funded

Terra Cognita: AI+Blockchain Gaming

$47,250.00 Received
$54,000.00 Requested
Ideascale logo View on ideascale
Community Review Results (1 reviewers)
Addresses Challenge
Feasibility
Auditability
ソリューション

Terra Cognita」は、AI/MLベースのキャラクターを作成・設定し、全く新しい世界を探索するオンライン協力型の戦略RPGゲームです。

Problem:

カルダノのエコシステムでは、AIとブロックチェーンのコンセプトを融合したエキサイティングで革新的なゲームが不足しています。

Yes Votes:
₳ 149,791,899
No Votes:
₳ 6,220,525
Votes Cast:
754

This proposal was approved and funded by the Cardano Community via Project F7: Gamers On-Chained Catalyst funding round.

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Detailed Plan

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<u>The year was 1576…</u>

…the golden era of the Age of Discovery and the greatest navigators of the world were eager to find new lands and to explore new worlds so far unknown to their civilizations. Most continents were already unveiled, all civilizations started to somehow connect to each other, but there was a rumor of a new, recently discovered land that wasn't like any other seen before…

As the word spread, each day more people got curious about the land. Stories about unimagined treasures, strange creatures and unknown natural resources - and as some said, even magic? - started to feed the imagination not only of the greatest explorers, but all sailors brave enough to cross the oceans and see with their very own eyes if all those stories were indeed reality.

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<u>Terra Cognita: Discovering a whole new world</u>

Welcome to Terra Cognita! In this innovative, online, strategic, cooperative, RPG, machine learning powered game, you are part of a group of pioneers discovering this new, yet unnamed land, and you are still to learn what challenges await for you.

Be part of this new gaming experience. Create your own AI (Artificial Intelligence), NFT based characters. Let them explore. Let them play. Let them learn, evolve and conquer. Guide them through this discovery quest. Give them advice. Set their attributes. Set up their equipment. Set your strategy. Explore the land and find treasures while you cooperate to unveil the mysteries of this unknown… island? Continent? Something else?

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<u>The Gaming Experience</u>

Terra Cognita is (almost?) a new genre of gaming.

The players are not directly in control of their characters, as they have their own AI brains and make their own decisions. They decide what to do next, they have their own abilities to fight, explore, negotiate, and they learn over time - their AI brains are powered by Reinforcement Learning - which are basically Machine Learning algorithms that adapt and evolve based on the results of the AI interaction with the environment. Each minted NFT character is therefore attached to an artificial brain that will evolve and perform better over time.

The exploration happens in real time, and the game is divided into rounds of a few (3 to 5, but yet to be defined) days. Once you send your character to this unknown land, you can keep up with what your character is doing, for e.g., did they find a treasury? Did they fight any creatures, or even other players? Did they die? (Ah, and don't worry, if they die they will be back soon to continue with their exploration.)

While your character is exploring, you can watch them in real time by accessing the game platform, either in Terra Cognita app or in the game website. When you are not watching it in real time, you can either use a mobile app and activate the customizable push notifications to get information every time something important happens to your character, or access the game website, see a log and, if you want to, watch a replay of what happened with you character in the recent past.

And even though you don't directly control your character, you can provide guidance and some tips to influence their decision and the future of their exploration.

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<u>Play-to-Earn & Free-to-Play</u>

Terra Cognita will offer the chance for all level of players engagement, both time and moneywise. It will be a free-to-play and play-to-earn game, with some pay-to-win features that will also benefit all other players. The details of these mechanisms and the game tokenomics is still under development and its development is part of the current proposal.

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<u>The Characters</u>

By the time you mint your character, you can set its visuals and define (most of) its attributes. These final set attributes is still being developed, but currently the following ones are being considered:

<u>Primary attributes:</u>

  • Physical stats: strength, dexterity, constitution, agility, awareness, senses
  • Mental stats: intelligence, braveness, negotiation, learning
  • Supernatural / metaphysical stats: lucky, instinct, soul, sorcery

The primary attributes are going to be combined with each other, and also with the equipped items, to determine the secondary attributes, which directly affect the gameplay (also still under development):

<u>Secondary attributes:</u>

  • Physical stats: melee attack power, carried weight capacity, maximum health, health recovery rate, stamina, endurance, range attack accuracy, attack speed, move speed, youthfulness
  • Mental stats: self confidence, courage
  • Supernatural / metaphysical stats: conjuring, magical attack power, magical defense

Some auxiliary attributes will also be included, such as:

<u>Auxiliary attributes</u>: exploring, hearing, smelling, sight

The character attributes are going to be defined when the character NFT is minted. Although, they will also evolve with time, based on the characters experiences during the gameplay, and the player's choices for equipment and goals during the game.

In between rounds, the players are going to be able to change the characters equipment, items and set some new strategies for the following round. This way, the players can test different strategies and track their characters progress, evaluate which strategy works best for their characters specifically, adapt and change for the following rounds.

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<u>Game Development and Technical Details</u>

Due to the simplified nature of the game, i.e. the player does not directly control the characters, there is no need to use a complete game engine such as Unreal, Unity or other traditional game engines.

What happens in the game is the result of a computational simulation involving all the characters, creatures and all kinds of game objects. The backend is going to be coded in Python, to make use of already available libraries such as TensowFlow and Keras.

The frontend of the game is simply a user interface to show all the simulation that happens in the game, without any (at least in real time) input from the player. Therefore, we will only need a way to visually represent the simulation. For that, a simple WebGL or similar solution, such as Canvas 2D, is enough. The backend, i.e. the simulation, is going to be connected to the frontend through web sockets.

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<u>Risks and Challenges</u>

The following risks of this project have been mapped, and possible solutions have been proposed:

  • Scalability: As the game backend is planned to be developed in Python to make use of existing AI/ML libraries, there might be some scalability issues since Python is not the fastest programming language around. Possible solution: As the number of simultaneous players increases, the simulation of the game world will be split into multiple servers, gathering different sets of game objects that don't interact with each other.
  • Game dev experience: The current team has little experience with game development, although we are all gaming enthusiasts. Even though this game is not going to be developed as most games (not using commercial/available engines, for example), we will face similar challenges as other games during our development. Possible solutions: To receive support and mentoring from already successful game dev studios/groups. Some such supporters are getting onboard and will be disclosed soon.
  • Funding: The current request is not going to be enough to pay for all the game development, and we couldn't ask for much due to the challenge size (games are expensive!). Possible solution: To perform a pre-sale of NFTs (characters, items and equipment, alfa/beta game access) to fund the subsequent development of the game (more on that to be developed).

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<u>Roadmap and Milestones</u>

<u>Q1 2022</u>

  • Onboard 2 back-end developers
  • Onboard 2 front-end developers
  • Onboard 2 new designers
  • Onboard community manager

<u>Q2 2022</u>

  • First version of character's AI ready
  • First set of design for characters, creatures, map, items and equipment
  • Create the first Terra Cognita pioneers NFT collection and perform first public sale
  • Backend and frontend integration testing and validation

<u>Q3 2022</u>

  • Improvement of character's AI, including fighting and advanced surviving mechanisms
  • Second set of design for characters, creatures, map, items and equipment
  • Create the second Terra Cognita NFT collection and perform another public sale
  • Deploy Terra Cognita alfa version to be tested by pioneers
  • Terra Cognita tokenomics developed

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<u>Success metrics</u>

  • <u>After 3 months</u>: new FE/BE devs, designers and community manager onboarded
  • <u>After 6 months</u>: FE/BE integration validated, successul first public sale ($50k raised)
  • <u>After 9 months</u>: tokenomics developed, alpha version deployed, successul second public sale (other $50k raised)

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<u>KPIs</u>

  • Number of unique design created (characters, creatures, map, items and equipment)
  • Number of NFTs sold on first public sale
  • Number of pioneers testing Terra Cognita alpha version
  • Number of NFTs sold on second public sale

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<u>The future is Open Source!</u>

The game is going to be constantly developed for the first 2 years, as improvements in many aspects are going to be implemented into the game. After that time, the game is going to be completely handed to the community, which will decide on its future using the governance system based on Terra Cognita's native token. By then, all the game code is going to be open sourced to the community.

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<u>The Team</u>

  • <u>Victor Corcino</u>: Game architect and ideator, MSc in software development applied to engineers, Specialization in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, PhD Candidate in Machine Learning applied to engineering, Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member, co-founder of AIM Community Tools.
  • <u>Lucio Baglione</u>: Developer with 9+ years of experience (mainly focused on web/mobile. Languages and frameworks: PHP, Javascript, Typescript, Python, Ruby - Laravel, Ruby on Rails, Wordpress, Angular.js, Vue.js, Node.js). CA and vCA, co-creator of the Community Tools (Proposer/CA/vCA/Voter Tools)
  • <u>Phil Khoo</u>: Front end UI/UX designer and finance and business background, co-founder of AIM Community Tools amongst numerous other pursuits.
  • <u>Filip Blagojević</u>: Entrepreneur, industrial software engineer, Plutus Pioneer, Project Catalyst Community Advisor and Veteran Community Advisor
  • <u>Carlos Fonseca</u>: Data science and artificial intelligence engineer.
  • <u>Alfredo</u>: Data science and artificial intelligence scientist.
  • <u>Felipe Marcel</u>: Designer, specialized in branding and visual identity.
  • <u>Victor Lobo</u>: Designer, specialized graphical design and character development.

<u>Budget</u>

  • Project management: $1600/ month
  • Back-end developers (part time): $800/ month / dev (2 total)
  • Front-end developers (part time): $800/ month / dev (2 total)
  • Plutus developer (part time): $1200/ month / dev (1 total)
  • Designers (part time): $500 / month / designer (4 total)
  • Community manager: $1000 / month
  • Total for 6 months: $54k

コミュニティ・アドバイザー・レビュー (1)

Comments

Monthly Reports

We are currently onboarding new team members. So far, we've onboarded 3 new devs and 2 designers. We are also onboarding some project advisors - which is actually out of the scope of the proposal, but we've identified this as a valueble addition and we've found some people interested in filling this role, in exchange for a small share of our future tokens.

Disbursed to Date
$47,250
Status
Still in progress
Completion Target
10/31/2022
Comments 0

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Since last month, we’ve create more back story, new designs, improved the back end engine and the front end as well, connecting them and making a very first version of the game with almost all parts already connected.

Disbursed to Date
$47,250
Status
Still in progress
Completion Target
10/31/2022
Comments 0

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We have improved the back story and brought a community manager onboard. Also, we have produced a chatbot to be the first contact with our community, and are working on improving both back end, front end and its connection through the web sockets.

Disbursed to Date
$47,250
Status
Still in progress
Completion Target
10/31/2022
Comments 0

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Due to various reasons related to the team members (work overload, sickness, moving), the project got delayed in 1 month. We are going to ask IOG to skip the next batch for us, and we get back on track the following month.

Disbursed to Date
$47,250
Status
Still in progress
Completion Target
10/31/2022
Attachment(s)
Comments 0

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As mentioned, due to various reasons related to the team members (work overload, sickness, moving), the project got delayed in 2 months. We skipped received funds for 2 months and are now getting back on track. Also, we now have a person that is going to me almost full time and leading the executing of the project until the end of the year so we can launch it still in 2022.

Disbursed to Date
$47,250
Status
Still in progress
Completion Target
3. In the next 6 months
Comments 0

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Since last report, we have onboarded three more people to the team: a musician, to work on the sound track and on the sound design; a writer, to work on the stories we are going to share with our players and which will tell the story of the game to our players; and a developer, who is helping us to adjust the code structure to scale up from where we are at the moment. They all already started working on the project and we will show some of the things they have developed.

Disbursed to Date
$47,250
Status
Still in progress
Completion Target
3. In the next 6 months
Comments 0

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Since the last report, we have been working on a few things:

  1. We are refactoring the back-end code base one some best practices that we didn't use at first because we were not aware of them. Also, we are using the opportunity to improve other things on the code that are going to be crucial for scaling up the project.
  2. We have built the front-end part of the code responsible for minting the NFTs and creating characters. The UI is still to be done in a better way, but the logic is already implemented.
  3. We have done new songs for the game soundtrack, and started working on other sound effects of the game.
  4. We are researching game assets that we can use prior to requesting a designer to make everything from the scratch.
  5. We have done some tests with the new image generating algorithms such as Dall-e and Stable Diffusion to make some conceptual art design.
  6. As we approach launch of the first version, we are starting to create a marketing strategy to gather the first players and starting our presence in some media, such as Twitter (https://twitter.com/TCog1576).
Disbursed to Date
$47,250
Status
Still in progress
Completion Target
3. In the next 6 months
Comments 0

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Since the last report, we've done the following work:

  1. We are continuing to refactor the back-end code.
  2. We are onboarding a new back-end developer, since one of our devs will leave the project on December, as we planned when the project started.
  3. We have developed an integration with the back-end, supabase and front-end. We can already run the first version of the game end-to-end in a local server, even though the back-end is still being developed and we are building more functionalities.
  4. Once more, we have done new songs for the game soundtrack, and started working on other sound effects of the game.
  5. We are starting to build the back-end part of the game to automatically generate the game map from round to round.
Disbursed to Date
$47,250
Status
Still in progress
Completion Target
3. In the next 6 months
Comments 0

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