[DAO:f04c209] Enhancing "Exodus: Goodbye World" ( Revision and Resubmission )

Governance
1

by 0x5117571b0bec00372ce00870ad8e523c704a78b7 (ExodusGBW)

Should the following $85,000 grant in the In-World Content category be approved?

Abstract

The purpose of this proposal is to support the expansion and improvement of the Decentraland RPG “Exodus: Goodbye World”.

Exodus will support the development of new content as well as place a focus on user acquisition and retention. Exodus will add skills like potion making and farming while also refining the user experience, game’s scene and designs, and expanding already developed content (like mining and fishing) to support more engaging mechanics and multiplayer interactions.

Grant size

85,000 USD in DAI

Project duration

6 months

Beneficiary address

0x5117571b0BEc00372CE00870ad8E523C704a78b7

Email address

exodusgbw@gmail.com

Description

Introduction

“Exodus: Goodbye World” (Exodus) is a multiplayer roleplaying game (RPG) aimed towards providing Decentraland users with an engaging as well as rewarding in-world experience. In Exodus, players have a large choice of skills and activities in which they can gather resources, produces new items, earn experience points, earn in-game currency, earn NFTs, trade, and interact with other players. Exodus provides hundreds of hours of activities and content, making it a valuable asset for user retention and engagement.

In 2023, Exodus has reached a net of 8000 all-time accounts created, having a current average of 75 weekly unique users. During that same time, Exodus released a variety of content and hosted several in-world holiday events. To give some examples, in 2023 Exodus released: Player-to-Player trading, Multiplayer Item Dropping, Workshopping Skill, Combat Alpha Content, Player Owned Pets, UI Overhauls, Scene Overhauls. As well, Exodus hosted multiplayer in-world events for: Valentines Day, Easter, Business Week, Exodus’s Birthday, and Thanksgiving. Exodus’s holiday events always offer a boon to player engagement, with past events averaging in around 500 new accounts created per event and 2000 NFTs given out as gameplay rewards. We believe that Decentraland needs engaging games like Exodus in order to retain DAU and drive organic growth. Exodus provides a fun experience where users play can interact with each other for a large number of hours without running out of activities or things to do. Moreover, consistently hosting interactive holiday events helps retain existing and returning users by providing them with consistent updates and content to look forward to.

Check out our socials at: https://X.com/ExodusGBW

Play at: Decentraland

Enhancements

Expanding Exodus by introducing new skills and multiplayer mechanics will further refine Exodus’ ability to attract new users and retain them. With this grant, Exodus will focus on a few primary objectives: Potion Making, Farming, and Multiplayer Enhancements. The introduction of our Potion Making and Farming skills will provide even more hours of content for our players as well as prove our commitment to releasing new content for already existing players. Lastly, we intend to enhance already existing content, like fishing, mining, and woodcutting, to have multiplayer features - this will help make our content more engaging and interactive.

In addition to these enhancements, Exodus plans to be a regular and continuing host of in-world events for a variety of holidays. In the upcoming future, Exodus will be hosting events for Valentines Day, and Easter.

Roadmap and milestones

Our intended content roadmap for the 6 month grant period be as follows. Note that development of features may overlap based on our development and release cycle.

Farming Skill

  • Estimated 2 months timeline. Goals include creation of plants and seeds 3D and 2D assets, animations for growing plants, backend programming for skill, front-end integration.

Potion Making Skill

  • Estimated 2 month timeline. Goals include creation of potion 3D and 2D assets, backend programming for skill, front-end integration.

Pet Cosmetic Skins

  • Estimate 1 month timeline. Goals include creation of alternative pet appearances and integrating the ability of player to choose appearance.

Multiplayer Resource Gathering

  • Estimated 2 months timeline. Will make resource gathering a multiplayer experience. Goals include backend updates to keep track of resources and respawning, front-end updates for triggering animations.

We will update the community on a monthly basis as to the progress of each feature. Once completed, we will release the content to be deployed in world within the following month.

We will host in-world events for: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter. We will report user engagement metrics in our grant updates for each event.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

1 Like
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Like my last comment I will continue to support this proposal because of the very same reasons.

I believe exodus is also doing a great job in doing events and also is always in the explorer this gives a good impression!

1 Like
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As I have stated on the previous proposals, Decentraland MUST INVEST in games/activities.

The Exodus team has continued building through the bear market, while most packed their bags and left.

I understand Exodus is not a genre of game for everyone. But the events they host bring in players from all areas of Decentraland. Exodus has tons of different skills/activities to enjoy, and will be a staple in DCL in the next Bull market. Yes, there are some activities in DCL to play, but Exodus is one of the few ACTUAL games being developed.

Decentraland HAS to invest in game development before the next bull run. Concerts and Fashion shows may bring in players to check out DCL, but those players are not staying and playing everyday. Daily Active Users are a MUST! And the only way to do that is to invest in games that will keep people in Decentraland!

I believe DCL needs to come together to pass this grant. We need game development to bring in Daily Active Users.

1 Like
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Before I vote, can we be ensured that no weed crops will be grown here? We already have a weed farming game at 27,24

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There are no plans to add marijuana into Exodus.

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Its a total waste of funds to develop this. No for me.

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Can any features be open-sourced?

I’m a fan of Exodus. It’s a complex game with some really cool mechanisms. I’ll never forget the time the Exodus team casually flexed with the Santa Hat burn mechanism, run at the same time as their other events.

Removal of all SDK 7 conversion costs is noted and appreciated. I think the costs for each new skill is still higher than they need to be. But if any of the skills or base mechanisms from them could be open-sourced, then I think the community would get a lot more out of this grant.

What are your thoughts on this?

3 Likes
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I agree with this take.

2 Likes
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Hi, thanks so much for your compliments about our past features!

We would love to be able to contribute to the community in some open source manner. However, open sourcing core parts of our codebase could prove technically complex and could also detract from Exodus’s unique value as a product. Those cool features and mechanisms are part of what makes Exodus what it is!

The Santa burn mechanism you mentioned involved a smart contract which we are happy to open source, potentially along with some code that exhibits how it worked in DCL.

Would be happy to hear any other suggestions that you think would provide value to the community

1 Like
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An open-sourced element does not need to be an exact copy from your game. It could be a dumbed down, white-labeled version. For example, maybe you’ll find that the crafting table or potion making skill can be turned into a very basic demo - similar to what was suggested for the Santa Hat burn. It could have the models replaced with basic placeholder blocks so that Exodus retains its individuality.

Your point that it could be a bit of a technical challenge is a good one, but I think that the effort would earn the other half of the budget requested. I don’t think it’s too much to ask. Exodus would be funded and the community could have some good building blocks with SDK7 examples - and of course Exodus team would get credit for that.

I want Exodus to receive the full funding requested, but it’s difficult when I’m weighing my opinion of what the community gets out of it. This is afterall, an open-source platform’s grant system that’s funding it, and those costs are still high imo as mentioned previously.

Thank you for hearing my take.

2 Likes
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This sounds like a really good approach to be honest ^

Moving into the future I will be more likely to vote yes on projects that are open-sourcing aspects of their project (NOT the entire project). If you’re going to ask for funding from the DAO, it makes sense to contribute something back that others can use to grow this platform. Maybe not the whole kitchen, like Doc says, just a few recipes that other chefs can add their own ingredients to, to make it their own :wink: (Hope the kitchen analogy makes sense)

In my mind:
Publicly funded by the DAO: Open-source some aspects back to the community
Privately funded (Not by the DAO): Closed-source, keep it all to yourself

I am open to more dialogue around this topic to further my own understanding :slight_smile:

4 Likes
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i wonder if you will be as active in the DAO when your delegation is recycled to someone else :thinking:

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Appreciate the perspective that the DAO should get something tangible. We’re happy to provide some open-source demo code for the Farming and Potion Making features that we intend to make for this grant if the community thinks that’s valuable. Hope that reinforces our commitment towards providing value to DCL by building our content.

2 Likes
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Sweet deal! Thank you for considering it.
I’m happy to vote yes then.

1 Like
15

How are your server costs this high?

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Can you provide receipts that validate this amount, because we also use AWS and our costs are a fraction of that for the entire year. I’m not a dev, and I don’t understand how storage and everything works so maybe it’s just that different, but if you could show some evidence that this is actually how much you’re spending that would be helpful.

4 Likes
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@Mimsy, sometimes there can be as many as 2 or even 3 people inside a decenraland estate all at the same time!

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@OGContraBand Sometimes even more :hushed:

@JTV Will we be provided with evidence of the server cost or not?

Nobody else wants to know?

2 Likes
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Our server costs consist of a variety services purposed towards providing our team with the resources needed for success. To list what this budget covers:

  • Autoscaling container (ECS) for our game APIs (cost scales with traffic)
  • Multiple websocket servers for our game
  • Database Cluster + Database management tools
  • Elasticache usage for cached data
  • Additional Servers, DB, Cache for quality assurance (testing environments)
  • Server log retention tools
  • Data analytics tools
  • Polygon node subscription
  • Any needed DevOps / maintenance work

While it may seem surprising that server costs for an operation like ours could be as high as $5000 over 6 months, providing all the tools necessary to run a large codebase, product, and team can be quite costly. We think that the $5000 budget will give us sufficient runway to provide this for our team.

1 Like
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Okay, that makes a bit more sense considering you are utitlizing a few more features of AWS than us but I’m still shocked at the gap in costs. It’s easy to find a breakdown of your monthly costs in the AWS dashboard to share what an average month looks like for you.

2 Likes
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No need to vote then, this proposal is invalid.
One of the requirement of this category is to opensource evrything related to the project.

2 Likes