Novellia Gaming Platform and Store

Welcome to gaming 3.0!

You used to own your stuff, but then the internet came along. It's time to take back custody.

What is the Novellia Platform?

The Novellia Platform includes the Novellia Dashboard and the Novellia DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).

What is the Novellia Dashboard?

It includes:

• Wallet for viewing games and NFTs in an appropriate manner. Displaying a bunch of numbers isn't good enough.
• Decentralized exchange for purchasing games and in-game assets, including resale and rental markets.
• Community section to democratically vote for quality content, keeping it relevant.
• Achievements, community content such as mods, and other game related values common to popular game markets.

What is the Novellia DAO?

A decentralized system that allows holders of the Novellia (NVLA) governance token to choose what content is listed on the Novellia Dashboard. Fees associated with DAO interactions fund a treasury for innovation and improvement. Users can democratically disburse these funds to accepted proposals for games, content, and technical developments.

Token holders are paid a reward for participating in proposal voting. This secures the DAO from spam and other bad actors.

How is this good for game developers?

Novellia is a decentralized video game platform. It increases developer profit margins and accelerates access to blockchain features such as selling NFTs and rewarding gamers for playing. It also reduces censorship and cancel culture from centralized gate keepers.

Historically, video game companies do not profit from resale markets, or often try to stop consumers from reselling products. Novellia opens alternative revenue streams such as resale markets where developers earn a percentage of every sale. This model encourages the creation of quality products that will continue to be used, improved, and traded. Companies are incentivized to keep their commission percentage low, allowing resale markets to thrive. This generates steady, long-term revenue that would otherwise be untapped.

Players are incentivized to trade in-game items, earning revenue for both themselves as well as content creators. Developers get a cut of each transaction in a fast-paced market, making everyone happy.

Through Novellia, developers can take advantage of decentralized storage technology and the Cardano blockchain. This may lead to decreased expenses associated with handling characters, in-game items, trading, and processing microtransactions. These use cases can only grow as Cardano scales with Hydra and cheaper storage alternatives become available. Novellia makes it easy to harness this new technology as it becomes available.

Workflows are provided for common needs, accelerating development timelines. Using the provided tooling, developers can stop reinventing the wheel. They can easily unlock Novellia's benefits as a platform for deploying their games by:

• Minting NFTs.
• Integrating existing NFTs into a booming market.
• Licensing and authenticating ownership of games using NFTs.
• Optional distribution of games and their content using decentralized storage.
• Surfacing user interfaces for headless dApps.
• And much more!

How is this good for gamers?

Novellia ensures gamers really own what they purchase. They can stop worrying about if their account will be disabled, causing them to lose access to their hard-earned games, in-game assets, and achievements.

Ownership is redefined as whatever is in a gamer's Cardano wallet. This includes tokens for game licenses, in-game currencies and items, and other game related NFTs. Gamers can do what they want, when they want, with whatever they own: that's the way it should be.

When a player is done with a game, they can choose to sell it on a resale market or rent it. This creates a return on investment for players, and trading commissions for developers.

By allowing players to resell their content, they're also more likely to spend. After all, they can immediately resell a purchase if they're not happy with it. This encourages gamers to be more adventurous with indie content, and reduces piracy by making it pointless. It's easier to lose a few dollars reselling a game than it is to spend hours dealing with broken torrents, cracks that don't work, or outdated game versions.

Microtransactions don't have to be a scam. By unrestricting the flow of invested value, and returning ownership of in-game items to players, these items gain real-world value. Players can try out that cool new skin or weapon and sell it later when they don't need it anymore. Gamers don't need to justify the cost of an in-game purchase when it's not a sunk cost.

A used game marketplace also makes games cheaper and more accessible. This is especially important when pricing is not adjusted to less economically fortunate countries. Why be restricted by the sale of the month, or the newest bundle? These are artificial restrictions that don't need to exist. When there's no middleman, it also doesn't cut into developer profit margins: they get a cut of every transaction.

How does this create value for Cardano and NFTs?

Network Effect

There's a huge amount of money locked up into video game microtransactions. Novellia allows gamers to resell this content instead of making it a sunk cost. This creates a huge network effect for Cardano.

• Transaction fees to fund the Cardano treasury.
• Spreading awareness by expanding Cardano's demographic to include gamers.

Interoperability

NFT game assets and licenses make a ton of sense, especially with a strong ecosystem. The dashboard makes it easy to find and play games that utilize Cardano, including their associated tokens and NFTs. By keeping everything together, NFTs can be interoperable with multiple applications.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could see at a glance what that shiny sword NFT is supported on? What if you wanted to try it before you bought it? In one game that sword can be a weapon. In another, it might access a super secret store. Or maybe it unlocks a spiky car in a racing game!

Indie developers can use this mechanic to bootstrap their player base, utilizing tokens released for similar titles.

Security

Gamers don't want to spend hours verifying checksums and PGP signatures when they download blockchain integrated games. It needs to be easier than that. The Novellia Dashboard only lists content secured democratically through the Novellia DAO. No more copycat tokens or fake smart contracts: if it isn't whitelisted, it's safely hidden.

Install content directly through the dashboard!

Quality

Sick of scouring through low quality content? The Novellia DAO uses a governance token so gamers can democratize what quality means. Whether that means disbursing funds to community content makers, listing the next best game, or blocking a buggy update from a greedy game developer.

How is Novellia going to be tested?

We are developing a game called Occulta Novellia as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the platform's features and lead adoption by other indie game developers.

Occulta Novellia is a turn-based strategy game set in a surreal horror multiverse. Its combat style is inspired by XCOM, DOS, and Fire Emblem series.

The game, along with its NFTs are heavily story focused with an emphasis on a lack of filler characters. Players have full ownership of game characters as NFTs in their Cardano Wallet. They can be used in single player and multiplayer modes, or traded at the Novellia marketplace.

What are the funds being used for?

• Legal Fees - $3000
• Marketing - $5000
• 2D Artwork - $12000

• Sprites
• Illustrations
• UI Assets

• 3D Artwork - $6000

• Models (meshes, rigging, textures, animations)

• Audio - $5000

• Effects
• Soundtracks

• Translations - $1000
• UI / UX Design - $7500
• Business Technology Stack - $4000
• Technology Infrastructure - $4500
• Research - $3000
• Taxes - $9000

Deliverables

• Novellia Dashboard (wallet, marketplace, community)

• Provided as a desktop app (Linux, Mac, Windows)
• Provided as a webapp with possible feature limitations

• Novellia DAO (voting, content whitelist)
• Occulta Novellia (video game for testing)

Links

• Our website including roadmap: https://rektangularstudios.com/
• White paper: https://rektangularstudios.com/whitepaper
• Wiki: https://rektangularstudios.com/wiki
• Our Github: https://github.com/RektangularStudios

IP Policy

• Novellia Dashboard is closed source, with strong potential for migration to open-source. This is strictly to prevent IP theft during our initial development phases. Many aspects of the dashboard will be exposed as open source plugins:

• Any components that touch money and need to be audited
• Theme extensions such as coloring, sorting, UI overhauls
• Wallet extensions for viewing obscure NFTs

• Occulta Novellia game is closed source for single-player. Multiplayer will migrate to open-source as it is decentralized.
• Everything else is open-source. This includes smart contracts, the decentralized exchange, the decentralized autonomous organization, Novellia Dashboard plugins, etc.

Key Progress Indicators (KPIs)

• At least 10k active wallets have interacted with Novellia (after 1 year)
• At least 3 organizations developing on Novellia (after 1 year)
• At least 50k cumulative social media subscriptions relating to Novellia (after 1 year)