[DAO: QmWaFXc] Development of "Exodus: Goodbye World"

Governance
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by 0x9381caa558f19a821a2360c59fdf3db60c09ff52 (JTV)

Should the following Tier 6: up to $240,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Gaming category be approved?

Abstract

Exodus: Goodbye World is a metaverse RPG set in Decentraland and being actively developed on a 7x7 estate at 126,44. The core Exodus team, not including volunteers, includes 4 Software Engineers and 4 3D-Desigers working under the leadership of the JTV Development team. We create fun and interactive content to Decentraland so that it can continue growing its player base. The team provides in-game content which has totaled countless playthroughs and thousands of wearable rewards at the JTVHQ venue. As the team builds more interactive content at the Exodus estate, it will need to expand and provide support to its developers. This grant makes a first step towards a much larger goal and ultimately to partner with and give back to Decentraland.

Grant size

240,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0x5117571b0BEc00372CE00870ad8E523C704a78b7

Description

Exodus is a metaverse role-playing game built by childhood friends who met online playing MMORPGs. Every day, MMORPGs bring together millions of people who form strong bonds, communities, and entire economies. Out of a shared passion with cryptocurrencies and MMORPGs, Exodus was born with the goal of making these communities and economies into real, consensus driven assets.

The name Exodus symbolizes a journey away from the online games we played and cherished as children and towards a new era where crypto assets allow gamers to create real value out of their playtime. We believe that time spent gaming is valuable and want Exodus to realize that belief. Exodus is themed around the concept of moving on from old ways of life and towards a better and more prosperous future. The character will begin in the medieval period and discover new resources, materials, tools, creatures, and questlines. Players will be able to play either passively or actively and work towards special items which will be represented as on-chain assets. The ultimate vision of Exodus is to have a full-fledged blockchain economy capable of providing opportunities to players of all types.

The JTV team has always focused on educational outreach when onboarding new users. As such, it has grown out of a mutual love for learning and having fun at the same time. The team has volunteered countless hours towards providing Decentraland content and will continue to grow to expand this outreach. JTV embodies this vision and has become a true goodwill of the Decentraland space. With Exodus, the JTV Development team aims to bring thousands of people to Decentraland to have engaging metaverse experiences.

Specification

Team & Experience:

JTV Development is led by none other than JTV, a prominent Decentraland streamer and influencer. JTV streams multiple times a week to onboard new users and share his metaverse experience. Through his promotions and community events, he has distributed tens of thousands of wearables and provided a ‘first wearable’ to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people. JTV has inspired many Decentraland content creators through his goodwill and general want to better himself and his community. In the opinion of the grant writer (not JTV) – JTV deserves the entirety of this grant, though his intention is to support his team and community through the massive task of building Exodus.

The JTV Engineers include 3 professional software engineers, 1 software intern, and 4 professional designers/artists. This group provides experience in blockchain development, backend engineering, front-end user experience, 3D designs/animations, web-design, and story-writing. If there was a team with the dedication to achieve the vision of Exodus, this is that team. In fact, the team has already volunteered their time towards creating engaging content like the popular JTV Easter egg hunt and scavenger hunts. Despite this grant’s pending status, the team has eagerly begun full-stack development of Exodus.

As the Exodus project grows, the JTV team intends to provide new metaverse opportunities to design and software interns. We believe that this fits well with the teams focus on educational content and its theme of giving back to the community. This fits well with the mission of Decentraland to empower its players and to provide opportunities to those who seek them.

Revenue sources:

Memberships

Ad space

Cosmetic NFTs

Backend services

Personnel

Socials:

Twitter @JTV____

discord.gg/jtv

Site for beta signups. Our main site is currently under development.

The JTV Development team consists of 4 Engineers, 4 Designers and various volunteers. We intend to add multiple interns (at least 5 interns split between Engineering and Design) to add to this team.

Allocation of Funds:

Funding will be divided into Engineering, Design, Marketing, and miscellaneous expenses like music, story writing, and server upkeep. Please understand, these values are approximate and may change depending on need. Engineering and design will include funds purposed towards hiring interns. The funding will be divided approximately into the following amounts:

Engineering - $125,000

Design – $75,000

Marketing - $25,000

Miscellaneous - $15,000

Roadmap and milestones

The primary release of Exodus will occur over a 6-month period with 3 phases: pre-beta, public-beta, and public release. The pre-beta phase will consist of a gradual release of gathering and crafting activities (woodchopping, fishing, mining, forging, cooking, scavenging), quests, and monster-hunting activities. Once fully rolled out, Exodus will transition into a public-beta purposed towards testing the game and preparing for public launch. Exodus intends to officially launch in January 2023.

We emphasize, the true roadmap of Exodus extends much further than the 6-month period of this grant. Our team intends to deliver a return of value to Decentraland for the long-term future. After public release, Exodus will continue to focus on attracting new players to Decentraland and building fresh content. Blockchain integration like wearables will be key features of Exodus, and will be continually developed for the game.

We believe that all grant recipients should strive to return the value of their grant plus some. As such, Exodus intends to contribute 5% of all revenue back to the DAO up to a total value of 300,000 USD. This is a small amount to offer in return for the critical support that the DAO would be providing with this grant and the team intends to deliver this. If successful, not only will this provide a return on the investment that the DAO makes with the grant, but it will also attract thousands of new players to Decentraland who can consume other metaverse content.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

2

it feels like this proposal is leaning largely on your reputation as a streamer in DCL, but i’d really like to know more about the game itself.

do you have some concept art? what are your influences? what other games have these devs worked on? how much have you developed so far?

also would be nice to answer some general questions like why should this game be made in decentraland (or in a metaverse generally) in the first place? is there a p2e component? if so how will that work?

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Hey dax, gaming in the Metaverse is highly important toward the advancement of itself. We believe the next step toward attracting the next generation of metaverse users will be through play and earn games. Exodus will be a play and earn RPG. Players will skill to earn assets. Those assets will give players game utility that will help them advance leveling their skills.

We have created a small portion of the needed concept art, as this game will be a very large game. Currently we have 100+ different items created and new ones are being created everyday by multiple artists. I have shown some on stream but at the same time trying not to spoil too much. These items consist of NPCs, resource items to gather from, resource materials, and tools. There is a small portion of our scene currently deployed. We do not plan to stay on 1 floor. We are going to build several levels above one another.

We are about a month out from having a small beta available for playing. There are 7 skills being developed and 2 activities (quests and scavenger hunting) There will be new skills launched month over month with a goal of completing the last one in December.

We’ve been working on building the team for Exodus for several months. We started with an Easter egg hunt and now have a weekly scavenger hunt at the JTVHQ 122,-14. We built the scavenger hunt game to help become familiar with game creation and integration in Decentraland. The lead developer Mrhamm, has created some other projects such as trademynft.net a peer to peer nft trading platform that allows a user to trade someone 1 nft for another, with an option of balancing trade with currency. Also, the NFT distribution bot at nftrobots.net I personally use the giveaway bot every stream.

Attached below are some spoilers for the Exodus.

Exodus

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@JTV
I’ve been a fan of your work ever since you dropped into this space. You have a track record of completing your goals.

I did not see a list of devs in this proposal, but I’m assuming it’s the same dev[s] from your working & successful scavenger hunt game? If so, I think it’s important to note the milestones with the development of that game instance; having been put together quickly and also changed weekly. This game also demonstates the abilities of your dev team with working leaderboards, token-gating with completion tracking, adaptive UI, and effective use of a 1x1 parcel.

While I do think one could argue that the details of this proposal could be ellaborated, I know you and the talented team supporting you are the ones who could get a project like this done, so I voted yes.

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I agree we need more MMORPGs in DCL, but I think your ask is too much. I think 20-30k is a good start for alpha. If you can run on that budget for 3-4 months and deploy a solid stable game, come back and ask for 50-60k.

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JTV is a Pioneer of DCL and should be in my opinion respected as such. As Epicsmash wrote in another thread “Give Creators a Chance to Create”. We will never grow if we don’t invest funds. Out of all the people in DCL I would trust JTV with these funds to help grow and improve DCL. You pay for talent, and quality.
You 100% have my Vote, and Support @JTV

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I admire JTV’s work as a purely decentraland influencer and this is a new level of innovation for the community, a game Play and earn will surely attract new users to the ecosystem.

@JTV you got my vote.

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You say it’s being actively developed, can you post more about what is done already (screenshots, videos, gameplay)?
I checked the website and both services and team page are empty.

You list some revenue sources but not much about what they are.
“Backend services” doesn’t mean much.
Ad space is only viable if there is traffic and I’m not sure if anyone is actually making money via ads in DCL.
What will the memberships be used for and what is the incentives to be a member?
Cosmetic NFTs are not at an ATH right now, what works are utility NFTs.

I think it lacks a lot of details for a 240k USD grants.

4 Likes
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This game is going to be epic. I have watched multiple live streams and videos he has done about the development of the game even before asking for the grant. Don’t get me wrong playing ice poker, having dance events, and clicking on astroid balls as they land are great, but if we want to be serious of the longevity of DCL we def need to step it up to compete in the soon to be very oversaturated metaverse space. So def down for this and and also am very confident on JTV and his team. Not just based on all he has done for the community but also the results of what they have accomplished in the past as well!

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Hi HPrivakos,

Unfortunately, we are limited on space when writing a proposal. I am happy to share feedback regarding any questions though.

You mentioned website. We are creating that now. It has not been our main focus, as we have been building the game rather than a site. The current one was built on Weebly and took 30 minutes. It is solely used for beta signups to communicate with our community.

We are working on integration of those things into the game. We have over 100glbs created and 10s of animations made. They have not been integrated yet. Here is a link of a recent tweet I put out that shows spoilers of scenes and items. Exodus Development Thread

Revenue sources

Backend services will contribute toward any blockchain transactions needed in the game.
Memberships will be for the purposes of having access to more advanced content and leveling in the game.

Ads will be placed in a corner of the screen when on the land that rotate between ads. We are going to try to stay subtle as possible but members will not see those ads.

Cosmetics NFTs will be event items released to the game for sale. The only way to get them will be to pay or perhaps win.
The cosmetic NFTs will sell very well. This has been proven across every video game that has an option to trade items. Look at games such as World of War Craft, Runescape, Fortnite, Clash of Clans, etc…

Thank you for your comment. If you have any other concerns I am happy to hear them. The more feedback the better.

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Spending our time pursuing a grant every month is a very poor strategy and a waste of our time and the DAO’s. Also, to add, the first basic Beta will be out next month. We have already worked for 3-4 months with no funding and paying for development out of our own pockets. Unfortunately game expansion is very costly and can’t be bought for $20k a quarter amongst 10 developers. At your suggested rate, you expect devs to work for less than $400 a month. Yes, $400 because we have other costs not just labor. Divide that into weeks and it’s less than $92 a week. We are at the point we must expand our team and acquire support from the DAO.

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This still doesn’t explain what you mean by “Backend services” and how it will bring you revenue.

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It will cost users money when they use our backend services, such as blockchain transactions. I am not sure how to simplify it more than that.

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@JTV Josh, Please provide your list of devs who are working on the project and tell us more about who you are and your background; for example, Ryan and his team from wilderness sent us a link to his LinkedIn profile.

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I love what you are doing JTV by trying to bring more users to Decentraland and I really enjoy your streams, but I don’t think I can vote “Yes” for this proposal.

Having 100s of glbs is not enough to convince me to vote “Yes”, I would like to try out the game, as I think everyone else would. At least some basic functionality, like chopping trees and progress getting saved in the database and displayed to user. You are writing that there are 7 skills being developed, but start with just one which users can try out and test, later you can iteratively add new ones.

I can’t help myself from comparing your idea about a game and a game which is already available for playing (Dice Masters). I love the look and feel of that game, all the details, it is just very nicely done, I get excited by visiting their scene, I want to play the game and can’t wait for them to progress.
But looking at screenshots from your game scene, well…

All I am currently seeing is no gameplay, pictures from very low quality game scene and silly assumptions that your cosmetic NFTs will sell just as good as in games like “World of War Craft, Runescape, Fortnite, Clash of Clans, etc…”

As somebody already mentioned, I would like to know more about the team. With which programming languages they have worked and for how many years? With what databases they have experience? Tech stack used for game? Since there is no gameplay yet, I don’t have the trust in the team

Overall I think you will get the grant at some point with your ideas and enthusiasm, but it won’t happen with this proposal. You and your team need to prove yourselves a bit more in the game development before asking for a quarter of million dollars.

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$240K is a HUGE ask. I would expect to see an alpha version of the game before requesting this much.

You mention paying back the grant to the DAO. That’s not how grants work; they aren’t loans. How you pay them back is by adding value to the community. This misinformation has run rampant through the DCL community and sadly influences many ‘NO’ proposal votes.

3 Likes
17

This proposal seems more like a desperate way to recover your capital after the few falls of MANA, you were always against grant requests, and out of nowhere decided to ask for a surreal value to build something that is already developed… DAO has no space for opportunists, my tip: try to build something solid and realistic and reupload the proposal.

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@TheCrowner While I also have some reservations about this proposal, I think it should also be stated for everyone to see that you attempted to sell the creator of this proposal, @JTV , voting power of “10 million” to him for 1% of his proposal grant or in other words $2400. This is not the spirit of the DAO which should be an expression of the collective opinion of Decentraland players and not about who is willing to pay for “support”. You only decided to express this negative opinion after your shadiness got exposed and people should know the background when reading what you wrote.

For @JTV : My reservations fall along the same lines as @Shiny earlier comment so I will not bother repeating them again.

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I think that you didn’t read the message that I’ve sent to him, I’m completely against anyone that’s “selling votes”.

Im looking for delegation to try to decentralize the actual scenario of the voting power, I’m a grant beneficiary and had to work hard to link with the busy investors in MANA that don’t look every proposals to vote. I’ve just offered a chance to discuss about the proposal and MAYBE get the yes

If you think that I have to share my work from months to receive a thanks at the end of the day maybe you can go and found then by yourself to help the proposal tho get the whales look.

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Hi Citrons, I understand your concerns and they are valid.

The glbs are a small fraction of the work we have done. The back-end and front-end have been our main focus. Not to be rude and in the politest way possible, you should go look at the land before making a claim that there are no interactions with it. We will go ahead and add more details to the land with that being the primary focus of everyone’s questions. Which makes 100% sense, you want to see something. The backend development is not something that is visual although, it is one of the most important aspects.

Due to the nature of the game I can see why you’d compare it to dice masters. Although, our game will be much different. To add, Dice Masters did not have a backend upon grant approval. I have not checked it out since but I don’t believe they do still. They made some animations and items swinging through the air, with a ticker of “chopped wood” which is honestly one of the easier parts of the game development.

As fun as adding one skill would be rather than the big picture, the functionality and resources will need to be balanced across different skills due to the game relying on other skills for advancement. Something as simple as a hatchet design needs a minimum of 3 skills because players will be using resources to create their own items, rather than us just spawning them for users. If we create a woodchopping game but not a mining at first, we cannot create more hatchets. If we create mining and woodchopping only, hatchets will not be capable for production without forging. Each skill plays it’s own roll in the game.

When it comes to low quality, unfortunately we are restricted by the operations of a browser and a client that cannot support a high performance scene. We would not want players to lag or crash due to those restrictions. They can hold what we have now but we are in the process of adding assets, NPCs, and materials to the land for visual purposes.

The team is very experienced in their field.
overall experience
Solidity
Java Scrypt
Type Scrypt
C++
C sharp
HTML5
Animations
3D modeling
2D

We built a very basic scavenger hunt to become familiar with game integration in Decentraland and the SDK before starting on Exodus.
The scavenger hunt is available at 122,-14 AND CAN BE PLAYED. It covers the basics of interface, time, NPC, NPC interactions, chat box interactions, progress visually, progress with sounds, poap distribution, and NFT rewards.

Thank you for your questions, they are important and I appreciate them. For those who have questions or concerns, I’d like to answer them. Feedback is very important for us to build a fun and interactive game for everyone to play and enjoy.