[DAO:57a7592] Vroomway Continuation - Revised

[dao]

by 0x56469159d91eb810dce34dd13ec4ed8194bca7be (iNikki)

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

Abstract

Vroomway is a racing game where players race and collect resources to craft their dual utility NFT. Our NFTs double as Skins and Vehicles. Players can race, craft, and upgrade completely free. We have a 4x4 estate that houses 6 different interactive instanced scenes. That’s a total 1,536 square meters packed with unique experiences.

Vroomway’s mission is to provide a safe haven for vehicle lovers and racers of all kinds. We aim to provide a dynamic variety of experiences for both solo play and cooperative play. Start your laps today and earn your very own Metaverse Vehicle!

Play Link: Decentraland
Game Trailer: Vroomway Trailer

Grant size

120,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0x4b99aD2Fad8B5553dc734EDA80695591b3CA1fD5

Email address

vroomwayracing@gmail.com

Description

Vroomway tells the story of a future where machines and human consciousness are one. A world created by machines for everyone to enjoy. Vroomway is the space station that bridges worlds all over the galaxy to Planeta Volo. This means the Planet of Speed in Latin. Vroomway provides the bridge to the future of what is possible. To inspire hope and encourage everyone to live in the moment and enjoy all the fun experiences life has to offer.

Vroomway is managed by a core team of 3 with our lead developer handling the infrastructure and back end. We have a community manager that is in charge of engaging our community on discord and in-game. Our community manager also helps onboard new players and provides community events to keep the core engaged. Our marketing person handles the social media accounts, and partner relationships and ideates/execute our marketing strategies. Our Project Manager manages and executes our business direction and project vision. They lead the game development process and 3D artwork development.

Vroomway has seen a gradual increase in our analytics since launching our Grand Opening on October 1st, 2022. Currently, we are seeing an average of 50 daily active users. Some days we peak at 150 while other days we valley at 43. On a monthly basis, we are seeing over 3700 sessions from our players. We expect to triple our Daily Active users over the next 3 months by fully utilizing our Social Friday experiences, consistent game releases, and upcoming partner collaborations. We plan to release a brand new Fuego Circuits track every month, and brand new vehicles and attributes often.

Milestones Achieved:

• Revenue has been generated each month from in-game purchases, wearable royalties, and build commissions. We have given 5% of those revenues back to the DAO total of $152.40 USDC over 3 months.
• NFT floor prices rising as high as 750% on some vehicles.
• Players have already earned 224 mana from crafting 7 of the 12 new skins/vehicles. The highest floor is currently 60 mana.
• Twitter account nearing 600 followers.
• Fully integrated 21 NFT-based vehicles with full functionality.
• Two additional non-vehicle NFT-based wearables with full functionality.
• Established a new sponsor: The Holy Ones to our 3 existing sponsors.
• Created 3 Game Modes: Solo-Sprint, Demo Derby, and Fuego Circuits.
• Created 5 different game tracks.
• Integrated 9 different collectible resources and a robust crafting system.
• Built an interactive club with Dance and Earn utility with live events and unique musical entertainment.
• Held 3 different parties to celebrate the launch of each stage of the game with a DJ performance, and community giveaways - One for Alpha, Beta, and the launch.
• Including performances by our own Nikki Fuego in Drag, bringing more Drag culture to Decentraland.
• Organized 9 giveaways, of Beta wings, vehicles, and in-game rewards.
• We started a 10-week tournament where we pick 1 winner with the fastest Solo-Sprint time and awarded 10 MANA. In our first 4 weeks, we have had 175 participants!
• Started our weekly events with LIVE entertainment and giveaways. (In week 4 as of writing this)

(image larger than 4 MB)

Gameplay Promo: Gameplay Promo 2022

Specification

To get Vroomway to the next level we will need additional resources. We have an extremely unique setup with our instancing and require some outside skillsets to elevate parts of our infrastructure. Our integration with the Infinity Engine was a huge accomplishment and enhanced Vroomway’s original vision tenfold. We learned a lot with that integration and it has sparked even more innovation on how to develop this going forward. We would like to both upgrade and enhance the current game modes, but also release some community-suggested game modes that we believe will put Vroomway above par with previous racing games in the web3 industry. This new budget also allows the majority of our team to give more full-time attention to the project.

We have generated revenue consistently over 4 months and have generated revenue this month (November) as well.

Our game generated over 2,500 MANA sales in wearables (primary and secondary combined). In addition, our players purchased 452 MANA worth of FUEL in-game.

It’s worth noting that since the beginning of our first grant we vowed to pay 5% of our revenue generated each month back to the DAO until the grant is paid back. We are keeping that vow with this grant as well. We have already shown good faith in this with 4 consecutive months of giving 5% back totaling $155~. Although a small amount, it shows that we can create revenue and eventually pay back the grants in full.

Budget Breakdown & Road Map:

Marketing: $19,800 - 6 months

Personnel: $54,000 - 6 months

Development: $43,000 - 6 months

Unexpected/Cushion: $3,200 - 6 months

Total: $120,000

We have revised the previous budget to exclude 50% of the personnel cost, $30k in development cost, and 50% of the previous marketing budget.

Personnel

Nikki Fuego - Founder, Project Manager, Lead 3D Artist:
https://twitter.com/NikkiFuego92

Neocyber - Lead Developer:
https://twitter.com/neocyber_eth

DOCTORdripp - Community Manager:
https://twitter.com/DOCTORdrippNFT

ckbubbles - Marketing, PR, Event Coordinator:
https://twitter.com/iamckbubbles

Doki - 3D Wearables:
https://twitter.com/Doki3D

Roadmap and milestones

We believe we can achieve the goals mentioned above with 3 phases:

January 2023 & February 2023
Phase 1 - Refactor & Upgrade:

We plan to refactor some of our earliest infrastructure for better scene performance. We will also refactor our Demo Derby Game Mode as this has been the most difficult hurdle we have faced. We want to redesign the game mode with better technology. We will upgrade our other game modes and the gathering profession to provide variety in difficulty and experiences. We will also add in-game coin sinks with these upgrades.

March 2023 & April 2023
Phase - New Game Modes and Player Ownership Value:

Players have heavily requested two new game modes that are Drag Racing and a new version of our Grand Prix that was held in April of 2022. Drag Racing would be a linear sprint utilizing the infinity engine. It would be a point a to point b sprint with gear-shifting mechanics integrated.
The Grand Prix game mode would be an event every 6 months that supports up to 20 racers racing in an Indie 500-style race.

May 2023 & June 2023
Phase 3 - Player Economy and Ownership Value:

We believe that the players are the most important part of our game aside from the fun factor. With this in mind, we want to always provide value both in the economy and the time spent in-game. We would like to introduce new ways to earn via mini-games that add more value to the main game modes.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

[NikkiFuego]

Hello, wonderful community. We took some feedback from the last proposal for $240k and made the appropriate adjustments. We have revised the previous budget to exclude 50% of the personnel cost, $30k in development cost, and 50% of the previous marketing budget. We also tried to make it easier to digest the content by including graphic images within the proposal itself instead of links.

We appreciated all the feedback from the last round and welcome any questions this time around too.

[Vaporizador]

Vroomway was a smooth experience when I tried it a few times, you can see its replay potential and space for growth and further refinement overall.

[amanda_mod]

Looks like a cool project that attracts daily users which is a big pro.

I’d like to see a break down of the personnel budget as there is already a substantial budget dedicated to the development and there is revenue generated from the game.

Also a brief marketing startegy, overview would be helpful. Will that budget be used for paid marketing?

[ckbubbles]

Hey Vapo! Really appreciate your feedback, and vote!

[ckbubbles]

Hey @amanda_mod, resharing from what we shared on the previous proposal ab the team. This is a revised proposal, based on the one linked below. Feel free to read through the comments and check out a lot of responses to the community on the same work, but broken out from 1 year to 6 months.

Vroomway Continuation - Race and Earn

In the previous proposal comments we mentioned that as it sits right now, Nikki, Doc, and I are paid $1,500 a month ea for our contribution to the project.

Nikki takes care of all the QA and SDK deployments. She manages every area of the project to ensure all deadlines are being kept and support other roles as needed. Out of the 6 scenes we have, She has modeled, textured, and decorated 5 of them in addition to every circuit map. Along with creating, modeling, and texturing 7 out of the 9 NPCs we have. All 21 vehicles as well.

During this first program, she was with Neocyber step by step learning and absorbing everything that was being made so that she could later assist with more of the SDK. She’s at that point now where she’s helping code the more simple things.

The cross-game collabs we have planned are managed and overseen by Nikki and myself. All communications and meetings for Grant Support Squad and DAO-related things are handled mostly by Nikki with some assistance from myself as well.

Basically Nikki has devoted her career to this project. She no longer works full-time at her “day job”. In fact, in the last 2 months, she’s logged maybe 4-5 hours total there. Doc and myself work on this part-time because we both too have day jobs.

Doc is at the land every single day at our reset time racing with our racers. Managing our discord and being the voice for the community to the development team. Nikki and myself are there most days too, (for me it’s harder when traveling, since I’m sharing the word of DCL, Vroomway, and the metaverse at conferences and AR/VR Summits).

Neocyber is not paid on a stipend because as Doc mentioned, development work is varied in complexity and cost per task. Neocbyer has built 85% of this game with part-time efforts. We have had a few step up and assist with some of the more complex situations.

I own social media at the moment. Right now we are only posting regularly on Twitter, with organic media. But we all know that nobody really grows on one platform. So we plan to expand to other platforms which require more content, such as IG, TikTok, Twitch/Youtube, etc.

I’ve also been developing marketing plans for all of this, from targets, personas, to strategies and then creative for the content. Currently with no real budget from the previous grant it’s all been organic media, speaking on spaces, getting guest spots on shows, plus some non-paid PR. And our twitter as mentioned.

In the future we definitely have plans to do more PR and some paid promo, that fits not only within DCL but also in adjacent worlds such as web3, crypto gaming, and car cultures. See some screenshots from our marketing deck.

I also handle all the DJ outreach and bookings, and event pages and promo for our Social Friday events we do every week. We have been onboarding DCL DJ favorites and will plan to outreach people who maybe haven’t performed in DCL or the metaverse yet as well going into next year.

We also have plans for more partnerships that will utilize cross channel promos as well. See our tease on twitter for our first one coming soon…

WonderZone

What we’ve been able to accomplish with really only one person owning this part, with support from Nikki and Doc, I’m pretty proud of. We have lots more planned for marketing, but with the revised proposal, as mentioned above, we have revised the previous budget to exclude 50% of the personnel cost, $30k in development cost, and 50% of the previous marketing budget.

Take a look at the previous submitted proposal next to this one to see the differences in budgets.

Previous: Vroomway Continuation - Race and Earn

We also want to let ppl know that with this grant it will allow the three of us to take a more serious full time roles with the project, we are dedicated to Vroomway, to racing culture, and to helping grow DCL with amazing content and experiences.

Thanks, and let me know if you have any other concerns!

[amanda_mod]

Thanks for the detailed response, appreciate your time.

If I’m honest, I still don’t quite understand where the $19,800 ($3,300 per month) marketing budget is going especially when stipends are being paid for social media management, it appears to be an arbitrary figure, are there any marketing kpi’s with this budget regarding how many users you plan to acquire? I think a general overview of the marketing plan would help, including things like desired customer acquisition cost.

[Tudamoon]

Thank you for revising your first proposal. Personally, I am in favor of moving this forward because this team has proven to fulfill its last grant and has an awesome product. Although, I do have a few questions. Will this grant provide enough new features to have an awesome game that will be played over and over again? How many active users of Vroomway are needed for sustainability? How much fuel must be purchased to be sustainable? Would the team mind sharing that information?

The reason I ask these questions is because I do feel like Vroomway can reach profits when the bull market comes back. What is Vroomway’s projections/goals?

[NikkiFuego]

Hey @amanda_mod, appreciate your thorough interest in our plans. As for the marketing budget, we will spend $800 a month on our weekly events (4 events each month = $4,800). These events we plan to outreach to talent external from DCL to bring more entertainers, of all types, to the events. We are budgeting $1,500 a month for ad spending. This would be putting ad dollars behind some commercial-grade content we’ve made and deploying it to different social platforms. Some of this is budgeted to test smaller amounts on each platform to determine the best ROI. Both CK and I have experience with Paid Advertising and Social Media Advertising so we are confident in our persona and strategy. We are budgeting $2,500 for press releases or other paid promotion that is not social advertisement throughout the 6 months. We have $3,500 budgeted for our biggest event of the year, The Grand Prix. This is a big event because it was the event that created this whole journey back in April of this year (2022). We are hoping to get some external brands involved with this event from the car/sport racing industries.

As far as our KPI’s, this is something we’ve been working on the last few months to determine what is the best route to go. Right now the most important one is our Unique Users. Since the previous proposal a few weeks ago, we’ve already seen our unique users go up and our daily average has increased by 5 users per day.

Hey @Tudamoon, thanks for the support and kind words. We design everything with sustainability in mind. With the future features we are planning, we also have this in mind. Our goal is to create features that encourage the desire to purchase FUEL. At the current rate of players that do purchase FUEL vs those that don’t, we would only need about 500 people buying 45 MANA worth of FUEL each month to be comfortable with continuing to support while also paying back 25% to the DAO until both grants are paid for. If all goes according to plan, we may be able to achieve this by the end of 2023. As we mentioned in the last proposal, our goal is to achieve this with added development, increased marketing efforts, and full-time attention.

[Mimsy]

Hi Vroomway Team,

I love seeing you take in the comments from the community and submit a revised grant- really shows a willingness to be flexible that I super appreciate and feel is crucial to project success However, there are a few points I’d like to know more about before I feel comfortable casting a vote.

Refactoring is listed as a large chunk of your development, taking the first month and $5.5k of the budget with only one developer listed on your staff (no critique here, just listing stats for context). I’m wondering if you could elaborate more on your plan of attack for the refactor. Since this can be such a massive undertaking, is there any plan to bring in outside developers to assist?

I also would like to know more about what we can expect to see as community members from Phase 3 of your road map, or possibly more measurable goals from this phase to demonstrate the growth in value you’re anticipating from the mini-games and new ways to earn mentioned.

Looking forward to seeing how this project continues to grow

[NikkiFuego]

Hey @Mimsy , thank you for your polite inquiry!

Before addressing the points directly, I want to point out that we have recruited additional development support. We quickly learned when developing our Demo Dery mode that we needed help from someone who had more extensive experience with the SDK. Wacaine is an avid contributor to the GitHub repositories for DCL and has already been a tremendous help with advancing the project forward with the integration of the infinity engine and customizing that code base for our needs. We did not list them on the official personnel list because they are contracted as needed and not a part of the core consistency like Neo is. I do minor developments and integrations. So we have 3 “devs” with an option to contract an extra one. Originally, we had 12 months to pull this off with the three developers, however, we are open and have options to recruit additional help should that need arise.

That being said, the refactoring for the overall scene comes down to making things less complicated with our scene loader/unloader. We have now 9 instanced scenes and we now know ways to make that less heavy on the rendering/engine to achieve a better user experience. The bigger refactor has to do with Demo Derby. We built what we could with the time frame we had. In order to deliver on time for the grant, we had to cut some corners to get it working and playable. There has been a ton of feedback from our core racers about how to amplify/redesign the game mode to make it more enjoyable. We have developed a plan for this and with the additional help, we are confident we can deliver on it.

Regarding Phase 3, we hope to increase our player base by 3x - 5x by the end of the year. We anticipate a lot more community-driven tournaments. We heavily encourage player-to-player interactions. Introducing more of these interactive experiences, such as peer-to-peer transactions, will help grow that naturally. We would also like to increase the time spent on the parcel. Right now, it takes racers around 30-45 min (with no bonuses) to spend their daily FUEL. We’d like to not only give more reasons to stick around after the FUEL but also reasons to buy more FUEL to keep racing. We’d like to see this number double at the very least. We also want to introduce features that heavily encourage players to recruit other players who haven’t played yet. We also anticipate onboarding even more partners/sponsors both within DCL and externally from DCL. The focus is the car/sport racing industries as mentioned above, as well as general car enthusiasts. The ultimate goal is to provide a safe haven for anyone to enjoy racing with their friends or by themselves. Some of the hardest laughs and intense gaming moments I’ve had in my year in DCL have been on the race track. We want to keep recreating that experience for others.

[MetaDoge]

Voted yes, as one of the start projects in DCL, hope they can get a chance to prove themself again with a larger fund.

[mazafaka]

This time I voted “YES”. Good luck with the game.

[ckbubbles]

@MetaDoge TY for your trust in us, we are excited to deliver and help push racing more in DCL!

@mazafaka we appreciate your vote, and the well wishes.

[pablo]

Hello, can we know how many weekly hours each team member will be working on the project?

[NikkiFuego]

Hey @pablo the core team (Myself, Doc, and CK) will be working a minimum of 30 hours, but we also anticipate more since we do not have the budget for an additional admin as originally proposed in our $240k plan. We are pretty serious and passionate about this project.

[pablo]

thanks @NikkiFuego, so I assume NeoCyber will work spare or part time on the project then but he will assume responsibility on accomplishing the development as Lead Developer, right? If that’s the case I’m fine with it, the project looks cool.

[NikkiFuego]

Correct, @pablo . Neocyber is in charge of the main development and coordinating with Wacaine and myself on deliverables. He has done this since Day 1 and is responsible for a vast majority of the code base.

[GaryDCL]

YES YES, projects like vroomway need to be built right now, so that with the next boom, which we tentatively assume will happen in the next 3 years, it doesn’t turn out that DCL for the street is boring again… (btw. nikki could hurry up sending usdc for writing these comments… ) jk jk hehe

[NikkiFuego]

@GaryDCL never fails to bring comedic relief! Much love friend and thanks for the kind words!