Revelar Game Engine - Operations

[IMPACT]

If this is the first time hearing about Revelar, we are the NFT Game Engine building API’s to generate, mint, manage, and provide on chain analytics for game developers on Cardano. It’s a platform as a service for developers to launch & manage their games on-chain, with a healthy mix of open source resources, business operation transparency, and community engagement. As a funded proposer, we have been encouraged by other members of the Catalyst community to see if there is enough value/vision at this point in time to be fully community funded for 2022 with our general operations budget.

Our request is for Revelar Operations funding which will cover our costs and needs to contribute on this project as a core team full time. Since this is a fairly new request from Catalyst, we have allocated time and budget to clearly document expenses, categorize them, and make them publicly available if funded. We hope this gives other startups insight to running an operation early on, as well as fiscal accountability to our team.

The impact of this funding would allow us to spend the time needed for research & community testing of our NFT Game engine, engage outside developer communities, and create quality tooling with high uptime and robust infrastructure.

It’s worth noting that we have budgeted this for operations, and we would be funding the rest of Revelar’s expenses through other engineering focused proposals and revenue from our products. This gives us good community feedback on priorities and a balance of accountability. 

In alignment with the campaign brief, Revelar is an application with underlying infrastructure creating a reliable and fast process for game developers to build on Cardano. As the first platform focused on the gaming tools for Cardano, we are already educating players and developers on other platforms with our NFT Gaming Podcast, collaborating with marketplaces for open standards, and creating open sourced guides on low cost node deployment and management to increase decentralization.

KPI’s for us as a team are attracting NET NEW game projects to Cardano. While we could aim to focus on current teams building on existing projects or creating new games, our goal is to attract brand new teams & their communities with easy to use tooling and education. Each one of these is a new application to grow our Cardano community and the diversity in the overall gaming community.

Success for us is 25 NET NEW Games on Cardano, powered by Revelar in the next 12 months. 

Our world today is full of risks, especially with the unknown nature of our global economy & workforce. The largest challenges for our goal of adding in outside developer teams to build NFT Games with Revelar on Cardano are the following:

• Death by success: Trying to onboard too many excited early customers to try and self fund with revenue. Since primary revenue is earned at mint, often infrastructure is underwhelming, under tested, and fails. *We aim to solve this by using a launchpad application approach to run several scaling cohorts through, allowing us to vet early projects for alignment, as well as capitalize (this proposal) in advance to spend the time and resources with support staff, testing, and infrastructure for better launches.

• Subjective budgeting: Every team builds and spends differently. A risk if funded is being transparent with the community through open accounting on what we are spending. Thankfully the Catalyst team allocates awarded funds in traunches and as we report our progress every month for ongoing funding. *To create accountability and offset this risk we use them as a community arbiter to review our spending & hold us accountable by withholding or delaying funds if we abuse the budget.

• Software delays: Show me software shipped on time, I’ll show you a software riddled with bugs. This is the largest risk with any DApp project due to unknowns of this decentralized frontier and new technology that becomes available along the way. *Our approach is to keep it simple solving 80% of the problem early on with known systems and infrastructure approaches from our previous experience. This means limited complexity with smart contracts and a focus on scalable simple solutions with business processes (like 24/7 customer support, dedicated QA) that often save time by solving problems early and supporting customers when systems break.

We have also partnered with a contracted dev shop as needed for engineering overflow needs. It’s a known team for us and they work on enterprise FinTech software deployments around the globe. Reference available upon request. https://www.excellarate.com/

There are likely other risks, but we believe these three are the primary ones to take into account and mitigate along the way. Again keeping in line with the Challenge Brief, we want to deliver the highest value with the least amount of technical sophistication to grow the community.

[FEASIBILITY]

The roadmap and timeline for this proposal covers the 6 months from:

Start of June 22’ —> end of Nov 22’ (Allows for December holidays and annual recap time outside of this budget)

Since this is an experiment in funding general operations for a DApp our milestones and deliverables may be different than normal, so we have tried to account for clear cut deliverables to present in reports for the Catalyst Coordinator check-ins.

Milestones & Deliverables:

- End of June: Transparent Accounting report process established, open and available from our CPA on the Revelar website each month. Overall progress on the NFT Game Engine from engineering, community, and launchpad cohort pipelines.

- End of August: 1st Launchpad cohort testing and preparing for launches using the Revelar engine. Support staff onboarded and trained to support launches. Final QA testing complete.

- End of October: First cohort of projects launched, second cohort onboarding, refinement of documentation & training.

- End of November/year: Second cohort launched, plan for general availability outside Launchpad, final reporting for Catalyst.

With this unique approach we have budgeted for a bookkeeper to maintain detailed records of all costs, categorize them, and make them available for full auditability on our current Catalyst Repo https://catalyst.revelar.co

Budget by Category - 6 months:

Developer Community Growth & Education - $16,800 - (80hrs/mo $35/hr 6mo)

Accounting & Compliance -$18,000 - (40hrs/mo $75/hr 6mo)

Productivity Tools & Subscriptions - $4,332 - ($722/mo * 6mo)

Utilities - $5,100 - ($875/mo * 6mo)

Cloud Infrastructure - $15,000 - ($2500/mo avg * 6mo)

Documentation - $20,160 - (80hrs/mo $42/hr 6mo)

Marketing & PR - $9,000 - ($1500/mo * 6mo)

Support - $17,288 - (160hrs/mo general support * 11.50/hr + 512hrs for launches)

QA User Testing - $14,400 (320hrs * 45/hr)

Total 6mo Operations Budget: $120,080

Revelar Core Team

———

Jason Toevs - CEO / Founder

Jason’s formal education is in Mathematics with a focus on Set Theory. With 10+ years as a full stack developer and technical founder, he has experience building and scaling software products and teams. His most recent experience has been focused on systems architecture design and leading an engineering team for global enterprise SaaS product used in Fortune 50 companies and in 127 countries with 99.95% uptime. Plutus Pioneer Cohort #2, Atala PRISM Cohort #1

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-toevs/

Twitter: @JasonToevs

Discord: ₳ussieGingersnap | DUO#1037

Benjamin Beer – CTO

Ben’s formal education is in Computer and Electronic Engineering with a focus on both hardware and software based programming and system design. His Masters degree specialty focus is on the creation of decision support systems. He was on the NWU Solar Car racing team in South Africa as an engineer to create a web-based Race Strategy Optimization System that provides near real-time feedback in a race scenario by collating and processing large amounts of telemetric data. As part of his post-graduate thesis he focused on the incorporation of blockchains, specifically smart contracts, into the supply chain. This research involved significant work on Ethereum with Solidity, before being introduced to Cardano. Plutus Pioneer Cohort #3, Atala Prism Cohort #2

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-beer

Twitter: @bigbenbeer

Discord: KarooSeun | DUO#2202

Jacob Christian - CCO / Co-Founder

With a double major in Entrepreneurship and Integrated Marketing Communications, Jacob is an experienced brand strategist and content creator. Before founding Revelar, he worked alongside startups across the United States to help them build their brands and grow their communities. His skills in content creation are best shown on YouTube, outperforming the channel average growth rate by +80%. His passion is cultivating community engagement through creativity and brand experience which is highlighted in Revelar’s flagship game, Duo on a daily basis as the game lead. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/designerfourteen/

Twitter: @dsgnrfourteen

Youtube: Designer Fourteen

Discord: designerfourteen#8550

[AUDITABILITY]

Revelar has a dedicated domain to all of our Catalyst proposals, we run these as live as we can to show real time progress, history, and modifications until we do our final reports and closeouts for each proposal. We welcome anyone to visit and audit our progress anytime - https://catalyst.revelar.co

For open source code and projects this Gitbook is automatically synced with appropriate GitHub repos for redundancy. If funded for this Operations Budget, we will create a new section for Revelar Operations, with open accounting ledger from our bookkeeper, and monthly video updates from Jason.

The primary auditability for this proposal will be +- % from our budget categories with our open accounting and video reporting for the Community each month, similar to how a startup would treat early investors with progress updates. In this case the Catalyst Coordinator team distributing funds would be our accountability check as a “Board of Directors” to make sure we are on track to receive each monthly allocation of funds.

For community members who believe there should be changes along the way, we will report and engage with requests and concerns via comments in our Gitbook or emails to: catalyst@revelar.co

Success for this experiment in budget request falls in a few incremental milestones for us.

- This model of early team funding is approved & funded showing the community values backing teams instead of seeking outside capital.

- We establish a method of transparency and set a high bar with open accounting to create a repeatable process for other teams to request early funding for operations.

- Our team is able to manage all reporting on time and in a consistent schedule with the least amount of delays for 6 months.

- Most importantly: Revelar is live with commercialized offerings & onboarding new developers into the Cardano NFT Gaming ecosystem and growing month over month by the end of 2022. 

While we have received funding for other engineering focused products, we consider this a brand new request for a different type of funding. If there is positive feedback and reception, we may continue this model for future Operational budget requests.