Proposal: Nounish Fall Guys-Esque Competitive Multiplayer Game

NounsDAO NounsDAO Proposals
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ABSTRACT

Chef Studios is planning to create a 3D, Fall Guys-esque game with Nouns branding. Anyone will be able to compete as their favorite Nouns, using a similar character selection system to something like Super Smash Brothers. Users will win prizes in the form of NFTs or Tokens, and any Nouns used in games will receive a portion of these rewards as well as POAPs signifying how often their Noun was played as.

MOTIVATIONS

Nouns has potentially the most exciting brand in web3 right now. The culture is unparalleled, the mystique and scarcity create allure, and the Nounish dominion over the memes is powerful. We believe that Nouns is positioned well to leave a legacy, and a competitive game that is both fun and Nounish seems like a great way to give back to web3 and propagate Nouns.

ASK

50 ETH for the delivery of Milestone 1. Funds to be streamed monthly (~25 ETH) with an estimated 2 month delivery target. With this 50 ETH investment, we believe we can proliferate the meme on a massive scale.

TIMELINE

Milestone 1 (~2mo) - First Basic 3D game with Nounish branding

Create a Nounish Fall Guys game where users can select a Noun to play as, and compete against others in a matchmade lobby. The earn component won’t be implemented here, so users would instead choose from a list of nouns to be their avatar for the game, similar to a character selection system like in Super Smash Bros.

Milestone 2 - Provide incentives for playing

Users and Noun-holders whose Noun is used in play will receive some sort of reward for playing. POAPs will also be kicked back to Noun-holders.

Milestone 3 - Season 0 Complete - Noun Event

As we flesh out the game loop, we will wrap up Season 0 of The Universe with a Nounish event. Given that the first game is Nounish, we want to tie up the lore of the first season, and release the flood gates on more games with more themes.

Milestones 4+ - More games and community features

RATIONALE

  • Gaming has already been proven time and again to be engaging and retentive. We haven’t seen a proper web3 game focused on “fun”.
  • Play-to-earn is starting to show its true colors. Longer times to re-coup initial cost, way too much focus on earn. Calling these games is tenuous at best. “FUN” should be the primary goal of a game.
  • The Nouns is an awesome brand, and keeping the meme alive, while also changing the landscape of play-to-earn is a one-two punch.

QUESTIONS / CONCERNS

  • Why not just play Blankos?
    • Blankos is fun, engaging, and technically web3, however they’ve more or less reskinned existing web2 games, but with a web3 twist. You earn NFTs in Blankos, but it’s on their own chain with their own currency, and these NFTs are not interoperable. We believe making a web3 game that is focused on fun, with web3 rewards that are on a major chain is a necessity.
    • Blankos isn’t Nounish at all.
  • How will this proliferate Nouns?
    • We want to brand the game as a Nouns game. We believe Nounish branding of a game that will be played by everyone in web3 will proliferate the meme.
    • The amount of social media content created by game-type experiences is endless (re: Twitch, Youtube). Nouns being the backdrop for all the content generated by users would mean eyeballs from everyone on Nounish content.
    • Viral loops will be built into the game. For example, the win screen will automatically generate a 10 second video with a link to share highly engaging nouns-branded content.
  • Why are you the ones to build this?
    • The team at Chef Studios spent the last year and a half building a 3D web3 Chuck E. Cheese in VR. We are well acquainted with both web3 and multiplayer 3D. Before that we built an SEO-driven gaming website with a mix of flat and VR games that grew to 1k+ DAUs in less than 3 months on $0 marketing spend.

Demos:
Player Movement example:

Sample Win Screen:

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I think this would be amazing! Being able for anyone to play as one of the iconic nouns and can personally win prizes but also built out prizes claimable by the noun holders is very clever.

Will this be just a web interface game? or would other platforms be considered?

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wow, i love this. had a couple questions:

  1. when you say fall guys-esque, what the differences be in game play be? same game structure but with nouns or “fall guys-esque” in the world/animation sense? if the latter, curious what the game itself will be?

  2. you’ll be using the real auctioned nouns? vs like a create-you-own-noun builder? will you add periodically if so how often (since there’s 1 new noun a day). or are you capping the playable nouns at a limit, since by todays count that’s roughly 300 options to choose from haha

excited!

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At the moment this will be web game. Click a link → play the game is the best way to spread the nouns brand.

It should also be noted that no wallet connection is necessary to play. We’re open to suggestions - but the running idea is to call this season 0/1 and at the end of the season do something awesome (think WWE viewing experience).

A subsequent season could explore other platforms—mobile would be the obvious next choice because the path from “playing game” to “sharing amazing game content on socials” is the shortest.

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  1. Fall Guys-esque meaning loose physics + FFA battle royal style gameplay. The first delivered alpha gameplay will be the racing variant (i.e. I got a PERFECT RUN on EVERY Race (Fall Guys) - YouTube).
  2. We’ll be using real auctioned nouns. Open to changing this but we really like the idea of noun owner getting something (bragging rights/poap/???) when players choose their noun and win as their noun. No cap on the limit. We’ll get creative on player selection so players don’t have analysis paralysis: for example - the first win as any given noun could give some sort of reward boost.
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i love it!

re: 2 - yeah, i’ll defer to noun owners for this one. i think a builder would add a fun element but obviously would add some complexity. overall, would like to see this happen.

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Oh for sure! We used the amazing 3dnouns.com project for the assets, which are almost game-ready as-is (took a little massaging but can be automated or we can work with tweaking their generator). We have experience in this area - we previously wrote a tool that automated the conversion of Isotile avatars to a standard VRM format. So definitely a possibility!

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Would be interesting if this included Synthetic Nouns too.

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If you mean any Nouns from the builder in 3dnouns.com, we can totally do that! We can leave that up to the Nouns community, but it’s absolutely possible.

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Love to see this. I’m glad that the assets were useful (and yes, depending on the application there is always a bit of post processing needed). To me what is important if you are going to advertise the project as a “Nouns” game, is that it needs to be nounish … By this I mean - and this might be a design centric point of view - : pay close attention to all dimensions and try to think through the nouns lense. The color palette, the environment, the font, the attitude etc It is a very fine line. You need to make something that bridges the community and a wider audience, and it is not an easy task. My advice is to be very conscious of every design decision you take or surround yourself with designers that are nounish.

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Meaning users could print the Noun generated by their addy.

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Love this idea, Will the 50ETH ask be reduced if you are using the models that @Coralorca made if you are using his assets will he be compensated for his efforts of building a big part of your tool box ?
Do you have any examples of playable demos of games you have made that are not plug and play open source ReSkinned samples. It would be great to see a game you have delivered in order to show what you have done in the space.

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Other stuff aside, this seems like a weird question:

  1. I don’t see the team saying the funds will be used for 3D model creation (they stated they’re using 3DNouns assets) so why would they lower their ask based on that?

  2. Assets on 3DNouns are both a) CC0 and b) paid for by the DAO, so I again don’t see why they would have to compensate @Coralorca within their proposal (I am sure he would be a great asset in their team, but thats not something we should be forcing.)

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Sorry if this is weird, and apologies if it read that way, totally not my intent.
I did not see the use of the Coral Orca assets in the original proposal only in the dance demo and they looked different. My questions are an attempt to wrap my head around as to how CC0 asset distribution really works and what are the various issues or benefits that may come out of that. I have some experiences with various use cases of WFH, and usage that relate to CC0 and I am just trying to make sense of it all as I build to have many of our new projects go straight to CC0. If Orcas assets are indeed free to use I think that there needs to be more clarity in the onboarding and building on NOUNS document because I think that someone like @Annetka who already built and shared a hilarious driving demo would be able to use this toolbox if they chose to and not have to rebuild the characters from scratch. Either way is fine, I am just trying to pay as much attention and figure this out so I can both work in the space as a useful citizen and also onboard people without any confusion. Usage and compensation are always the key friction points that i encounter when i try to bring people here.

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i would not support this until i see a sample of the core gameplay loop to ascertain if this would be any fun to play before we start to import all the nouns and art

simply put, and this is no comment on this specific proposal, but i have not seen a single fun blockchain game ever made. they are all universally vaporware because making games is a very challenging endeavor. if the game designers have samples of their other work that demonstrate their skill in creating fun games i would consider that in my decision

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