No-code NFT minting - Revelar

[IMPACT]

On the back of building our own NFT game - Duo - we found that a set of stable, well documented, tools and a website for NFT Game Asset generation doesn't exist. So we started building Revelar.

Revelar is the first NFT Game Engine on Cardano and will bring gaming-specific tooling for artists and developers alike.

This proposal covers a web app for artists to use the Revelar as a no-code drag and drop experience to create all final assets out of their art layers. Pick from statistical/random rarity generation algorithms to automatically combine your art assets into final files ready to mint.

V1 of this website will include:

• Create/manage projects
• Create/manage layers
• Bulk Upload and Store art
• Create/manage attributes
• Create rarity with rules or pre-built models
• Combine layers into final assets
• Export all images/metadata with CIP compliant metadata in bulk

Many amazing games are being built on Cardano, many require early asset generation to jumpstart their NFT project for the next stage of development. This No-Code generator enables those who aren’t quite ready to hire developers or learn the Cardano blockchain a simple way to Generate, Mint, and Sell their assets with Revelar.

This proposal helps meet the challenge goals by increasing the variety of games earlier and at a lower cost. This allows game creators to spend time on mechanics and develop a thriving community of gamers around their project.

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

• Death by success: Trying to onboard too many excited early customers to try and self-fund with revenue. Since primary revenue is earned at the 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 prepare in advance to increase 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 tranches 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 software riddled with bugs. This is the largest risk with any DApp project due to the 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 full timeline for delivery on this web app is 12 weeks or 6 full sprints for a dedicated front-end engineer. With our backend API available, there is less work needed across engineering teams, however, we have current engineers to support if needed.

• (Sprint 1): Frontend UI/UX design finalized.
• (Sprint 2 & 3): Begin frontend development, test web app with Revelar API.
• (Sprint 4 & 5): Dev load testing of web app and final tweaks to frontend code
• (Sprint 6): Launch public Beta to Revelar Launchpad waitlist.

The funds used in the development of this web app will be used to add additional engineering capacity.

The funds used in the development of this web app will be used to add additional engineering capacity.

Development hours: 480hrs

• Frontend Developer: $36,000 (3mo full time * 75/hr)
• Cloud infrastructure: $0 (Covered by Revelar)

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

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

As defined by the challenge, our goal is to focus on three key metrics over a 3, 6, 12 month period for the Revelar Game engine's impact on Cardano NFT games.

• Number of unique projects that use this website (targeting non-developers)
• Number of assets created through our generator be minted as a CNFT for gaming & % that end up being minted.
• Mint day value (ADA) of CNFTs that contain assets created by our generator.

To create a level of transparency with the public to be able to audit this success we will automatically include a metadata element in the JSON exported before minting.

• Our 3-month goal after v1 of the website is live is 50 projects with > 500 assets each.
• Our 6-month goal is 120 projects with > 500 assets each.
• Our 12-month goal is 150 projects with > 500 assets each

If we reach our minimum 6-month goal of 120 projects with 500 assets each, at an average price of 30ADA per asset we can create (120x500x30) = 1,800,000ADA in value for indie games/artists, create 60,000 Assets, help onboard thousands of gamers, and bring a no-code asset generator online for artists and creators around the world.

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

This is a revised proposal that was APPROVED in Fund 7 but missed out on Funding. Our hope is with a larger budget in F8 we can begin work!