Ecosystem Grant Application - Crypto Unicorns Evolution Tool [Development]

[PlaycoreBD]

Summary

The Crypto Unicorns Evolution Tool is a game analytics tool that seeks to provide users with strategic data and deep insights into the evolution mechanics of the game. The Evolution Tool will be developed by the team behind BreederDAO’s Playcore (an analytics and content aggregator for blockchain gaming).

Motivation

Through close collaboration with Laguna Games, the Playcore team previously had the chance to create a fully-functional Breeding Tool for the Crypto Unicorn (CU) ecosystem that allowed users to analyze and delve deeper into one of the game’s core mechanics—breeding.

The next logical step then after the Breeding Tool is the proposed “Evolution Tool” which, among others, aims to provide new users with a good understanding of the flow of Crypto Unicorns’ breeding mechanics (i.e., from Breeding → Hatching → Evolution).

Unicorn Lifecycle (source: Crypto Unicorns Whitepaper V2)

Playcore, a product under BreederDAO’s ecosystem, is applying for a grant that would support the development of the Evolution Tool.

The data and information will be directly sourced from the Crypto Unicorns team for the development of the tool. As the genes of each Unicorn define a distinctive skill set that makes them highly proficient in various battle loops such as jousting and racing, the Evolution Tool, together with the Breeding Tool, will help the gamers come up with the best decisions and strategies.

Details

The Evolution Tool will take in and process the following data inputs: (1) baby unicorn’s ID and (2) evolution booster intended to be used. Once the necessary information is provided, the tool will then generate the following output (upgrades): the baby unicorn’s name, class, number of mythic parts, gene display (original), stats and the potential gene upgrade results.

Evolution Tool Design Mockup

The Evolution Tool will be displayed and can be accessed on Playcore’s website, under Crypto Unicorns’ game page at PlayCore by BreederDAO.

Development of the tool will start as soon as the grant is approved, and is estimated to have a cumulative development time of 1-1.5 months. This includes design iterations with Laguna Games, actual development period, and logic and functionality testing.

Aside from the simplified user experience that such tools provide, the Playcore team also works directly with Laguna Games and thus, any changes and updates will be implemented to ensure that the tool the community is using is up-to-date and available. Iterations pass through review of both the Playcore team and the Crypto Unicorns team before sign-off. As the game evolves, we can ensure that the collaboration between the teams will keep up with the pace of developments to improve such tools for the community.

Grant Amount (Revised)

The development of the evolution tool is proposed to have a one time allocation of 400,000 RBW (estimated 9,700 USD), which will be disbursed at the end of the month following the release of the tool to the community. This amount will be used to support the following:
- The Development of the initial stable version of the Evolution tool and
- The constant updates (for any game changes) and maintenance for the tool for a span of six months (The duration is to ensure that the community will be able to reassess if such a tool is still useful to maintain given further changes in the game).

Important note on the revision of the grant amount:

We sincerely thank the community for its constructive feedback and comments. The Playcore took them into consideration in recalibrating the grant request to what we believed was fair and reasonable given the value that the Evolution Tool will be able to provide to the Crypto Unicorns ecosystem.

Accordingly, we are revising the initial grant proposal of 1,250,000 RBW (estimated 30,000 USD or 10,000 USD per month, over the course of three months) by altering the proposed product features and reducing the requested grant amount to the aforementioned amount of 400,000 RBW.

For purposes of clarification, the rationale behind the initial amount are the following:

1. Larger scope of work. The initial coverage of the proposal intended for the original three month duration was to cover the (1) development of the initial ready version of the evolution tool, (2) the UX/UI improvements and logic updates for the existing breeding tool and the new evolution tool, and (3) further analytics dashboard development for in-game analytics. We recognize that the team has not clearly stated these in the initial proposal, as these will require further pre-work for clarification.

2. Average developer salary and initial project duration. Estimated average backend developer salary ($90,652 annually / $7,554 monthly) plus estimated average frontend developer salary ($77,741 annually / $6,478 monthly) totals more than >13,000 USD per month. With an initial project duration of three months, the total of 10,000 USD * 3 months = 30,000 USD was deemed a reasonable and discounted estimate. This is exclusive of costs relating to infrastructure upkeep, project management costs, testing, and other intangible costs.

We took the time to fully consider the community’s sentiments and deemed it appropriate and fair to scale down the proposal to the development of the stable initial version of the Evolution Tool and constant updating and maintenance only, and to reserve the proposals for the UX/UI improvement of the tools and analytics dashboards in separate proposals (as necessary) to empower the community to decide on these matters separately.

We’ve also consulted with our internal game experts for the estimated development time of one month (or up to 1.5 months for safe measure) for a stable version of the tool, considering its less complex logic as compared to breeding (which took two months of iterations with Laguna Games, including logic changes and clarifications, design feedback, testing, etc.).

With this adjusted rate, we hope the community finds the new proposed amount as fair and commensurate with the resources needed to develop a useful tool for the community (plus its maintenance and updates, as necessary).

Conclusion

Once the Governance Council initially approves this proposal for the community vote, the following will be the choices:

   - Approve Evolution Tool Development Grant
   - Reject Evolution Tool Development Grant

The grant will support the Playcore team’s efforts to develop a useful, efficient and seamless tool for the Crypto Unicorns’ community.

This proposal is also timely as this new strategic tool will complement the timing of the community’s decision on the direction of the Team RPG game, the expected release of another jousting season, the launch of other mini-games and, of course, the continuous progress of Crypto Unicorn’s land gameplay.

The grant will help enable the Playcore team to support the Crypto Unicorns ecosystem by developing analytical tools that are free, intuitive, and accessible. We hope that this will empower and encourage the Crypto Unicorns community to always make informed, optimized and efficient game decisions.

The ultimate goal of Playcore is to aid Web3 gamers in making data-driven decisions to better their gameplay and experience. We are committed to improving your experience in tandem with the CU team and the community and are looking forward to the approval and passing of this proposal.

[lgManicUnicorn]

We appreciate all the work that BreederDAO has put into the Breeding Tool. Our data team has been closely working with BreederDAO for this.

PS: Note that all proposals can be negotiated, so please feel free to negotiate in the comment section. Ultimately, we leave it to the DAO to negotiate what is best.

[alriad]

The Playcore Breeding tool has been a smooth experience and has been successful in helping players, both new and current players seeking to strategize breeding and understand chances for passing on parts.

However, it has been brought up that some of the numbers are inaccurate (specifically with crossing mythics). Will this be resolved with the breeding tool before this evolution tool grant is up for vote?

Furthermore it would be appreciated to have a breakdown on why 1.25 million RBW is needed to make an evolution tool (as evolution numbers are much more straightforward compared to breeding/cloning/crossing mythics). What advantage will this have over currently available free spreadsheets provided by members of the community?

[Venticello]

Thanks for the proposal, but I don’t understand why such a useless tool costs so much money?
You didn’t even bother to make a layout for the genes, just copied the breeding layouts, and did not learn how it all works, since the external parts do not evolve. And high-level genes have such small chances that you cannot predict the outcome of evolution even approximately to the real one.

[Serghio]

1. Why ~30k$ for the tool? Why not 50k$, for ex.?
2. We already have breeding emulator for free in tg bot. Why need one more tool?
3. Make better visualization for breeding and evolution in game.

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Base% 100%-base

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With boost

Success

V

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New part
________________V
IxxxxxxI-------------------------------I

It’s more useful

[kora]

Could you explain in more detail where this cost breakdown is going?

I would expect the evolution tool to be at most ~2hrs dev time + maybe a few days for QA/UAT and deployment to production.

Is this primarily a UI/UX lift then?

Is it to cover the expected costs for running simulations upon request?

[RXIS]

Most concerns I have, have already been raised.

I feel this proposal is premature, especially since we have not received any response on why the percentages that the breeding tool provides appear to be inaccurate, in some cases quite significantly so. In my opinion, this needs to be addressed before even considering further development by the same party.

Second, the cost seems rather exorbitant for what should be mainly a “copy-paste” exercise, seeing how the data is readily available and community tools already exist. It would be great if

1. a cost breakdown can be provided
2. a clear value proposition could be set up to describe what the benefits over existing tools would be

In its current form, this is a clear no from me.

[REQuiem]

$31,000 in RBW seems extremely high for something so simple. Evolution is just base stats +20% with better odds using boosters.

The grant should be a fraction of that…

[OnnGusta]

Thanks for the proposal .

Anyway , I’m pretty against towards this proposal . Here is why :

1. Their previous tool isn’t accurate enough , me and some of my friends were trying out the tools , but at which their data isn’t accurate enough . Im using a Telegram bot by Venticello . His bot helps us a lot for breeding and evolution

2. OVERPRICED COST , building a tool for 31k worth of RBW? I don’t think this is reasonable . Some people are just using excel for calculating the genes ratios .

In conclusion , this proposal isn’t logic at all . Also , it isn’t necessary imo . There are different way to learn how to breed .

[enillyddjens]

Imo, this proposal won’t even pass through the temperature check. Everyone who’s familiar and interested in breeding are familiar with Venticello’s telegram bot / Hawku’s representation of genes / checked the breeding strategy pinned messages / maybe people also saw Nowan’s way of visualizing the procces, so people know how it works.
No communicating with community, pure monetisation for a hardly useful tool. Excuse me for the overly harsh statements. Total “NO” from me.

[AldanAlx]

I am 100% against this happening with ecosystem grants. Except you guys want to make it for free and just take comunity donations and then you wont need a proposal for it anyway.

First thing, the breeding tool is somehow good, but the math behind it is totally wrong for some scenarios involving mythics. Our breeders talked extensively about this in discord and you guys havent even bottered checking.

Second, anyone who understands the mechanics behind evolution knows how completely useless this would be. I cant even call it a tool, its more like those online slot machines you play with virtual coins for free that are completely unrelated to the real deal. I can explain anyone evolution in 30 seconds, its a simple plain odds game.

Bottom line is: you wanna make comunity tools, thats great, but going for ecosystem grants for something that doesnt add any value to the ecosystem is plain wrong and I am totally against it.

l.e.: it appears Playcore is not responsible for wrong odds on the breeding tool. Nevertheless point 2 still stands and Im am still totally against this evo “tool” being paid with eco grants.

[Segarion]

LG already plans to make something ingame to assist with gene visibility. I would wait for what the ingame feature would look like even though it’s much further down the road but at least we’re not facing a stacking of tools that have the same purpose.

[GoliathRulz]

While we appreciate the efforts to put the breeding toolset together this is a toolset that is unnecessary. There is already a 1-pager that explains Evolution out there and how it works. The basic concepts of Evolution are not that complex and are really… “use a booster if you think it is worth it and then sacrifice your offering to the RNG gods”. It’s not that complex, and the booster % benefits are also included when you add them. Not much more to do. The development of a tool for Evolution is just to develop a tool for the sake of developing.

I am all for tech and added tools but not tools for the purpose of just doing it to do it.

[Sky1s]

1,250,000 RBW for this is to much

[lg-Jeff]

This is lgJeff from Laguna Games. The incorrect math was my mistake. I gave the incorrect logic for inheriting parts when two Unicorns of the same class breed. We are sending PlayCore the correct logic. I’ve verified that the math for how parts roll is correct. Once the logic is updated, the math will be fixed.

This was my mistake and PlayCore executed correctly on everything that we gave them. So I wouldn’t judge PlayCore on their ability to execute on this.

[Kice]

expensive and unnecessary

[KeizerMc]

Thank you for your efforts,

I appreciate the tool creation for this matter. I have been reviewing and seeing the discussions about this and I would politely decline on this for now due to the following reasons :

1. If it was a pack of breeder and evolution set and was given initially. I may have sway my vote to yes because of the accessibility.
2. It is too expensive at this time while there are much more basic competitors that are in the community.

I honestly was not confident of the tool because of the first hand experience i had with the breeder tool. I am sure that it will be fixed but i think the timing of this Evo tool is a bit early if there was no confirmation of the Breeder portion getting fixed.

Let us know what will be your measures and hopefully a breakdown as to why it is spent like that so the public could understand the expense.

Thank you! .

[VonNuemann]

I am going to politely say: LMAO bruh what.
Can I get 5k USD for this response? It took me 11 seconds.

[sauliusj.eth]

From my point of view it’s waste of money, this picture explains even more…

[PlaycoreBD]

Thank you for all the feedback so far! Playcore is always committed to developing tools in tandem with the Crypto Unicorns’ team that align with the community’s needs. We’re currently refining our proposal based on your suggestions. Please continue to share your thoughts and feel free to reach out with any additional feedback.