Viff.Club: Slimey Emotional NFTs

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Easy to read format on Google Docs:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h_I91McQXfBeo8BlFf13vgkxt4dWdTKCBreq2LX1PuY

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Links:
- Google Docs of Fund Application and Detailed Plan: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h_I91McQXfBeo8BlFf13vgkxt4dWdTKCBreq2LX1PuY
- Google Drive folder with future Viff resources: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MnUCERF8ygw99kbwBCh2IroVfteoTA6X
- Game engine demo (current dev state): http://viffclub.com/
- GitLab docs project: https://gitlab.com/viff-club/docs . The engine and other components code will be closed at least until the release of Viff.Club (to prevent unfair competition copying project, rushing to finish it first and doing half-ass job, and destroying the idea that we love).

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Updates:

- April 14: Submitted idea. Detailed plan to be submitted by Sunday, April 18 (we're preparing detailed plan for submission on Catalyst).
- April 15: Submitted the first draft of the detailed plan. We'll continue working on it until the end of the revision phrase. Please, let us know what questions and suggestion you've got :)!
- April 18: viffclub.com waiting room is open :)! We've been busy building React.js based game engine to show Viffs and their interactions. There are simple 2 rooms there for now: the Viff meeting room and your Viff observer host room. Viffs have a random goal now (they can get cup of coffee and turn PC on/off, but that's all for now). This is just to give you the idea of how the actual Viff simulation might look like. We've had to use viffclub.com domain for now as our reversed proxy renewed Lets Encrypt certificate over 10 times: https://crt.sh/?q=viff.club . Our very sad mistake, but we'll be updating in a week and keeping viffclub.com as redirect. Important note: current Viff graphics are just placeholders as we are currently work on building Viff generation scripts and genesis graphics. None, of the Viffs are minted, yet, they are randomly generated before the stage is loaded.
- April 21: Added link to Google Docs with detailed Viff.Club development plan: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h_I91McQXfBeo8BlFf13vgkxt4dWdTKCBreq2LX1PuY . Updated detailed plan.
- April 28: Finalized project description: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MnUCERF8ygw99kbwBCh2IroVfteoTA6X

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Intended fund usage:
- $20k graphics design of Viffs, gadgets, land, and all other assets;
- $20k software development (website code, smart contracts, simulation engine, etc.), simulations, research, and implementation;
- $10k infrastructure, hosting, and reserved for the unexpected expenses. $10k should hopefully be enough to cover a year of costs after which Viff.club should become self-sustaining.
Why only approximate figures? The exact numbers are hard to predict and we did our best to approximate costs based on our prior development experience. In essence, they'd be sufficient for the plan and shouldn't differ much from the present allocation.

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Detailed Description

Meet Viff

Viff is your on-chain crypto-friend, but what exactly is Viff?
Viff is an NFT composed of the following on-chain metadata:
- Viff's body - SVG shape object [1] randomly generated and unique throughout the entire universe (each Viff is 100% unique); using SVG [1] allows to store the entire Viff graphics on-chain;
- Viff's gadgets - references to gadgets that your Viff received; those are added via depositing to smart contract with unique Viff's id; each gadget has rarity and limited emittance;
- Viff's emotions - similar to gadgets types of emotions are minted, rare, and can be assigned to Viff (e.g. curious, joyful, explorative, etc.); emotions once assigned are associated with Viff forever; emotions contribute to Viff's utility function, hence influence his behavior;
- Viff's traits - earned completely through random interactions in the simulation; e.g. inquisitive and curious Viff might be influenced to learn new things and acquire new trait, traits might be temporary or permanent; if they're temporal they're stored off-chain, if they become permanent they're minted same way as gadgets and given to Viff.

What does Viff look like?

Viff is a slime-like creature with transparent jelly and adorable eyes. Viff can hold gadgets such as evil horns, cooking hats, or hockey sticks. Sometimes Viff might have a small accident, e.g. end up with guitar stuck in its jelly for a few days temporarily modifying its look. Also, look out because Viff can swallow some of your coins (don't worry they won't come out of your wallet, but Viff has a tendency for things getting stuck in its jelly).

What does Viff do?

However, that's not all, we discussed what Viff is, but we haven't talked about what Viff does.

Viff is a living organism, it's got a pretty body, maybe some gadgets, but most importantly Viff has emotions and life objectives. All Viffs are simulated in a 2.5D pixelated game. You don't take part in the game, Viffs just live their lives among themselves. It gives you an opportunity to observe what your Viff and others do.

Viffs are living their lives in one of the biggest off-chain live simulations in the world. Each clock cycle, each Viff will take the current state, it's surroundings, emotions, and objectives into account and select the best course of action to pursue. All interactions into which Viff enters have different possibilities of outcomes based on randomness, but also on Viff's traits. Some interactions might change Viff's state temporarily, but some for permanent (e.g. Viff might acquire a new trait).

You can track Viffs lives via a pixelated game. You can center and follow your Viff, but also any other Viff as long as you know it's name or see it and can attach a camera to it manually. All interactions are stored in Viff's life history and you can browse and search through it. Notable events such as learning new traits, making friends, etc. will be bookmarked as important life events.

We also mentioned that Viff is your crypto-friend, right? Well, it wouldn't be too nice, if you couldn't talk to your friend. We're researching a language/psychological chat interaction model that's feasible for us to implement, but which gives the impression of actual conversation. Emacs ELIZA despite it's simplicity emulated a very human type of conversation [2]. We plan on building a more complex model that can deliver detailed conversations, but we think a lot of fun things can be done. Finally, the conversational style will be unique to each Viff, as it'll be influenced by the Viff's emotional and personal traits, and state.

Does Viff die?

No, Viffs are forever.

Where does Viff live?

We propose development of Viff Club, a virtual-space that shows all Viff's in real-time in a form of browser based 2.5D game. The only difference is, you don't control anything, you can just watch, each Viff is an autonomous agent with its own goals and reward function (influenced by its emotion, gadgets, state, etc.).

We've parked the https://viff.club (not set up yet) and https://viffclub.com (hosting the game engine demo) domains and are in the process of developing browser UI.

The Viffs' world will be simulated in an off-chain game engine which also creates snapshots that nothing is lost even in the case of total failure. We might even use FileCoin or ARWeave to store snapshots.

React.js view engine will be used to watch the Viffs' world in real-time and give access to all other functionalities such as minting Viffs, giving Viff new gadgets and traits, reading Viff life history, and more.

Finally, all Viff information will be stored on-chain as NFTs. As Viffs evolve, e.g. are given gadgets each gadget or trait will hold a unique Viff id to keep association with it.

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Timeline

Launchpad

We plan 3 phase launch (all dates are 2021):
- July: Viff minting and customization system with NFT minting, gadget, and emotions equipping, and simulation with a static map (the world will be eventually fully dynamic and procedurally generated). Viff.Club will be tested on the testnet and launched on the mainet following shortly smart contract deployment on the mainnet.
- September: implementation of smart agents taking the Viff state, emotions, traits, and gadgets as input and generating at each simulation loop objectives for Viff to fulfill.
- November: Implementation of a procedurally generated world that is expanded upon Viff interactions with the surrounding - environment. Launch of season customization for the winter season, and completed platform launch in December.

Definition of Success

After 3 months:

- Completed React.js simulation browser viewer, implemented using React.js and Three.js. For an idea of what it might look like visit https://viff.club.

- Completed Viff minting stage (front-end page).
- Completed minting smart contracts for Viffs, gadgets, and emotions on testnet.
- Completed development of the basic interaction simulation engine allowing for simple Viff interactions with the environment and themselves and simple utility algorithms.
- Stack integrating the backend, front-end, and the simulation (game) loop.

After 6 months:

- Implementation of complex reward functions derived from Viff state, emotions, gadgets, and traits.
- Implementation of Markov-chain model for path dependent decisions.
- Implementation of emotion and gadget assignment mechanics (attaching additional properties to Viff's).
- Viff timeline showing interactions and Viff profile.

After 12 months:

- Procedurally generated work, where the work is generated based on Viff interactions with it, which might change the current state of the objects in the world, and which might expand the world itself (exploration).
- Event based customization with the winter season being launched first.

Impact on the challenge metrics

Source: https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/campaign-home/25941
NFTs are a very active area of blockchain development and usage at the moment. We believe that innovative approach to NFTs (not just a static piece of file such as image or music or a certificate), but rather ownership certificate of a sentient being (Viff) that is the 3rd generation of all tamagotchis put in one world, would definitely attract interest to Cardano blockchain.
Based on the current metrics, we'd expect active platform engagement and trading, and would estimate the level at 500-1000 users at the end of the year.

Community engagement

- We want to offer airdrop to a limited number of Catalyst users. Purely to reward Catalyst users for building the future of Cardano and will not be tied to voting or engagement on this specific project, etc.
- We'll host an initial fixed-price sale of first Viffs with a higher ratio of rare items to reward the Viff pioneers via a dutch auction (as the number of Viffs will be limited).
- Small stake (around 5%) of Viffs might be reserved as presents, e.g. to YouTubers to make reviews or notable community members (both to engage them to explore and give feedback on the idea, but also as a token of appreciation of their work).
- After that you'll only get Viff based on the time-clocked minting policy, in a form of dutch auction.

KPI

- User retention - users who are still active after 6 months; can be projected using power series (e.g. approx 6 month retention from 1 month, take 1 month retention to 6th power).
- User growth - year on year user growth (can be projected via regression or taking into the account marketing campaigns).
- Monthly Active Users (MAU) and average attention span.
- Average orphanage time; if not all Viffs are pre bough, what is average time Viff doesn't have an owner. This would be used to slow down the emission rate. If there isn't orphan time the new Viff minting rate will return to the default policy setting the maximum emission rate.
- Viff value appreciation. For those transactions that we can observe from the blockchain what's the price appreciation of Viffs from the time brought to the sale time. If the price appreciates it means that Viffs are unique and hence perceived as valuable based on the time in the simulation and their uniqueness or specific traits.

Roadmap

- Develop SVG Viff-base models with random parameterization via SVG parameters (such as color, gradient type, and random mutations to the shape outline). Further thanks to SVG format we'll be able to store the entire NFT on-chain!
- Develop and test SVG based Viff generation.
- Create a set of SVG gadgets that Viff might receive. Include rarity information in the process of creation of the gadgets themselves (gadgets can be assigned to Viff, but can also be traded separately and stacked/unstacked from Viff via smart contracts in the future).
- Research and design personality traits. Each trait must translate to the utility function and each personality trait should have activation thresholds for each decision to be situational. Simulate Viff behavior based on different personality traits and assess the randomness of choice. PCA (Principal Component Analysis) can be used to focus on the personality traits maximizing the uniqueness of Viffs behaviors. Implement the initial set of personality traits and utility and activation models (this is pretty much classical neural simulation).
- Design and create Viff land - this is the place where Viffs will live, interact with each other, and minted into.
- Design Viff minting mechanism and time clock.
- Design Viff land auction mechanism.
- Design Viff gadgets, emotions, and assets marketplace allowing users to trade between themselves or burn token of Viffs, gadgets, etc. for ADA (each asset will have intrinsic value based on the initial pay price which can always be unminted), but as the Viffs live their lives and create unique history logs, become more unique, and rare, they'd hold a lot of value in themselves.
- Research, design, and implementation Viff narrator mode (constructing stories out of the Viff behavior simulation).
- Continue developing Viffs, gadgets, emotions, etc.
- Allow for world exploration through the Viff eyes (allow the user to take control over Viff).
- Generate live Viff TV, where anyone can watch the Viffs in real-time through the simulation state representation on the web page canvas.
- Implement the ability for Viffs to acquire temporal states, e.g. Viff is curious and discovers a new piece of information, a jelly might contain a book for the next 7 days, and few have temporal property (e.g. knowledgeable).
- Implement trait acquisition and Viff development mechanics. Viff's actions are dictated by its emotions and state, this will lead to it performing specific tasks frequently, each repetitive task will increase via a Markov chain model a probability of acquiring either new trait or skill. For instance, Viff with traits: curious, ranger, nature loving and gadget binoculars and backpack will aim to discover new forest tiles. As it does so, the probability of it finding forest gadget (e.g. antlers, moss, berries) which it can later equip raise similarly as the probability of acquiring new traits such as hunter, watcher, one with nature, etc. All second level and higher traits can only be acquired by interaction, i.e. cannot be bought and assigned to Viff making long living Viff only so much more valuable and unique.

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References
[1] Scalable Vector Graphics Wikipedia Article. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics . Accessed on 2021/04/14.
[2] ELIZA - Natural Language Processing Program. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA . Accessed on 2021/04/14.

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Game Engine Demo

Available at https://viffclub.com .

Custom built game engine on top of React.js, three.js and fiber.

Currently the game runs fully in the browser, but eventually the simulation will run on the server, and the browser application will only be used to observe Viffs, modify them, and read their interaction histories.

The Viff graphics are placeholders for the game engine and view part of the engine development. Each Viff will be unique and uniquely represented in the simulation.