Duo can rapidly accelerate with a “simple” game that can educate new players into the P2E model while providing context for other games on how to create sustainable ecosystems, or certainly learnings of what not to do! Duo directly aligns with the Challenge KPI’s as we can measure the direct number of NFT’s created for this game, new players onboarded, and if the tokenomic models are used in other CNFT games.
Our world today is full of risks, especially with the unknown nature of our global economy & workforce.
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Death by Success: Launching an App for a game that becomes popular and can quickly onboard thousands of users overnight creates a big technical burden. We aim to limit this with limited NFT Card Deck releases to ensure that we can track the upper limit of potential players in the app. We will also require a player login with a Duo NFT in order to play, thus limiting server side resources.
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Software delays: Show me software shipped on time, I’ll show you software riddled with bugs. While we are scoping a reasonable timeline to ship a React Native app, managing Apple’s requirements can drag out verification and launch on the App Store. We can mitigate this with using iOS and Android core UI components with limited modifications and keeping the gameplay simple with animations for v1. Also allowing for a bit of extra review time.
We have also partnered with a contracted dev shop as needed for Native App engineering overflow needs. It’s a known team for us and they work on enterprise FinTech software deployments around the globe. Reference available upon request. https://www.excellarate.com/
There are likely other risks, but we believe these are the primary ones to take into account and mitigate along the way. Again keeping in line with the Challenge Brief, we want to deliver the highest value with the least amount of technical sophistication to grow the community.