Cardacity: a trading card game

A trading card game where each card represents a city. Players can buy and sell cards with ADA. Dynamic events to make the market move.

2 software engineers with 10+ combined years of experience at SaaS startups. Blockchain investors and enthusiasts.

The idea
The main idea is to create a decentralised game where players are encouraged to collect and trade cards corresponding to real-life cities (100k+ cities in the world). Each city would have a limited amount circulating in the market, with some of them being rarer than others. Players can get cities by buying them from other players or opening packs (which will contain one or more cards).

Weekly dynamic events will be held, corresponding to real-life events (e.g. the Olympics, Super Bowl, World Cup, etc.). These events would allow the players to trade in cards matching certain requirements for a reward (the reward can be rarer cards or other collectibles or even ADA). This mechanic would drive prices of certain cities higher, making the market fun and dynamic, and also as a possible way to make money.

Players would also be incentivised to collect, for instance, all the cities of a certain country, all the countries in a continent, etc. Special cards could be created as a limited-time offer for real-life events as well (see examples above). The game will make it fun to collect cities you care about (having multiple copies of each one makes the game more enjoyable and accessible to everyone, instead of going with NFTs with only one owner per city). Players can interact with the game via a web or mobile app.

Marketing
We are thinking about selling and giving away 0-numbered cards (cards for a given city will be numbered - the ones with number 0 are the first edition/generation) when we start promoting the game. This will probably also involve working with Cardano/blockchain enthusiasts and influencers. By distributing some cards in the beginning we will kickstart the marketplace, with the added incentive of completing puzzles and earning rewards.

Funding
Development will be done by ourselves. The requested funds will be used for:

• Licenses for mobile app publishing
• Server costs
• Hosting/domain
• 2 months of part-time work from the 2 engineers
• UI/UX/cards design commission

When online, the idea is for the app to sustain itself via the profits from selling items to players (e.g. card packs) and potentially from a small margin taken from every transaction in the marketplace.

Roadmap
1 month

• Start development of the smart contracts to support the game, with the necessary logic for generating tokens, buying, selling and bidding.
• Start development of the web app where users will interact with the game
• Create a landing page to promote the game
• Mint and start distribution of 0-numbered tokens to create anticipation

3 months

• Have a working MVP version of the web app online, supported by the smart contracts with the basic functionalities
• Start development of mobile apps
• Start development of puzzles feature, to enable users to trade their tokens for other tokens (smart contract + UI)

6 months

• Full working app + mobile apps with support for buying packs of cards, trading cards with other players via the marketplace and framework for dynamic puzzles
• Approach organizations to collaborate with in order to promote real-life events in cities that are in the game (via puzzles, limited-time events, etc.)

Definition of Success

• Having the distributed game working with at least the features described in this proposal.
• Web and mobile apps to allow users to interact with the game.
• Having a volume of 1,000 transactions after 6 months.