Terra Cognita: AI+Blockchain Gaming

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The year was 1576…

...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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Terra Cognita: Discovering a whole new world

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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The Gaming Experience

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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Play-to-Earn & Free-to-Play

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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The Characters

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:

Primary attributes:

• 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):

Secondary attributes:

• 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:

Auxiliary attributes: 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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Game Development and Technical Details

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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Risks and Challenges

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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Roadmap and Milestones

Q1 2022

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

Q2 2022

• 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

Q3 2022

• 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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Success metrics

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

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KPIs

• 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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The future is Open Source!

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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The Team

• Victor Corcino: 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.
• Lucio Baglione: 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)
• Phil Khoo: Front end UI/UX designer and finance and business background, co-founder of AIM Community Tools amongst numerous other pursuits.
• Filip Blagojević: Entrepreneur, industrial software engineer, Plutus Pioneer, Project Catalyst Community Advisor and Veteran Community Advisor
• Carlos Fonseca: Data science and artificial intelligence engineer.
• Alfredo: Data science and artificial intelligence scientist.
• Felipe Marcel: Designer, specialized in branding and visual identity.
• Victor Lobo: Designer, specialized graphical design and character development.

Budget

• 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