[DAO:zonlmaa] Dice Masters Development & Expansion

I have played so many games on Decentraland and i support them all but I dont agree with the way that dice masters people has acted.

First of all you went to the exodus proposal to savotage them and now you are applying for the same thing

I dont doubt that you are doing a good job but stop messing with others people project to pass yours let your work speak for itself, wish you best of luck and I want to tell you that there are better ways to do things.

Hey @MetaverseGenius the message above was about the response to feedback and what was presented at the time which in my opinion wasn’t a good base to ask for the grant. Since then JTV and his team have shown great dedication and the game has improved a lot which is why I also changed my vote to yes.

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Bravo on all the amazing work you do, have done. YOU ARE AMAZING.

I’m 90% yes right now.

The last thing I need to get to 100% is some strategy on sustainability. How do you plan on sustaining development, realistically. Having worked in game design, app development, we all know how long term and capital intensive this journey is. I think it’s important to have a clear and achievable strategy whether in this build stage, or how in the next stage of your growth you plan on getting cashflow needed to sustain your own project without DAO funding.

LOVE THIS, oh and small fix. The MetaMoment Wearables are DCL Report related :smiley: So they are The DCL Report MetaMoment Wearables which commemorate amazing community builders/contributors like yourself!!! Preserved in history through fashion :smiley:

Sending you all my best, looking forward to seeing this in the DAO

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You went a long way with the 60k of your previous grant.

I’m voting no because 240k it’s too high. I would support a tier 5 grant tho.

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Hi @KevinClark,

So far in the testing stage we’ve introduced our two main models for sustainability on a small scale, which have both proven successful, and also found surprising success in an unanticipated third model. Our pets line has proven to be consistent throughout the alpha stage, and we believe this model will continue to provide a reliable source of revenue that will only be expanded upon as additional pets and in-game upgrades become available as Dice Masters grows. Additionally, the profession wearable releases have all gone very successfully, and we believe that responsibly-timed profession releases will provide the additional revenue needed to sustain Dice Masters long term. As an added bonus we recently introduced a Hero wearable that was not originally intended to be a source of revenue, but was surprisingly successful. We are now considering how the hero wearables and corresponding quests can be balanced and timed with the profession releases to further help sustain Dice Masters long-term while maintaining value in all wearables and without exhausting the customer base. We believe as Dice Masters grows, and with the founders being the ones to maintain Dice Masters long-term, these models will get the job done.

Thanks for taking the time to read our proposal, and to shed light on this important aspect as I’m sure you’re not the only one wondering.

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@Mimsy to this note, I think its important to note any previous grants somewhere in the materials, even if on a gitbook of some sort, to show how your are using the funding to achieve progressively higher goals reaching towards your ultimate goal of self sustainable growth.

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@KevinClark Dice Masters has not received any previous grants. Yemel is referring to the Decentralwear community center, updates have been posted for that proposal.

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Hi @DCLDating , hi @Yannakis! How are you?

Some questions to give more clarity to the community to vote:

  • Could you explain to the community the relationship between your ending grant (Decentralwear Community) and Dice Masters?
  • Could you give us clearly defined and measurable outcomes in your roadmap?

Thanks in advance!

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Hey @palewin !
There’s no denying that without the skills and knowledge gained through the DWCC project Dice Masters would not be what it is today, so we understand why the community may want some clarification- thanks for taking the time to ask. When we began working on the DWCC and learning about incorporating gamified aspects in DCL for DecentrAcademy, we were inspired to continue exploring those skills via developing Dice Masters. However, the only true relationship the two projects have is that the DecentralWear Community Center, DecentrAcademy, and Dice Masters are all deployed on the same parcels of land. Though as we began to wrap up the DecentrAcademy portion of the project and Dice Masters started to take off, we saw an opportunity to take advantage of the gaming elements already happening on our land and found ways to incorporate them into DecentrAcademy to provide gamified learning opportunities to the community.

As far as some of our goals, we aim to have our additional staff onboarded to our team immediately, allowing us to promptly begin the UI overhaul and start revamping the code infrastructure- two large goals that will be ongoing through the first three months. In the first month, community members can expect to see bug fixes, new player tutorials, and a new profession release with an NFT wearable. By the end of the first three months community members will have an entirely new UI experience, at least one additional pet available to purchase, at least one additional world deployed, as well as several new resources added to the inventory and multiple new NPCs introduced. During the last three months of the project community members can expect to see at least one additional profession release with NFT, the launch of an NFT pfp project, and any remaining necessary preparations being made to bring the project to Beta launch by the end of the six month period.

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Hey @DCLDating and @Yannakis, love the proposal and what you guys are building but I feel the amount is too much and the cost evaluation for $240k is too vague.

I have heard DCLDating say in twitter spaces/AMA/DAO discussions how you hadn’t coded before and you’re just making stuff work and learning in the process and that is awesome but it is an indicator of the experience of the current coding lead.

The same sentiment applies to Yannakis in regards to experience as a 3D artist, the budget doesn’t warrant the salary in execution (from an industry point of view), just yet.

I am not bashing you as individuals, again love what you’ve built but I think the requested amount without a proposed project manager with years of experience on delivering projects at the budgetary scale of $240,000 is an imperitive (Please give credentials for Mimsy if they’re running operations managment because it is important :pray: thanks)

I know you want to hire more talent to create better quality visuals, do you have any artists in mind and are you sure they’re worth the salary you have suggested in your spreadsheet? One thing I have experienced is, people will talk a good talk, they’ll convince you they’re worth the fee and have the experience but they’ll take your money and waste your time. So it would be great to see a potential list of artists before people vote yes on this proposal if ‘enhancing the visuals by hiring a 3D artist’ is a core reason etc…

I think you’re both strong pillars of DCL with this project but maybe a $60k or even a $120k proposal at a stretch would have been more considered for a visual overhaul, you appear to making good sales on the marketplace with your content expansions and Yannakis is quick to snap up every possible curation submission so you must be on a considerable amount of $$$$ already to continue persistent development.

So all love for the project and you guys building but I’m not sold on the amount + experience with a project and budget this size.

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Hey @Malloy, we will take the time to answer everything you’ve asked, but I want to start by clearing up some miscommunications. I never said that I’ve never coded before; I write code every day for a living as an sr software automation test engineer, which I’ve been doing for the past 7 years. Within this time, I’ve become a certified SCRUM master as well as served as a technical product manager working in PODS for multiple agile shops, responsible for delivering projects with larger budgets. The company I work for is in the Fortune 500 top 40 and is worth over 70 billion dollars.

Before coming to Decentraland I’ve never written in typescript before; the majority of my experience is in python and java. The development evaluation is based on the number of hours it will take roughly to complete this project. We have created over 50 user stories, each with time-based estimations of when the work would be completed. We used these estimations and the average cost of the developer hourly ($75-$125) to determine the amount needed to complete the work.

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Just adding that one of the reasons we’re applying for this grant is exactly what you stated. I’m by no means an expert in 3D art so the grant would help us hire some people that have way more experience than me and can produce high quality props, NPCs etc.

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This is valuable information! I’ve been in multiple public calls with you and not heard this so thanks for clarifying.

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Ok, vet your artists if you get this grant. Not only assess their portfolio but have them do a paid art test (artists deserve to be paid for time and it’s a project cost to ensure you get talent worthy of the project) with staged screenshots of progress so you can ensure they’re not just stealing assets from elsewhere :pray:, only thing I can say about that, been burnt myself :sweat_smile:.

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Thank you so much for the feedback and questions. We promise to do our due diligence when selecting devs and artists for the job. Our plan is to take advantage of the DCL verified partner registry while we take our time and look for more long-term teammates.

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Hi @Malloy

I’d love to provide some of my credentials to support Matt and Yannakis’s choice to bring me on as Administrative Operations Lead. I have a BA in both Spanish education and English education, and have 7 years experience in classroom management and professional development from this alone. I also have an MA in Learning Design and Technology, as well as an Education Specialist (33 doctoral credits for those unfamiliar with niche education degrees) in Administration and Leadership with an additional concentration on curriculum design. I have also begun working towards becoming a certified Scrum Master, as I’ve found the skills I’ve gained through my previous degrees translate seamlessly over to project management in software development, and would like to have the appropriate certifications to represent my abilities in this field.

Thanks for giving me the chance to provide some clarity on that.

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After having a conversation with @Seanny from MetaArchs, the Dice Masters team has decided to take action that we believe will ultimately benefit the DCL community and help to sustain the DAO long term. As recommended by Seanny, upon the passing of the grant, we agree to pay back 10% of our monthly revenue to the DAO, in perpetuity until the grant amount is paid back to the DAO. If at any point the community feels we are not upholding our end of this commitment, we highly encourage them to contact a member of the grant squad to consider this a breach of terms.

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Awesome @Yannakis & @DCLDating. I commend the Dice Masters team for being leaders in this regard. As a community, we’ve long been ideating/debating how exactly this could/should be done, and this can be an important first step in better refining our DAO’s grant strategy.

@HPrivakos; could you lean in and advise us on what the best approach towards executing this commitment would be? Would an intermediary payable wallet need to be set up? Would be great if we can clear up the process for paying back the DAO before we pass this commitment.

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Hey!
Payments could be done directly to the DAO Committee MultiSig or to the DAO Agent.
If we want an easier tracking, you could create a vesting contract with the MultiSig wallet as beneficiary, 0 cliff and 1 as duration.
It will either require an action from the DAO Committee to claim it, or you can just revoke it when fully funded and all the funds will go to the Committee MultiSig automatically.

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Perfect, thank you for clearing that up @HPrivakos !

This puts us in a really great position, as I feel a lot of the remarks tabled here are justified.

Dice Masters is a brilliant project, however, it is clear that as a community, we need to start developing more of a framework with regards to how we’re managing our treasury, and actively consolidating our assets for the betterment and growth of the platform.

Once again, I want to pass on my appreciation to the Dice Masters team for voluntarily taking the initiative to lead in this regard. Having a $240k revenue-generating project which is committed to paying back the DAO over the years ahead is an important first step in setting up the groundwork we need to get these structures set up.

Moving forward, we now have a precedent we can use to start ideating what the goals, ambitions, and scope of our grants program can be moving forward, whilst actively pivoting our community funds into a sustainable investment vehicle as opposed to a simple funding scheme.

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