__Gotchi Battler__

Ideas
1

Hey frens,

I want to introduce a project I’ve been working on for a couple of months now, Gotchi Battler:

Sound on for the trailer! :sunglasses:

Overview

Gotchi Battler is an auto battler game where 2 teams of 5 gotchis battle each other until 1 team is wiped out. Each Gotchis stats and special move will be determined by its traits. To set up a good team you’ll have to strategise what types of Gotchis mix well together and what formation the team should be in. Once you’ve set up the team you can sit back and watch your strategy play out in an epic Gotchi battle to the death!

Motivations

This game is created as a different form of Rarity Farming. It aims to carry on the meta of Rarity Farming whilst also introducing some teamplay, tactics and randomness. There are elements of ARS as well, where the highest stat of your Gotchi dictates its special move, which is key to the strategy of setting up a team.

Tournaments

As the game is an auto battler it lends itself perfectly to being on-chain. Given a random seed a battle will play out the same way every time, meaning you can organise trustless on-chain events with provable randomness. These events could be, for example, large scale tournaments to distribute protocol rewards. The tournament could work as a double-elimination bracket, meaning each team would get at least 2 battles before being eliminated. There could be up to 4096 teams entered (this would be 20,480 gotchis) and the top 512 teams get paid. For a 100,000 GHST prize pool the payouts could something like this:

Place Prize (in GHST)
1 10,000
2 6,000
3 3,000
4 2,000
5-8 1,270
9-16 760
17-32 500
33-64 310
65-128 200
129-256 120
257-512 85

Watching these tournaments play out could be a really fun community event and introduce a more engaging way to distribute protocol rewards. As the game develops out of MVP the depth and complexity can be increased to make sure the meta always stays fresh and there are new strategies being developed when setting up a team of Gotchis.

Game Design Document

Gotchi Battler

The game design document lays out the battle mechanics for the MVP including examples of how stats and mechanics are calculated. Couple of points to keep in mind:

  • This is very much a first draft and every single detail at this point is mutable.
  • The MVP is kept deliberately restrained in its complexity to simplify development time and to keep the game as accessible and simple for users as possible.

Funding

Yes I know, everyone is totally sick of funding requests! However, this project will require a team of people working on it so there needs to be some form of funding and I want to present a couple of different options:

Option 1

This is the traditional form of funding we’re seeing at the moment. Ask for roughly $150k of funding from the DAO treasury, hire a web3 dev, a web2 dev, a designer, a game dev and build an MVP in around 3 months. Nothing wrong with this approach and I have a tonne of experience as both a technical manager and developer to deliver a project like this. I appreciate there’s a lot of fatigue surrounding this model right now though.

Option 2

I continue to fund this project privately and I will contribute as much of my own time and resources as I can to complete an MVP of the project. If this option is chosen then a 10% setup fee would be charged from the prize pool for every battle/event/tournament that takes place in the game (pending IP rights from PC). This would be the riskier option for me but could turn out to be profitable if the game is popular but more expensive to the DAO in the long run.

Possible Future Expansions

PvE

Instead of battling each other, a team of Gotchis could battle their way through a dungeon ending with a boss battle at the end.

Wearable specials

Instead of the Gotchis traits determining which special moves it has, each hand wearable could have its own special move. This would increase the complexity a lot but also add much more variety to the game and deepen the tactics.

Feedback

Thanks for reading frens, really excited to hear the community’s feedback on the concept, mechanics and funding options :v:

18 Likes
2

I love it.

We need to upgrade our rewards gamification, and you’re killing it on multiple levels here…

  1. Its like a RF tournament.
  2. Its playable by a large bag annd small bag
  3. It gives pvp type value to gear without requiring owner to involve scholars or bots
  4. It bites off of final fantasy, the most understood mechanic in rpg history
5 Likes
3

Thank you for your effort.

This is brilliant idea. Even that I have weak gotchis, I love that whales could battle it out, definetelly to I would watch that :smiley:

I guess you could rent gotchis for your team? Somebody might not be able to form whole team without it.

Maybe would be cool to have weight classes as well (based on total BRS of whole team)… more metas, more engangement from the community.

3 Likes
4

Sounds awesome, Only thing is… at first glance it sounds very pricey for an auto battler MVP.

5

Renting would depend on the implementation. You could pay the prize to the address that submitted the team or you could split the prize 5 ways and send to the gotchi pockets.

In terms of weight classes for a competition, yes that’s certainly possible :+1:

1 Like
6

Many different factors to consider here:

  1. Should you use cost-based or value-based pricing here? Should the product be supplied to the community at cost price or based on how much the product is worth to the community?
  2. Assuming cost price then how many hours at what price? $150,000 @ $100/hour is 1,500 hours. Split between 5 people that’s 300 hours per person. I’ve already spent around 300 hours getting the project to this point and there’s still a very long way to go.
7

In concept it seems fun. I played Axie Infinity and early Illuvium beta, these games can be highly addicting when executed well.

Zygo was working on an Auto-battler just before the Arena was released. Do you see battler gameplay competing with the Arena? Seems like PVP gameplay will be dominated by the Arena, especially when we can host our own instances.

If this ends up competing with the Arena or is not fun/engaging enough, the only incentive to play will be the DAO supplying capital for rewards, which would not be ideal.

Second point is the budget; doing a quick GPT search based on your required dev resources gives this sort of rough break-down;

"To estimate the cost of building a blockchain-enabled auto-battler game using NFTs, we need to consider the hourly rates for each role involved. The actual costs may vary depending on factors such as location, experience, and project complexity. Here’s a rough estimate based on average hourly rates:

  1. Blockchain Developer: $50 - $100 per hour
  2. React Developer: $40 - $80 per hour
  3. Designer: $30 - $60 per hour
  4. Game Developer: $40 - $80 per hour

Assuming the workload is evenly distributed among the team members (375 hours each), we can calculate the cost for each role and sum them up:

  1. Blockchain Developer: 375 hours * $50 - $100 = $18,750 - $37,500
  2. React Developer: 375 hours * $40 - $80 = $15,000 - $30,000
  3. Designer: 375 hours * $30 - $60 = $11,250 - $22,500
  4. Game Developer: 375 hours * $40 - $80 = $15,000 - $30,000

Adding all the costs together, we get:

$18,750 - $37,500 (Blockchain Developer) + $15,000 - $30,000 (React Developer) + $11,250 - $22,500 (Designer) + $15,000 - $30,000 (Game Developer) = $60,000 - $120,000

Thus, the estimated cost to build a blockchain-enabled auto-battler game using NFTs, with 1500 hours of work, would be approximately $60,000 to $120,000. Keep in mind that this is a rough estimate, and the actual cost could vary depending on the factors mentioned earlier."

IMO the rates you provide are high given a competitive hiring environment right now. Even if you take the highest possible rates available the ask is still significantly higher than the upper limit.

Not saying the cost is unjustified, but rather if it is. A detailed breakdown of the specific tasks for each role and hours allocated to each task would give a much better idea.

For reference, Zygo’s auto-battler proposal was quoting a total 18,000 GHST over 33 weeks of development.

Here is another source to back up my point;

4 Likes
8

How come your chat-gpt says 50 an hour and mine always says 150 to 250? Im having trouble getting reliable estimates from it, which stinks, because this is continually a pain point.

How do we get past this? Put up ad trying to hire at 50 and see what happens? If so… where do we put test ad, because we have a slew of ideas needing more affordable dev work.

If we can get to where a well thought out idea written in proper tech specs is enough… we can fly to the moon.

Our big downfall always seems to be that any one of us thats qualified to do the work obviously has great career and is working overtime to do this stuff. We need US to design stuff, but we need hungry devs to build it, not frustrated community members grinding out their 60 to 100th hour of the week.

1 Like
9

Hi Hefe, did you manage to watch the trailer? The term auto battler can mean different things so that may cause confusion but I’m not sure how this would compete with the aarena as they are completely different genres of game?

In terms of the funding, couple of points:

  1. The 150k was a only ballpark figure from my end based on my experience in the industry and my understanding of the project having got it to this point. I havent started building the team yet and therefore havent had time or monetary estimates done. It was purely to give a comparison of the funding options I proposed.
  2. In your example you missed off the 300 hours I’ve already spent on the project and the ongoing managing/directing work.
  3. If you dont have knowledge/experience working in or managing technical projects then Chat GPT could give you a very rough idea but like Hardkor pointed out, it can give you very different results even if you ask the same question twice. So by all means use it an extremely rough sense checking tool but remember there’s far more nuance to any project than what chat gpt can understand with a 1 or 2 sentence prompt.

If we decide to go the DAO treasury route to fund this project they’ll be a way more detailed proposal with timings and hourly rates so either wait for that or you can always DM me if you want to learn more about the idea and what needs to go into building it.

2 Likes
10

Yeah that’s fair enough, just pointing out my initial gut reaction to the $ price (and someone with only minimal knowledge of game dev and the current market rates,etc). Personally I don’t really care about $/hour or any of that stuff, rather just the potential benefit to the ecosystem vs the depletion of DAO resources.

TBH I’d probably vote for it myself anyway, I think we very much need games like this, over other projects that the DAO is considering funding. If we even got one ‘hit’ game out of several, and it went viral, it could be a massive win.

3 Likes
11

I agree there is nuance and no-doubt game development is no easy task. I’m pointing out the cost here because there is a huge disparity between your ask and a similar game design proposed by another community member, with similar resource demands. Granted, I did watch the trailer, the look and feel is nicer on your version.

Have you spoken to @Zygo at all? It might be a good idea since he seemed really knowledgeable and passionate on this game genre, and also had a basic MVP demo put together already.

12

Hey fren!
I like your concept, reminds me of FF series on auto mode.
Also, if it’s not coop, it looks familiar to me as mybrute (browser game) type of games.

I really like the document with calculations, but biggest point been missed.
Balance and matchmaking mechanics.

I’m not sure how our arena will manage the balance, cuz by now it’s free for all mode, and no ranking weights yet to have a clue.

About your game:
1x1 or 5x5 would need to have matchmaking mode, or, it should have a a dashboard with opened positions of challengers, that you could choose from, and sent the invite, if both agree on eachothers challenge, then the game started.
Otherwise, matchmaking and leaderboard is broken, if randomized in the matter of no “weight” category. We will have the same winners and loosers all the time.
Need to have categories based on BRS.

Also, this game have no point for elo, since there is no “skill” needed, means that no matter how much gosu your are, you will win or loose only based on your pockets (money invested in brs gitchis and wearables)

I’m not happy for the same logic as RF for battling game.

Would be cool to hear your position about this points :slight_smile:

13

Hi Hefe, I’ve tracked down the game you’re talking about: Aavegotchi Battler Gameplay Video - YouTube

Shame it has the same name, I had no idea! As you can see though, it is a totally different genre of game, there’s no crossover there at all.

Looks like development has halted:

image
image756×619 65.1 KB

It’s incredibly hard to build a game by yourself, especially produce something of high quality when you’re just learning game development. You can see Zygo was building this for 1 year and only got halfway through. This is why I want to hire a team of 5 specialists with proven track records to reduce implementation risk as much as possible.

There’s a classic diagram that explains the tradeoff when building a project:
image

The $150k option that I mentioned was in the orange area. If I’m funding the project myself it will be in the purple area but I will then be trying to generate revenue from game so from the DAOs prospective I think it’s pretty well balanced choice between the options. Does the DAO want to pay more money up front for a faster release and free gameplay or pay no money up front, wait longer and then pay for gameplay? Or neither of course! :smile:

4 Likes
14

Hello frens,

Apologies for the lack of updates in the last month, don’t worry though, lots of progress has been happening in the background. I’ve spent the majority of my time writing specifications and recruiting a team and, I’m happy to say, I’ve found a fantastic group of highly skilled individuals from both inside and outside the community who are excited and ready to get started. So we’re now at a crossroads, we have the team and the plan and now the DAO needs to decide whether to fund and own the project.

As a reminder, I previously outlined 2 funding options to the DAO:

  1. The DAO funds and owns the project. This will mean Gotchi battler becomes a public good for the ecosystem and can be used however the DAO sees fit.
  2. The project is privately owned and funded. This will mean Gotchi Battler is built as a product to be monetised. Revenue will come from either fees to play or NFT sales.

The proposal/plan below is for if the DAO funds the project. The timeline and team will differ if the project is privately funded as less funds will be available.

Timeline:

So far I’ve been working solo on the project which has been slow but necessary to establish the product vision and build a text-based prototype of the game. With funding however, we can hire more heads and start moving multiple parts forward in parallel. In the Gannt chart below you can see that in June we can finish the designs and technical specifications before moving on to building all 4 parts of the development work in parallel which will get finished by the end of August. Beginning of September we will aim to release a public beta version of the game and spend the rest of the month on bug fixes and refinement before a public release at the start of October.

image
image1336×560 38.4 KB

Team & costings:

Name: Immaterial (gotchiboard.com)
Role: Ideation, Prototype, Specs, Management, Backend/Frontend dev, Infrastructure.
Monthly cost: $8k
Months of work: 7 (Feb-September)
Total cost: $56k

Coinmandeer (gotchiboard.com)
Role: Designer
Monthly cost: $8k
Months of work: 1
Total cost: $8k

Wildfyr
Role: Battle Mechanics Consultant
Monthly cost: $4k
Months of work: 1
Total cost: $4k

Maxicrouton
Role: Backend specs, ½ Backend API, Smart contracts
Monthly cost: $8k
Months of work: 3.5 (June-August + ½ September)
Total cost: $28k

Eitri (aadventure.io)
Role: Frontend Development
Monthly cost: $8k
Months of work: 2.5 (July-August + ½ September)
Total cost: $20k

Unity Developer (anon)
Role: Unity development
Monthly cost: $8k
Months of work: 2.5 (July-August + ½ September)
Total cost: $20k

Bounties: $10k

Total cost: $146k

Summary:

For a total of $146k we can accelerate the development of Gotchi Battler with a selection of some of the best builders in the community. We will aim for a public beta on September 1st moving towards a general release 1st of October.

11 Likes
15

Thank you for the background information and context with a previous project. I understand your point about having all-hands-on deck with this sort of project rather than delivering a partially completed product, it makes sense.

After recently playing the Illuvium Auto-battler I can attest it to be a fun experience when traits, progression, balance and randomness are navigated effectively and I could totally see something like what you’re proposing filling that genre gap.

After looking at your proposal I have a few questions:

  1. What are your thoughts on trait/power balance? I know these games can take a ton of time to get the balance right. It seems highly possible that one month may not be nearly enough time imo.

  2. It would be helpful to get a risk vs benefit analysis for both options one and two for funding. For example, what would be your projected revenue for this game if you were to monetize it verse the DAO owning rights to the game

Overall feeling bullish on fun auto-battlers lately and we could use a Gotchi Battler

1 Like
16

So I’m working with Wildfyr to get Battle Mechanics V2 and the bulk of the balancing done in June. We can use the text-based prototype I’ve built to run 1000’s of simulations across a number of different team archetypes that we are currently designing. This will hopefully get us 90% of the way there and then we can use data from public beta in September to do additional fine tuning before the full release.

It’s very difficult to judge the revenue with no idea of how popular the game will be, which makes it very high risk and more suitable for a slower more bootstrapped approach. In terms of fees, I think we could charge 10% of any tournament prizepools so then it’s a matter of how much the DAO would vote to use from the Protocol rewards wallet. Other revenue streams could be:

  • NFT sales for in-game powerups
  • Wagered 1v1s with a 10% setup fee
  • Future paid PvE content with NFT prizes
3 Likes
17

I really like the model where DAO funds the MVP, allocates some rewards(take a little from something that is based on same mechanic, as as we add games, we cant just have endless reward creep, they should either get spread thinner, or be this/that options), and then, instead of coming back to DAO for a salary, the project uses non-protocol sales to generate its own income, while being supported indirectly, through the protocol allocating rewards to it.

This treats the DAO like an incubator, but also puts responsibility on both parties, to make the arrangement equitable for all. Where things get toxic here is when we ask people to value each others work, and if we can seperate rewards, from compensation, we might have a shot at a more positive contributor/DAO relationship.

Instead of trying to make something, that you become the on staff manager for, indefinitely, the DAO can get you over the startup process, to the MVP, and then at that point, you can decide if the rewards the DAO is directing towards your game, can be aligned to make your revenue streams feel like a natural YES to the people playing.

For this game… most of the heavy lifting is going to be on the startup, so, I think there is a very strong case for this being a smart investment.

Immaterial has demonstrated a good understanding of game theory, economics, and working with the DAO, and did the concept build all on spec, so we know that what he’s asking for as a budget, is actually accurate, as he already tried to do all these jobs himself :slight_smile:

8 Likes
18

I’m all up for an autobattler! was designing a mvp myself but gave up because as you said building a game alone can take literal ages, looking forward to see what can come out of this

3 Likes
19

I really like this initiative and know you can get the job done!

I personally would love to see this offering as a mobile game. The auto / idle battler genre goes really well with mobile gaming over desktop gaming. As a desktop game, it might feel too limited or slow / boring. But as a mobile game, it would be a really fun thing to do on the go!

6 Likes
21

Why Gotchi battler?

Hey frens, I’m about to post the sigprop for funding the development of Gotchi Battler so I wanted to take a step back and remind everyone (including myself!) of why this game is important and what it is trying to accomplish:

Gamify Protocol Rewards

2.5 years ago dressing up your gotchi with wearables and competing in the RF leaderboards was revolutionary. Myself and many other OG gotchigang spent 100s of hours collecting and optimising wearables, sets and gotchis to ladder up the leaderboard as far as possible. Now though, as other web3 projects catch up to us, we have to continue to innovate and start allocating some Protocol Rewards to new experimental competitions that drive more engagement. Gotchi Battler can be the perfect addition for this in the form of a new Rarity Farming category. It continues the meta of BRS Rarity Farming (more BRS, more rewards) but also introduces new edges to be gained from strategising whilst still having a very simple setup to accomodate more passive investors.

Increase demand for protocol assets

In Gotchi Battler, there will be 8 different classes of gotchi, determined by their strongest trait. Each class will be powerful in it’s own way and this will split up demand for each different class of gotchi. You may have a gotchi that is currently #400 on the BRS leaderboard but in Gotchi Battler it is the #50 best +NRG gotchi. As well as splitting gotchis into classes, Gotchi Battler is also is a team based game with each team being made up of 5 gotchis. This is the first time there’s a use case for owning multiple powerful gotchis and should breathe new life into the rental market as well as incentivise owners to build up their own 5 gotchi team.

Strengthen the game lineup for Gotchichain

As we all know, we’re about to embark on a new chapter of our adventure, launching our own chain. As always, we’ll be leading the way in innovation and a lot of eyes will be on our project as we become the face of web3 gaming on Polygon. We’ll only get one launch however so we need to make our game offering as strong as possible. Gotchi Battler’s Large Tournament mode with up to 4096 teams is the perfect spectacle to show the world the power of our DAO and ecosystem.

Future expansions and DAO revenue generation

This MVP launch of Gotchi battler will introduce a Large Tournament mode and 1v1 PvP gameplay. If these modes prove to be popular I believe there could be an opportunity to use the core mechanics built in the MVP to extend to a PvE dungeon mode. These dungeons could cost a small amount to enter (revenue going to the DAO) and give out NFT prizes that strengthen your gotchis in the game. These are all experimental models we can assess for future game devs in the ecosystem.

Full details of the costs/deliverables/timelines will be posted in the upcoming sigprop. Any questions then let me know here or in the Discord. Thanks for your support frens :v:

10 Likes