If this is the first time hearing about Revelar, we are the NFT Game Engine building API’s to generate, mint, manage, and provide on chain analytics for game developers on Cardano. It’s a platform as a service for developers to launch & manage their games on-chain, with a healthy mix of open source resources, business operation transparency, and community engagement. As a funded proposer, we have been encouraged by other members of the Catalyst community to see if there is enough value/vision at this point in time to be fully community funded for 2022 with our general operations budget.
Our request is for Revelar Operations funding which will cover our costs and needs to contribute on this project as a core team full time. Since this is a fairly new request from Catalyst, we have allocated time and budget to clearly document expenses, categorize them, and make them publicly available if funded. We hope this gives other startups insight to running an operation early on, as well as fiscal accountability to our team.
The impact of this funding would allow us to spend the time needed for research & community testing of our NFT Game engine, engage outside developer communities, and create quality tooling with high uptime and robust infrastructure.
It’s worth noting that we have budgeted this for operations, and we would be funding the rest of Revelar’s expenses through other engineering focused proposals and revenue from our products. This gives us good community feedback on priorities and a balance of accountability.
In alignment with the campaign brief, Revelar is an application with underlying infrastructure creating a reliable and fast process for game developers to build on Cardano. As the first platform focused on the gaming tools for Cardano, we are already educating players and developers on other platforms with our NFT Gaming Podcast, collaborating with marketplaces for open standards, and creating open sourced guides on low cost node deployment and management to increase decentralization.
KPI’s for us as a team are attracting NET NEW game projects to Cardano. While we could aim to focus on current teams building on existing projects or creating new games, our goal is to attract brand new teams & their communities with easy to use tooling and education. Each one of these is a new application to grow our Cardano community and the diversity in the overall gaming community.
Success for us is 25 NET NEW Games on Cardano, powered by Revelar in the next 12 months.
Our world today is full of risks, especially with the unknown nature of our global economy & workforce. The largest challenges for our goal of adding in outside developer teams to build NFT Games with Revelar on Cardano are the following:
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Death by success: Trying to onboard too many excited early customers to try and self fund with revenue. Since primary revenue is earned at mint, often infrastructure is underwhelming, under tested, and fails. *We aim to solve this by using a launchpad application approach to run several scaling cohorts through, allowing us to vet early projects for alignment, as well as capitalize (this proposal) in advance to spend the time and resources with support staff, testing, and infrastructure for better launches.
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Subjective budgeting: Every team builds and spends differently. A risk if funded is being transparent with the community through open accounting on what we are spending. Thankfully the Catalyst team allocates awarded funds in traunches and as we report our progress every month for ongoing funding. *To create accountability and offset this risk we use them as a community arbiter to review our spending & hold us accountable by withholding or delaying funds if we abuse the budget.
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Software delays: Show me software shipped on time, I’ll show you a software riddled with bugs. This is the largest risk with any DApp project due to unknowns of this decentralized frontier and new technology that becomes available along the way. *Our approach is to keep it simple solving 80% of the problem early on with known systems and infrastructure approaches from our previous experience. This means limited complexity with smart contracts and a focus on scalable simple solutions with business processes (like 24/7 customer support, dedicated QA) that often save time by solving problems early and supporting customers when systems break.
We have also partnered with a contracted dev shop as needed for 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 three 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.