Duo - (Alpha) - Mobile App

[IMPACT]

Duo is the flagship game being built by Revelar, the NFT Game Engine on Cardano. We started by exploring many different game mechanics and designing a fun and repeatable gameplay as a quick fun social humor game.

For Alpha we are adding in our tokenomic research to build a full play-to-earn model. Initially this will start with test tokens to balance out the in game economy, while pressure testing how players try and break things. (Our favorite part too) We believe it’s important to use the tools you build, but Revelar was born out of a lack of tools that served our needs as NFT Game makers.

This Duo mobile app will let us explore how players want to primarily engage with our game - either via web app or a native mobile experience. The acceleration of a mobile app build allows us to increase access around the world (like with our language translation proposals) to emerging ecosystems and find a fit for our game that helps grow the global gaming focus on Cardano.

Large, well known Ethereum titles like Axie Infinity found product market fit in the Philippines where they had ~10x the Daily Active Users (DAU) than the US market. If we don’t enable mobile support in these emerging countries we don’t have good data on demand around the game since an overwhelming majority of their online time is spend on mobile devices.

This mobile app will have feature parity with our web app allowing the user to play Duo through the following core phases:

• Connecting and verifying wallet assets (Duo Cards)
• Putting Cards into Gameplay
• Joining Rounds via open Matchmaking
• Voting and playing a round of Duo
• Earning test tokens to simulate rewards
• Community voting of ongoing rounds through Fan Favorite Selections (FFS Points)
• Purchasing new Cards

Gaming is a core attraction to any modern blockchain and we believe short social gameplay experiences like Duo add a rich flavor to onboarding the casual gamer category. Beyond this, once they experience a Play-To-Earn mechanic that is based on a Cardano native token, players are less likely to completely move off the Cardano blockchain.

We believe that Duo can rapidly accelerate with a “simple” game that can educate new players into the P2E model while providing context for other games on how to create sustainable ecosystems, or certainly learnings of what not to do! Duo directly aligns with the Challenge KPI’s as we can measure the direct number of NFT’s created for this game, new players onboarded, and if the tokenomic models are used in other CNFT games.

Our world today is full of risks, especially with the unknown nature of our global economy & workforce.

• Death by Success: Launching an App for a game that becomes popular and can quickly onboard thousands of users overnight creates a big technical burden. We aim to limit this with limited NFT Card Deck releases to ensure that we can track the upper limit of potential players in the app. We will also require a player login with a Duo NFT in order to play, thus limiting server side resources.

• Software delays: Show me software shipped on time, I’ll show you software riddled with bugs. While we are scoping a reasonable timeline to ship a React Native app, managing Apple’s requirements can drag out verification and launch on the App Store. We can mitigate this with using iOS and Android core UI components with limited modifications and keeping the gameplay simple with animations for v1. Also allowing for a bit of extra review time.

We have also partnered with a contracted dev shop as needed for Native App 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 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]

Scope:

The main deliverable for this proposal is a production MVP native app on iOS and Android that allows for full gameplay in Duo’s Alpha stage.

• Connecting and verifying wallet assets (Duo Cards)
• Putting Cards into Gameplay
• Joining Rounds via open Matchmaking
• Voting and playing a round of Duo
• Earning test tokens to simulate rewards
• Community voting of ongoing rounds through Fan Favorite Selections (FFS Points)
• Purchasing new Cards

Milestones for this project encompass a 6 mo timeline with 12x 2-week sprints

• Sprint 1 & 2 - App setup and begin UX with simple placeholder assets. Final UI review.
• Sprint 3 → 7 - App development and Testflight launching for internal gameplay and feedback.
• Sprint 8 & 9 - Tweaking tokenomic parameters & adding buying of Cards
• Sprint 10 & 11 - PreAlpha Community Beta & load testing, with database wipe at the end.
• Sprint 11 & 12 - Final project Reporting, documentation, and preparation for general availability (Beta).

The main cost for this project is expanding our engineering team with a React Native developer. Since many of the API and backend needs for this project are already core services internally with Revelar, we can eat our own dogfood and save from using an external vendor. This limits infrastructure costs greatly compared to other projects.

• Cardano API Services: $0 (Covered by Revelar)
• Lead React Native Engineer: $65,000 (12 weeks full time at $135/hr)
• Marketing & Feedback Reviews: $3,500 (interviewing and collecting surveys)

Total Requested: $68,500

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 business systems 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 products used in Fortune 50 companies and 127 countries with 99.95% uptime. Plutus Pioneer Cohort #2, Atala PRISM Cohort #2

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 Master's 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 daily as the game lead. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/designerfourteen/

Twitter: @dsgnrfourteen 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.

Since this won’t be an open-source code base, to begin with, it means our primary way of tracking and communicating progress is our Catalyst Coordinator reports which include a recorded video, a written version of the updates on our dedicated site above, along with demos as applicable of our projects after each sprint (2 weeks).

This reporting process is also a requirement for continued funding by IOG

Our definition of done is public iOS and Android apps available to download that you can play Duo on and experience gameplay with limited wait times and across web & mobile games.

Success looks like more than 200 Weekly active players during the PreAlpha beta & > 500 Weekly active players on average over the first 8 weeks after launch. 

Revelar has a catalog of past proposals & their progress at: https://catalyst.revelar.co

The Duo mobile app is a brand new proposal for the Catalyst program.