[DAO: Qmd1ZYX] Decentraland’s first AI driven smart pets! (Resubmission)

[dao]

by 0x9ff256f65fa594ccdc13d76f116c87d9defd8a1c (Stripcheese#8a1c)

Should the following Tier 4: up to $60,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Platform Contributor category be approved?

Abstract

At MetaPlay, we are creating the first intelligent & independent virtual companion. It was made possible by embedding an innovative state-of-the-art AI code within our first chicken NFTs. The CryptoChicken plays and interacts with the owner as well as the environment, bridging the gap of static pets with limited functionality in the Metaverse. Our team currently has a small staff of talented individuals with a variety of significant capabilities. Each member comes from multiple types of professional formations such as finance, web development, and business studies, besides having worked with multiple noteworthy businesses. Our vision is to empower Decentraland’s community with smart and interactive pets that have yet to tread on this land.

Grant size

24,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0x01F0b8e92F0ca0398482C265a99612196c8782fE

Description

Hello fellow Decentralanders! We are MetaPlay®, a newly founded NFT development company with the sole desire to innovate and expand the horizons of Decentraland and the metaverse as a whole. Our first NFT project is called TheCryptoChickenCollective. (For a sample, go check out the info on specifications below!) With this project, we are fulfilling a major desire for Decentraland 's user base, which is the need for having a companion animal that follows you around. Until now, this was currently only available as a static wearable that is constrained to your avatar and mimics your steps… we thought this simply wasn’t enough. Our chickens are not just animated pets, but also interactive and smart, allowing for a brand new experience for Decentraland’s Community!

TheCryptoChickenCollective was founded in December of 2021 with the intent of creating Decentraland’s first pet that moves independent of the users avatar motions. In addition to moving independently of the character the chickens will develop their own personality over time based on how the user cares for and interacts with their chicken, and this in turn will affect the overall statistics of it. As our project progresses, we intend on adding a battle feature to our project that will allow users to battle their chickens against one another RIGHT IN DECENTRALAND! That’s right! Never before has anyone accomplished an animated companion that could be seen by all users and could fight right in Decentraland… until now. All previous “fight” projects have users do the actual “fighting” on a completely different website and server. We wanted to take it a step further. For the first time in history, the CryptoChickens will allow for its users to mint, raise, and fight your companions against your friends right in Decentraland. Side note: It is worth mentioning that the development of this proprietary code has lead to further developments, which we believe could make animated wearables (ie. wings the user can wear that actually flap) a real possibility in the near future “winky face”.

We believe in Decentraland and our project so much that we have spent countless hours and a significant amount of resources out of pocket already on the development of this project, which we hope will bring joy to all the users of DCL. While we have many more ideas as well as the technical ability to back them, we don’t have the funding to continue our conquest. Although we have already managed to break a few boundaries in the platform, we believe we still need to increase our limited staff members in order to keep on delivering our promising roadmap!

Upon all the amazing feedback we received on our last proposal we have made significant changes to the funding request for our project. Originally our project asked for 240k for development which we believe could greatly benefit not only this project but Decentraland as a whole by way of the technological advances our project proves to bring in the near future. With that said, we fully understand and acknowledge the concerns some had regarding our lack of history in DCL and giving such a large grant to a brand new project. For this reason we have elected to reduce our original asking amount by 90%. With this new grant we strongly believe we can develop this project into one which we calculate could bring up to 1000+ new DAUs to DCL.
The 24k will spend as follows (over a 6 month period)

• 1.5k per month for marketing
• 2.5k per month for development

Specification

Our developer and designer are world class professionals, with over 30 years of experience in their respective industries. Our designer has done animation, and graphics for a variety of television, film and corporate projects and our developer has played a key role in the development of software for NASA, Unity, and Lightwave 3D. Due to the proprietary nature of the coding we are unable to disclose the exact manner in which we achieved the animated companions but we hope that our current example on our Land (22,89) will prove to be enough evidence that we know what we are doing and can deliver everything promised in a timely manner. Basically we created a cool looking chicken that, while in the beta testing phase, anyone can try out and enjoy within our C.C.C. partnered LAND. To check out what all the hype is about please visit our land at: ChickenLand (22,89) (link provided below)
(INSTRUCTIONS: Click the red box on the corner (only once), wait for it to turn green, then go to the middle statue and click summon your chicken. Disclaimer: we have yet to add additional AI functionalities and coloring to the chicken, but will do so immediately following our first drop. The first drop will be a wearable in the form of a gold chain that enables your pet chicken to show up behind you once equipped on your avatar.)

For more detailed information pertaining to our project please visit The Crypto Chicken Collective whitepaper: https://docs.metaplay.cafe/

Any and all updates on our project will be relayed through the following channels:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/\_CryptoChickens

Discord: Crypto Chicken Collective

Project’s links: cryptochickencollective | Twitter | Linktree
(Website is still under construction… brand new website coming soon!!!)

For access to The Crypto Chicken Collective official land plot click the link below:

Decentraland ChickenLand: Decentraland

Personnel

@Trag (CTO) ➺ software architect with over 30 years of experience in every aspect of the game industry, from high speed server design to graphics and gameplay. He created his first game in the early 90’s, created one of the first browser based poker games in the late 90’s, and has worked on hundreds of games and apps for PC, Mac, iOS, Android, Xbox, and Playstation over the last 30 years. He’s worked with NASA, Apple, Amazon, Epic, and Unity, on some amazing projects, but his best work is the project he’s working on now.

@KdubX (CCO) ➺ 30 years’ experience in the CG industry as an Animator, Modeler, and Compositor, working in the fields of Film, Television, Corporate, Virtual Product Design and Visualization, Medical, Scientific, and Architecture, working both as an individual and part of collective teams.

@Fooman (COO) ➺ Graduated Cum Laude from Oregon State University with a B.S. in business management. Seasoned restaurant owner and operator, as well as an early crypto investor.

@Stripcheese (CFO) ➺ 6 years of banking experience, Business Management Bachelor & Psychology minor, with International studies and experience. Experienced with stocks, crypto, real estate, NFTs and more.

@DR92 (Lead Editor) ➺Worked several years in retail management focused on private clients in two different countries, as well as side gigs with running musical concerts, translation, and B2B sales. Left the retail industry to pursue a career in trading in crypto, stocks, and real estate.

Roadmap and milestones

By the end of 2022 Q2 —>

Phase 1: -Mint of “Ayam Cemani” wearable chains, giving you access to your chicken on CCC partnered Land, for marketing and early supporters on DCL Marketplace. -Development and finalizing of the Crypto Chicken Collective website with full minting capabilities. -The AI-embedded chicken NFTs will be deployed in Decentraland, allowing your character to have a companion that follows you around on CCC partnered land. -Starting the development of five more breeds for the growth of our flock!

Phase 2: -Finalize 2 partnerships with notable NFT projects, increasing the space where your chickens can roam. -Expand the social media community to 1000+ people. -Mint of second breed of chicken on Decentraland, directly on MetaPlay’s provided website.

By the end of 2022 Q3 —>

Phase 3: -Develop “fight” feature for users to be able to battle their chickens against their friends! -Creation of a customizable ChickenCoop, usable directly on your Decentraland plot, enabling you to play with your chicken in any land you have control of! -Airdrop of ChickenCoop to Ayam Cemani holders from snapshot at end of Q3.

By the end of 2022 Q4 —>

Phase 4: -Be able to export your CryptoChicken NFT to other metaverses. -Begin development on an APP that allows you to interact with your pet in a different environment of your choice…

2023: Phase 5: -Creation of the $COOP utility/governance token. -Interact with your CryptoChicken through A.R, using the upcoming MetaPlay APP.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

[Vaporizador]

Maybe when smart wearables are enabled and you can use it anywhere, but for now I don’t see much use on a very specific type of pet (chickens) that are limited to ‘CCC partnered lands’.

[Tobik]

I don’t think this proposal benefits the Decentraland community, and also you are not showing anything that we haven’t seen before.

Let me do a review of your project by starting with a fragment of the whitepaper:

1. You are showing the same thing that Voxters does in the present. For the people who don’t know, Voxters is a project made by Pablo where you need a wearable (which you could get at GolfCraft for free by playing) and an NFT (which you can win at GolfCraft too) to make a pet follow you.

2. At the same time, a similar project called Compicactus is trying to do something similar (and while the option of the pet following you doesn’t exist, there is already a prototype where you can interact with the character). By the way, you can win a Compicactus for free by playing GolfCraft and opening a chest with surprise tickets.

3. Your demo is super basic. It’s only an unfinished chicken following you.

4. You claim that any project in the past was able to do the actual fighting right in Decentraland when Ethermon exists.

5. In the whole whitepaper, there is only 1 multimedia resource which is this one:

I think there is a lack of demos, pictures and content to even consider voting ‘yes’ on this proposal. I would recommend you to keep developing the project and once you have something more solid, present yourself again.

I still don’t understand how you thought that asking for 240K was a good idea. I’m not sure what type of maths you guys did in 15 days but now you are asking 10 times less which is really sus. It seems that you tried to apply for the biggest grant just for the lol and you realized that by those numbers was impossible.

sus

https://c.tenor.com/GfVorHpvor0AAAAd/among-us-sus-gif.gif(image larger than 4 MB)

[Fooman]

Hey Tobik, thank you so much for addressing these very valid concerns. It is this level of feed back that helps us to better our project as well as better understand this DCL community we have just recently become so involved in.

Diving straight in, voxters is actually a major inspiration of ours! Love the project and it is our hope that we may be able to partner with them in the near future. One notable difference between CCC and voxters is I don’t believe other people can see your voxter when it follows you. With our chickens, if you are in a scene with 100 other people you will see 100 other chickens moving at their “own will” and let me tell you that is a sight to see lol.
We believe this is our main offering to the DCL community at the moment as we are the first and only project to offer such features(We’ve heard rumors that ethermon finally stepped their game up and has a similar feature in some scenes but haven’t confirmed this personally). To be clear, once our project has been fully developed, you will be able to not only train and play with your pet but you will also be able to walk up to any other user on CCC partnered land and engage them in a 1 on 1 battle right then and there in the scene. Once again I am not familiar with ethermon but last I checked this was not possible. This very well could have changed though.

While our concept appears to be very basic at the moment it is actually our back end development that we believe is deserving of the funding we ask for. We have accomplished a wearable/companion that can interact with its environment without being commanded to do so by the user, which has not been done. We have also created a wearable which offers animation features which can be seen by all users. To put that into perspective, I was personally informed by many experienced individuals within the DCL community that such a feat was not possible due to DCL’s current limitations. Through many hours of research and development (which was paid for out of our personal pockets) we finally broke the limitation and found a way to offer personal animation that can be seen by all present users within the same scene. THIS is why we feel as though this project was originally worth the 240k we asked for and we still strongly believe that this valuation is accurate. The creative possibilities that are now available because of our findings are endless and it is our full intention to share our findings with other devs and individuals in this space which can help take the tech to new heights. For this reason we truely believe that this will be an invaluable tool for Decentraland and it’s immediate future. It is our hope that through that collaboration with other more notable projects we will be permitted to implement our code on their land, which we believe will be a mutually beneficial arrangement with most existing projects. Currently we have the potential to go from 1 parcel of LAND to 100s in a matter of weeks. However, it seems apparent that the positive outcome of this proposal will be critical to seeing such a level of adoption in such a short period of time. This is why we ask for your help in making this dream possible not only for the C.C.C. but for all current and future DCL users.

We admit our first proposal was more so to get the attention of the DCL community, hence asking for so much, and it was never our true intention to actually receive that much on our first submission. In retrospect, I can see how this might have come off as suspicious to many in the community who do not know us and our project. I now wish we had gone a different route to grab the attention we desired but hindsight is 20/20. (I guess all attention isn’t good attention)

We feel like the 24k we have asked for is very fair considering that we have invested close to that amount with our own personal resources. So far we have spent 3k on research and development, 16k ish on LAND to test our concept and 2k on web development for a total of roughly $21,000 that we have put into the DCL ecosystem one way or another. As much as we would like to continue funding this project on our own dime, we have simply run out of funds and current market situations have not helped the matter. I am not a coder myself and because of this I am left to hire talent which we lack funding for at the moment. Given that DCL has such a robust funding pool for projects just like this one, we come to the DAO in hopes that they can rally behind our project and give us the one opportunity we need to prove our worth.

I apologize for for the book but I felt the need to address these points in detail as they were very good points and I’m sure many others had similar concerns. Thank you so much for your time and if possible I hope that you will at least consider changing your vote and giving us a chance to add the value to DCL we know we can.

-Will from da CCC

[Tobik]

Hello, Fooman.

I don’t believe other people can see your voxter when it follows you. With our chickens, if you are in a scene with 100 other people you will see 100 other chickens moving at their “own will” and let me tell you that is a sight to see lol.

Yes, other people can see your Voxter.

but you will also be able to walk up to any other user on CCC partnered land and engage them in a 1 on 1 battle right then and there in the scene. Once again I am not familiar with Ethermon but last I checked this was not possible. This very well could have changed though.

I don’t think Etheremon has the option to follow you but I was talking about fighting.

We have also created a wearable which offers animation features which can be seen by all users.

If there is a big development in this aspect, please show it.

So far we have spent 3k on research and development, 16k ish on LAND to test our concept and 2k on web development for a total of roughly $21,000 that we have put into the DCL ecosystem one way or another.

You don’t need to spend 16K on LAND to test a concept. You can rent, get a deed or even ask someone to lend it to you. If I vote ‘yes’, I’m basically giving you back the money you paid for the land. To put it in a better perspective, you spent 76.19% from the total budget on something you don’t need.

I’m not sure if you have read other DAO proposals in the past, but people NEVER support when the idea of the OP is to get land. Here you are including that land in your budget, so it’s basically giving you for free a land.

Some questions:

1 - Will everyone be able to get a chicken without minting a chicken from your collection?
2 - How much is going to cost (aprox.) for a chicken (please specify a price range)?

Why my vote it’s still a no:

1 - You are still showing something super basic.
2 - I think this proposal is to fund your land.

Please, don’t take it as something personal. If you really believe in your project, keep working until something more solid is done. I don’t have any problem with changing my vote if you show us a better prototype.

[Stripcheese]

Hello Tobik!

Thank you again for providing feedback on our proposal.

We strongly believe that Decentraland is a very strong ecosystem with unlimited potential. Our leadership learned that it may not have been the smartest use of funds to directly buy a LAND plot, however we strongly believe that LAND is a very valuable asset, and therefore “recouping” LAND costs is not an interest of ours at all, as that would imply we plan on selling our asset for cash and not having LAND in this ecosystem

Initially, we were new to the DAO and certain practices, and we did not consider how we may have had the option to rent, (which we are now contemplating for an expansion of our project to a considerably bigger space, so we do appreciate the constructive criticism!). We understand that DCL funding would not simply go to us acquiring LAND and then potentially selling it on a price action, for this grant funding, we plan on reinvesting all of the funds to continue operating and building a better space for the whole community

Lastly, I would also like to address the potential misunderstanding of the fluctuation regarding our grant funding amount, we initially asked 240k as we believed we can distribute those funds to make our project launch as fast and smooth as possible, however upon receiving valuable feedback from the community, we have learned that the amount asking was way higher than what is expected to be granted to a new project in the community, although we can work with only 10% of that for now, we still have lots planned to give back provided we can have the manpower and time to do so. We are not expecting to recoup any money back from our personal investments from this grant, and we are positive that this project will sustain itself when we release our upcoming planned drops, in which will finally support the founding members to build this project on a more dedicated basis with a full on staff.

A few answers to your questions:

1: You can currently get a demo of our chicken upon doing the provided instructions, however that is not an NFT. Our first phase of this drop will consist of minting a wearable that in turn activates the chicken we have picked for the first drop.

Although we wished we could sell a pet directly on the marketplace instead of a chain, that is currently impossible on Decentraland Marketplace, but we do have the code and capacity to enable those in the future, hence, we plan on hopefully doing our second drop not as a wearable, but rather as a companion, that, however, will be contingent of DCL working with us on expanding the technical horizons of Decentraland!

2: Like I mentioned above, you do need to purchase the pet to receive it as a NFT, and

it will firstly be done so through a wearable, that is currently pending submission

We plan to sell the wearable that would also give you a chicken for 150 MANA on the marketplace, as that seemed like a fair price to obtain a first of its kind NFT within the DCL ecosystem.

Some things we wish you to consider:

1: We still have many more things to show, however some are still in development and delayed due to the lack of funding, but we have also had to keep some cards in our sleeve to keep the community excited!

2: We have learned from the DCL community from our first submission that is is not feasible to acquire LAND from grant funding, and it makes absolute sense we have considerably cut our budget that we expected from the first grant for that amount and we do not plan on selling the one plot of land we currently have despite of funding or not as it is a long term investment that we plan on hodling forever and hopefully slowly add more parcels to our inventory as our project grows down the road, and we are now fully aware of the need and advantage of renting parcels from the community to ensure everyone benefits.

We thank you and all of the Decentraland community members for all the continued feedback and attention

we will continue building regardless of any pushback and will improve to ensure we can better our community as we progress our path

[dao]

Decentraland’s first AI driven smart pets! (Resubmission)

This proposal is now in status: REJECTED.

Voting Results:

• Yes 1% 2,872 VP (7 votes)
• No 47% 943,062 VP (18 votes)