[DAO:3a244f7] WonderMine Multiplayer and Feature Enhancements

Governance
1

by 0xfcacace2713d41c02666e2643e5583793196c935 (WonderZone)

Should the following Tier 5: up to $120,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Gaming category be approved?

Abstract

WonderMine is a social play-to-earn game where you mine meteors, collect resources and craft upgrades and rewards in the form of wearables and other NFTs. WonderMine continues to be one of the most popular locations in Decentraland, with an active and passionate community and over 1400 players per day.

In 2023, we aim to take WonderMine to the next level by introducing new multiplayer mechanics, new categories of meteors, even more wearables, enabling WonderMine as an event space and giving a fresh new look to the WonderZone Park area.

Play WonderMine at -28,55

Join our Discord

(image larger than 4 MB)

Grant size

120,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0xfcacAcE2713D41c02666E2643E5583793196c935

Email address

rob@wonderzone.io

Description

WonderZone began in 2017, just as an idea by Radix to create an Amusement Park district in Decentraland. That became reality in 2018 and by 2019 the park was filled with various hackathon-winners and mini-games.

WonderMine quickly became one of the most popular Decentraland games, and has become something of a staple. WonderMine is one of the first places new players visit when they enter Decentraland for the first time, a feat we’re very proud of. WonderMine playership increased steadily over time. We currently support about 1,400 players per day (DAU).

Since the WonderMine alpha first launched in June 2020:

  • Over 300,000 unique players have played (mining at least one meteor)
  • Hit a peak DAU of over 10K players (December 2021) without performance issues
  • Nearly 20K wearables (19,865) given to players who crafted them
  • Over 3,600 WonderZone Pickaxe NFTs given out
  • Over 20 “2X Loot Drop” events with 300 to 1000 players attending
  • Over a dozen different collab events with projects like DG, Vroomway, MetaParty and MetaKey

WonderZone received a Tier 6 grant in January 2022 with a very ambitious roadmap. We planned to hire a new developer but that didn’t pan out, so the full roadmap was more than our small team could accomplish in 6 months. Even so that grant let some of us work full-time, and since we didn’t end up hiring another game dev the funds lasted us almost a full year, instead of 6 months.

Here is what we achieved in 2022:

  • Developed a custom NFT smart contract (audited by Solidity Finance: Wonder Zone Smart Contract Audit by SourceHat (formerly Solidity Finance))
  • Released the WonderZone Games NFT collection (https://opensea.io/collection/wonderzonegames)
    • Released 5 NFT pickaxes, with more on the way
    • Auto-minting when players craft an NFT pickaxe
    • Innovative contract supports per-item attributes and leveling-up
  • In-game highscores (level + meteors mined)
  • Level-locked crafting
  • Limited item crafting (one per player)
  • Updated UI
    • Improved meteor loot pop-up
    • Pickaxe switching functionality
  • Backend event manager (work in progress)
    • Hub for WZ staff with data dashboards
    • Easier and quicker to host events in WonderMine
    • Faster support ticket processing
  • WonderZone Guild House building
    • A central hub for the WonderZone Amusement park
    • More buildings in development
  • Many, many, many new WonderZone wearables
  • Seasonal wearables, an organized way of releasing wearable collections
    • Each season contains 10 new wearables every 2 months
    • Offered Seasonal Airdrop Pass NFTs, another step towards self-sufficiency for WonderZone
  • Hired part-time back-end developer/Azure expert
    • Refactored back-end/server infrastructure for performance and better internal testing
    • Improved CoinCart process

We have learned a lot in 2022. We feel more confident in our abilities to deliver on our more realistic goals and milestones. These are features we believe will elevate the current singleplayer mining experience and help us attract new players to the WonderMine game and to Decentraland.

Our goals for WonderMine were to create a game that’s fun to come back to every day and to become a social hub where people hang out in Decentraland, mining and chatting. We feel we’ve been successful with these goals. Our high player retention numbers put us in the top 75% of all games (not just metaverse games). Many of our top players have been playing WonderMine for over two years.

Specification

WonderMine is a social hub, but the gameplay is entirely single-player. Players only see the meteors that fall in their own instance of the scene. With the next roadmap we want to encourage multiplayer gameplay.

The first step is to enable shared, synchronized meteors, so everyone can see the same drop. This would make all active players rush over to a single location to get the loot first.

Shared Meteors

We want to add complexity to the current meteor system, with new categories and tiered meteors that require different levels to mine, including a few meteors that will require collaboration and multiple people to mine at the same time. These meteors will be full of juicy loot! Encouraging players to rush over to these new meteors adds a level of competition to the gameplay, and also requires teamwork to get the loot.

Players will still see their own meteors fall at a similar rate. But sometimes a larger, special meteor will drop at the same location for everyone in the scene. The special meteor will require at least 10 players to mine it before it breaks open. Then all 10 players will receive a better-than-normal loot drop for their cooperative mining help.

Shared meteors add a new level of player cooperation to the game, which should encourage more interaction and socializing among players. It also adds a competitive element, since you have to be one of the first 10 players to get there.

After we deliver the first tier of shared meteors, we have ideas for expanding to other specialty meteor tiers with different in-game mechanics to make WonderMine even more fun.

The Town Square

We have begun building a new town square which is going to be a central hub in WonderZone. The square is where new players will spawn and get introduced to WonderZone and all of our games. A place for players to socialize, trade, craft and quest.

We also want to create a venue with a big screen and stage near WonderMine for hosting events in WonderZone Park. This lets us pursue enhanced collaborations with other Decentraland projects and outside musical artists who can help attract new players. Our strength is in retaining players once they engage with our game. If we can attract new players to an event we can keep many of them playing for a long time to come.

Town Hub
Town Hub1849Ă—1374 412 KB

Seasonal Wearables

We have reorganized our wearable releases to be seasonal. We create up to 10 wearables and release them at the same time in the crafting machine. Each season contains 1 Mythic, 3-6 Legendaries and 3-6 Epics. The total craftable supply is 3k-6k per season. This means there are always wearables available for players to grind for when mining.

We want to keep being a hub for new players to socialize and craft their first NFTs for free. Bi-monthly seasonal wearable releases will ensure there are always new wearables for our players.

We recently introduced Seasonal Airdrop Pass NFTs for players who want to collect all of the wearables in a season. The Airdrop Passes for Season 1 cost 0.3 ETH each and sold out in about 30 minutes. Airdrop pass holders get all the wearables in a seasonal collection. We only sell 10 passes per season and it’s the only way to get the seasonal mythic wearable.

Nearly all of our wearables can be crafted for free. Airdrop pass revenues are a small fraction of the cost to create the wearables, but it’s a step in the right direction of becoming a sustainable business.

Personnel

The core team consists of four people with different experience and expertise. Our collaborative experience includes front and back-end software development, game design and game development, character design and all aspects of 3D modeling. Experience aside, we’re a group of passionate game enthusiasts, and have been working on WonderZone next to our full-time jobs prior to receiving funding.

  • Rob Dixon (Radix), Co-founder, lead developer
  • Chestnutbruze, Co-founder, 3D artist
  • Lew, Co-founder, 3D artist
  • maruudn, Community manager and game developer

In addition to the core team, we also have an additional 3D modeler that has designed some of our most iconic wearables, such as the Steampunk outfit, plus an extra back-end developer that works part time to ensure things are running smoothly behind the scenes.

  • Maricela Perdomo (Maricela), 3D artist
  • Kim G., Back-end developer and Azure expert

Roadmap and milestones

Milestones

  • Shared meteors
  • Stretch goal: More shared meteor tiers, rarer meteors with more valuable materials
  • 3 bi-monthly seasonal wearables drops (30+ wearables)
  • New NFT Pickaxes
  • Town Square and updated park layout
  • Enhance WonderMine scene for events (add big screen and music streaming)
  • Allow CoinCart purchases using Polygon Mana

Budget breakdown

  • Server costs: 5,100 USD
  • Software licenses: 2,680 USD
  • Wearables submission fees: 4,500 USD
  • Developers: 46,800 USD
  • 3D Artists: 43,200 USD
  • Community management & support: 14,400 USD
  • Cushion/Contingency: 3,320 USD

Total: 120,000 USD

Sustainability

We aren’t profitable yet. Our overhead is significantly higher than our revenue. We address this with WonderCoin sales and the recently introduced Seasonal Airdrop Passes, and refactoring server code to reduce costs. It will take more time to become a sustainable business.

In recent months, we have been able to increase our wearables production, thanks to the DAO grant letting some of us go full-time. We need new wearables and NFT Pickaxes to keep WonderMine running. Without DAO funding we can’t keep making enough free wearables for our community. Nor could we add new features to the game, since ongoing maintenance and event support requires all the part-time resources we have.

Please support us to keep WonderMine moving forward and attracting new players, and to help us build a sustainable game within Decentraland.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

2

You all more than deserve it, however, I am unclear of the Roadmap or what you plan to do with the $120k. Would you mind sharing?

3

However someone just mentioned about a $240k grant last year. I have been around this full year and haven’t seen much changes. Am I missing something?

4

@Tudamoon Thanks for your interest! Yes, we talk about the previous grant in the Description section above, and how we stretched 6 months of funding to keep the team going for a full year. We accomplished quite a lot with a small team in 2022 as a result, and that’s all listed in bullet points above too.

1 Like
5

One of the big tasks we finished in 2022 was the creation of our innovative smart contract for the WonderZone Games NFT collection. Here’s a screenshot of some of the Pickaxe NFTs that were distributed to players, and the OpenSea page for the collection. We hope that these NFTs will provide value to players even outside of the WonderMine game. And it gives us a platform for expanding the game in interesting ways in the future.

wznfts
wznfts1758Ă—1011 229 KB

6

It is no secret that I am extremely supportive of the WonderMine project. It is 100% a staple in the community and an even bigger staple in my journey in Decentraland. It is the first place I explored when joining the platform, made my first DCL friends, received my first free wearable, and started dreaming about my own possibilities as an artist. Over a year later and I still visit the parcel often to hang out with friends. Whenever there are new wearable drops from multiple projects, I find groups of people showing up to celebrate and show off their new gear. If it weren’t for WonderMine, my journey on this platform may have turned out completely different.

On the professional side, WonderMine has also been instrumental (along with other Games) in sharing knowledge about the SDK to get our journey at Vroomway started. They are always willing to help and share different methods to achieve our goals. We recently went under a partnership with them to release a collaboration Wearable. This gave the opportunity for both our teams to work together with one goal and so far it has been a great experience. Their team is very talented and easy to work with. I truly believe they can achieve what they’re proposing to achieve. :+1:

1 Like
7

Yes, I guess what I am not really understanding is yes you have a smaller team, but is there a reason the smaller team couldn’t complete the same tasks with the same amount of money? I understand it may take longer obviously. But why more money for same tasks like shareable meteors?

1 Like
8

Voting yes. Maybe WZ’s last grant did not have the most impressive results to some however I’m boolish on WZ as it is still one of the top games in DCL taking top spots in places/explorer page with some of the best wearable quality work.

GL :heart_hands:

1 Like
9

I really want to support projects that bring users to Decentraland, but at the same time P2E games have proved again and again that they are not sustainable.
WonderMine has had 300k unique users (so including people that showed up only once) over two years and received 240k USD from the DAO, that’s 0.8 USD per unique users, I don’t know if it’s a good investment.

More time, but how much?

I do not believe that you cannot create wearables and pickaxes without a new grant. If you cannot make a set of pickaxes with the current revenue, then the DAO should not be funding this grant as the chances of it being sustainable one day is incredibly low.

I also don’t see anywhere in that grant a proposal to give back to the DAO over time.
(Not that it is a requirement, but it would be much better if the DAO could make back the money over time if my sustainability concerns happens to be wrong.)

3 Likes
10

Here’s the link to the last grant Wondermine grant:

I am a HUGE fan of the Wonderzone! It was the birthplace to many of us! That being said, I have some concerns here. In your original grant, you have the following items that you were going to bring in Q2:

2022 Q2

  • Release Kingfisher, a new social fishing game
  • More meteor tiers, rarer meteors with more valuable materials
  • Wearables Shop and Ticket System
  • In-game Pets
  • More wearables
  • Expand WonderMine to other scenes across Decentraland
  • Restructuring of the park

These were deliverables for Quarter 2 of 2022. The traditional calendar dates for Q2 are between April 1st and June 3rd. This means that these should have been completed 6 months ago. I understand life happens and your team was smaller than anticipated, but this is also a business. Not delivering on these components of your last grant give me concerns whether this will happen again.

Additionally, it’s hard to see that the most popular game in DCL has not become self-sustaining at this point. I’ve personally spent hundreds of dollars on extra coins in the game. I apologize if I overstep my reach here, but could you have been hosting advertisements within the game to bring in extra income? Submitting this new grant with still no roadmap outlining a clear plan on how to be sustainable makes me unable to vote yes on this proposal.

4 Likes
11

Hey HP, fair point! P2E only seems to work in a high-growth environment to attract new users, but I agree with your sustainability point, long term. We are trying to pivot away from marketing ourselves as P2E and encourage collecting instead and other sources of revenue. P2E has certainly helped us grow and attract users, but it might not be sustainable in the long run.

That said, I believe very few projects in DCL are currently sustainable. Mainly because of current market conditions (bear market) combined with the lack of overall interest in decentraland. We very much rely on the popularity of decentraland, and our business is set up to scale with the amount of overall users in DCL.

We could continue creating pickaxes and wearables without a new grant, but it would come at a significantly slower rate, as we would have to do it part-time. We all live in HCOL countries and most of us used to have full-time jobs before the previous grant.

Giving back to the DAO would make the path to sustainability harder, and I believe our overall impact can be more significant by focusing on attracting new players to Decentraland.

2 Likes
12

i agree with both HP and Canessa - I can see from running DCL-metrics that wondermine consistently draws users which is obviously a great thing, but there should be some plan for sustainability after so long of a dev phase and established user base. If you can share that then for sure I will vote yes for this

13

I want to support WZ as it really is a DCL landmark and one of my favorite places to hang out, but I agree that with the 240K previously provided you should have been able to complete the roadmap and if for some reason it could not be completed or a developer was not hired, then the money should be returned to the DAO, not used to pay other staff to work full-time for a whole year, and yet still not deliver on the roadmap. In the last year, WZ has not changed or significantly leveraged their high traffic to create extra income… I can’t justify another 120K for shared meteors, more wearables, pickaxes, updated build, a big screen and CoinCart. I don’t believe any of it aligns with our goals of pushing mass adoption of DCL.

14

Some questions for the WonderMine staff:

Can you provide a more detailed break-down of the $5100 USD server costs and $2680 USD software licensing costs?

WonderZone is massive, and I think it’s not too unkind to say that WonderMine is the only game that took off. Has the team considered renting out some of its extra land in order to help make WonderMine sustainable? Even Disney World has a resort.

Lastly, what happens if this grant doesn’t pass?

P.S. Can’t wait for the season 2 wearables. I may even pick up the pass.

15

Thanks for the comments everyone!

Many of you are concerned that we are not yet a sustainable business. But moving closer to sustainability is the main reason behind this proposal (as we stated many times above).

WonderMine was designed with a free-to-play (F2P) mobile game model (not just a P2E model like people assume). Most players play for free all the time, but 2%-3% of players pay us some Mana for extra coins when they want to play more or progress faster. The F2P model can be profitable, but only with large numbers of players. A year ago during “the surge” we had over 10K players per day in WonderMine and coin cart revenues approached a sustainable level. Revenue is much lower these days with only 1,400 players per day.

Games within Decentraland are heavily dependent on the overall popularity of the platform. During down times very few DCL-only businesses can be sustainable. In fact DG might be the only one at the moment that’s sustainable on a large scale.

As a flagship experience in Decentraland, a healthy and thriving WonderMine game helps bring new players to the platform. People make YouTube videos and stream on Twitch about the game. Plus our player retention statistics are great, better than 75% of all games, including PC and mobile games, according to our analytics platform.

Many players come to DCL every day just to play WonderMine.

Many of the tasks in our roadmap are designed to help bring in more players and keep current players involved.

  • Adding an event space will help us bring in new players through events and collabs. If we can attract them, many new players will stay.
  • Adding some new features like shared/cooperative meteors should keep current players more involved.
  • Creating an attractive Town Square hub gives new players another entry point to the game, and more up-front information about WonderMine and DCL to help with onboarding.
  • Delivering more wearables and pickaxe NFTs for our players also keeps people returning to the game in the long run.

Sustainability requires more players, and we are doing what we can to increase playership for our game and for Decentraland as a whole. If people don’t agree with that goal, or don’t think that WonderMine is an asset to the community, then perhaps they shouldn’t support this proposal. But if you agree that attracting and retaining players is important then it seems like supporting WonderMine with a Yes vote is a good idea.

2 Likes
16

I support the project. We need to bring more users to DCL. Projects like this aim to do that. Without more users, we are going to see more devaluation of the currency and in-turn the depletion of the treasury. We need to help and encourage creators to develop more content to attract more users to DCL to offset the current market conditions. This is not the time to hold back. Creators, like the rest of us, are suffering in this market, and need the help to go on. This is a YES for me.

1 Like
17

Easy YES from me. A lot of you prob don’t even remember but the most of the time the only two places you can find anyone in Decentraland was the casino and WonderMine. They have continued to pioneer and lead the way for us all. I too agree would like some road map to have self sustaining revenue light at the end of the tunnel. I hope this round of funding gets them there so we can all learn form their success as we all have in the past.

18

I’m in favor of this proposal.

Rob is one of the leaders of this community. He and his team have put in many hours over the years to promote and make Decentraland interesting and fun to visit. This kind of effort is vital to the long-term success of DCL. If it’s not an interesting place to visit with fun things to do, people won’t come and DCL will die out. WonderZone has proven that it brings people in, and keeps them coming back.

Building cooperative multiplayer functionality is the kind of pioneering work that should be invested in. This is what the grant program should exist for, imo.

I would urge the Decentraland community to come together to support the creators who are working hard (and often for little to no money) to make DCL better for everyone. A vote in favor of this proposal is a vote in favor of the DCL community, since we all benefit when more interesting content is created.

19

Voted Yes! To me, the majority of wondermine’s value comes from its long-term Brand recognition (AKA IP), as a result, they only need to use 50% of its strength to create something that other brands could not achieve even if they try their best. So under the current critical bear market, it might be a good idea to support them and make sure they are alive.

However, I really really hope Wondermine team can reach more of their potential, and work 200% harder, as you guys have huge potential to create a true legend in the future, please cherish all the amazing achievements that you created. All the best to you and the projects!

1 Like
20

Vote: YES

A proven team with a track record of delivering a consistent product/service at WonderMine. I think it is still too early to throw in the towel and deny this request for additional funding.

I think this is a good amount of money per user to spend. I’ll do some research and post later how that compares to for-profit, web2 companies.

If my memory serves me correctly these undelivered milestones were already discussed and addressed in a previous grant proposal discussion. I will need to search for them. My recollection is they attempted to hire a developer who could help them create these items. They were unsuccessful in hiring this developer.

They do mention in this proposal they pivoted and instead used the funds to operate their staff for a full year. My assumption is this would not have been possible without first communicating it to the DAO Grant Support Squad. I could be wrong on this point.

Regarding sustainability I’ll mention a few companies that spent multiple years in the red before they turned a profit and continued under their own steam [1]:
FedEx
Amazon
ESPN
Tesla

There are also a number of companies that are currently valued in the billions but still lose money [2]:
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals
Carvana
DraftKings