Please describe your proposed solution.
Video gaming is a booming billion-dollar industry that is expected to rise enormously in the following decade. The boundaries between gaming as leisure and profit-making activity have already become blurred, but we are not happy with the results so far.
Rookiez is the first decentralized blockchain-based motorcycle racing platform that joins racing enthusiasts in a community where you train your NFT riders, mint new NFT motorcycles based on your research, and scout new NFT riders who can become future champions. However, Rookiez is not meant to be a play-to-earn game. We don’t like the direction that many self-proclaimed “play-to-earn” games are going, simply because the first goal for any game should be for the players to have fun.
In our vision players own their assets, and they can decide what to do with them. If a player trains a brilliant rider for years and (after all of this effort) decides to sell them for profit, it’s not our business. We just want to make sure that players have an enjoyable experience with a first-class management game.
Currently, the game is in the advanced prototype stage and there is another proposal I wrote to facilitate its completion in a very short time: Rookiez - Decentralized Motorcycle Racing Manager Game - Completion and release of a playable prototype. However, this is using temporary assets, both for the 3D models and the 2D graphics that the NFTs are using. While this is totally acceptable for a prototype, it is necessary to replace those with more professional and better-looking assets.
Also, the game backend is running on a single virtual machine hosted in a cloud provider, therefore there is not high availability, and any issue will result in the game not being accessible. My plan is to migrate the backend to a more resilient infrastructure, running in a cluster with a true high availability setup.
Last but not least, we also need to acquire and customize several different race tracks for the start of the official championship, which should happen shortly before the deployment of the new backend server, allowing us to release a more complete beta version of the game a few months after this deployment. The same artist who made the training track (which will be included in the playable prototype linked above) already has the tracks for sale and will apply the necessary customizations required for Rookiez.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
While there are plenty of NFT projects that allow the owners to use those assets in some kinds of games, Rookiez takes a totally different approach: It's a game that uses NFTs for assets.
This sounds tautological but there's a big difference: there are no tokens, no NFT marketplace, and no pre-sale because all the NFTs are minted directly from the game when the players decide so. The mint price of those assets will be particularly low because the real value of these assets depends on the player, the strategy he/she applied, and the improvements that this strategy will bring in the long term, making them more competitive.
In the "traditional" game-dev community there are still many doubts (and, often, prejudices) about NFT technology. Being an indie game developer myself, I think that most of this negativity is difficult to dissipate mostly because of the lack of inclusivity that practically every project seems to show, from the traditional video-gamer player point of view: usually, the first thing that happens is the sale of NFTs, which are supposed to become in-game assets for that specific project, often for an incredible floor-price. With Rookiez I'm directly addressing this issue.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
I want to show the gaming industry, with a specific focus on indie game developers, that thanks to Cardano it is possible, and somewhat easy, to deploy a different kind of business model, therefore driving more adoption for the Cardano ecosystem. I think that releasing a working prototype with great visuals and beautiful NFT art will encourage other developers into following a similar path and drive more adoption by onboarding gamers.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
The progress will be documented using the social media platforms of choice (Twitter and Discord) with regular updates (not less than once per week). Feedback from the community will be extremely helpful and being active on those platforms is a real priority.
Communication and engagement with the community are very important for the success of any game, and for this reason, I decided to submit a dedicated proposal: Rookiez - Decentralized Motorcycle Racing Manager Game - Website and Community engagement