Secret Heroes - The Road to V2

[floAr]

Secret Heroes - The road to v2

Secret Heroes launched early May this year as the first fully on-chain game on secret network. We had a phenomenal launch in regards of player count and gas usage (only bested by the $SEFI launch so far). Due to the novelty of on-chain games and the privacy persevering value proposition quite a few technical difficulties appeared during this timeframe, that are mostly fixed by now. The aim of this grant is twofold: First it will allow the team to keep supporting the game it's current state. This comes down to fix cost for running the frontend and backend to connect to the network. Second this grant includes a roadmap where to take Secret Heroes as a game, to provide additional interesting game mechanics, opens the ecosystem to other developers and adds utility to your nfts.

Statistics

First we would like to give you some statistics from the first 12 hours after launch and from the current state of the game:
On launch day, after 12 hours we had slightly over 100k requests from the game client

Players were from all over the world, with a big bunch of them logging in from the US.

Currently we are still seeing around 200 interactions with the network per hour on average.

Value for the Secret Network ecosystem

Secret Heroes provides value to the network in terms of continuous gas usage, as well as a strong pull for users of the gaming ecosystem, that are not yet familiar to blockchain technology / secret network. We already saw an uptrend in account registrations preceding the launch and believe that a continuous development of this game will bring more fresh players into out ecosystem.

Team members:

• John Brodish - UX/UI Design
• Bill Wincer - Secret Contract Development
• Florian Uhde - Front End and Game Client Development
• Can Kisagun - Product / Business Development

Contents of this grant

As mentioned above this grant will enable us to support the game for the coming days, as well as open up some resources to develop it further. The timeframe of this grant is the next three months.

Operation

The current fixed costs of running Secret Heroes, projected onto the next three months are 1350€ (~1.644,30$) for running Azure functions to access Secret Network as well as the deployment and building plan for the frontend.

Extension

Now for the more exiting part. We had a lot of discussion where to take Secret Heroes to provide the maximum value for players and the ecosystem. Below you find an outline of features that we considered interesting and believe that we are able to deliver them based on the current state of the game. Those are in no particular order and we are happy to have the community chime in to give us their opinion on the priority of those issues.

The Forge

In the forge players can permanently upgrade selected heroes by burning unwanted nfts. This allows players to make use of their lower level hero cards, beware through that, the stronger a hero becomes, the more burning power you will need to upgrade further.

Design / UX	Unity	Secret Contracts	Frontend
10 hrs	15 hrs	10 hrs	10 hrs

Tournament of the Champions

The good old arena will also see some long lasting improvements. Using the power of secret contracts we will implement the first ATM (Automated Tournament Maker)! This comes with weekly leaderboard resets, as well as an automated price pool for the top players, that is fueled by the minting fee.

Design / UX	Unity	Secret Contracts	Frontend
1 hrs	1 hrs	25 hrs	5 hrs

Golden Bazaar

The golden bazaar opens its doors, allowing players who want to get an edge on the battlefield to spend some extra $SCRT to maximize their chances of pulling well trained heroes.

Design / UX	Unity	Secret Contracts	Frontend
1 hrs	2 hrs	2 hrs	3 hrs

User Guidance

We will improve the How To Play page with all in-game mechanics and numbers that are of relevance for the players, giving you a full understanding of the inner workings of the game and allowing you to strategize around that. We will also add a FAQ page, answering all the questions that we relentlessly collected from Discord and other communications since launch.

Design / UX	Unity	Secret Contracts	Frontend
10 hrs	1 hrs	0 hrs	3 hrs

Bug fixes / General improvements / Dev Handoff

This is a small buffer to allow for ad-hoc bug fixes or improvement of existing mechanics on the fly.

Design / UX	Unity	Secret Contracts	Frontend
5 hrs	5 hrs	5 hrs	5 hrs

Roadmap

The features mentioned above will be release over a three month cadence and we are happy to take input from the community which feature players would like to see first and include that in our priorities. The user guidance improvements will be rolled out when ready over the course of the three month.

This grant would include a fixed time commitment of the team members, over the next three month, to work on fixes and new features mentioned above, at a rate of 70 $SCRT per hour.

• John Brodish - 27 hours - 1890 $SCRT
  • Previous, Post-Hackathon Work - 23 hours - 1610 $SCRT (50 hours, 3500 SCRT Total)
• Bill Wincer - 42 hours - 2940 $SCRT
  • Previous, Post-Hackathon Work - 45 hours - 3150 $SCRT (87 hours, 6090 SCRT Total)
• Florian Uhde - 45 hours - 3150$SCRT
  • Previous, Post-Hackathon Work - 35 hours - 2450 $SCRT (80 hours, 5600 SCRT Total)
• Maintenance - 1000 $SCRT (at 1.644$ per $SCRT)

The total grant request is for 16190 $SCRT, which will provided in four separate installments upon completion of the following milestones:

1. For completing previous work (game and supporting website design, development, and launch) + maintenance (8210 $SCRT)
2. Upon completion of The Forge - 2660 $SCRT
3. Upon completion of Tournament of the Champions - 2660 $SCRT
4. Upon completion of Golden Bazaar + Improved User Guidance - 2660 $SCRT

We aim to deliver one milestone-per-month but reserve the right to adapt the delivery and completion order to accommodate team member's other work and network commitments.

Once the project is completed, we will make it open-source, excluding some of the 3d assets used in Unity (due to copyright reasons), to serve as a resource and reference for other builders in the network. This includes providing insights and base implementations into complex contracts, complex front-end code and the connection between Secret Network and isolated third-party applications (i.e. Unity3d).

[guyz]

Thanks @floAr. Huge supporters of Secret Heroes and want to see it succeed not just within the scope of Secret Network but beyond that.

We want to approve this grant request, but if the expected timeline is 3 months of support/gameplay, I'd say that isn't enough. Why not aim for a longer period? What's the vision for Secret Heroes beyond the next 3 months?

[floAr]

Hey @guyz happy to hear that you are as big of a fan as we are :)
Fully agree that we should focus on growth beyond the three month period and turn secret heroes into an engine pushing secret network forward.
I can see this as a two step process and I am happy to add some more details about our reasoning below to discuss.
The first step would be to polish the current game into a self sustaining experience that will motivate players long term and draw new users into the ecosystem. That is the focus of this Grant. If this works out we have a solid foundation to move to phase two and build secret heroes into a metaverse. Here lies the full potential of the NFTs, you could reuse them in different games, trade them and add layers of utilities. While we discussed some of those ideas already within the team I would also be extremely happy to help other devs to connect to this ecosystem and make use of the playerbase that exists around secret heroes.

As mentioned this grant proposal focuses on smoothing the current experience and realizing the potential of the secret heroes battle game. From a game design perspective we currently have an unidirectional flow: People buy heroes and those get better over time, there are setbacks but the expected average skill value grows over time. The only way of resetting the current loop is by having another player reaching similar power levels. While this mechanic in itself is not bad it produces a large number of unwanted heroes in the process, which clutter your inventory and slow start times. The main components that we are adding are a sink for weaker NFTs to allow a secondary loop to build a strong rooster of heroes by burn-to-upgrade. The other part is adding a continuous stream of prices for automated tournaments, as well as an incentivized buy option to push more value to the players.
Given those blocks we believe that secret heroes could turn into a self sustained seed, that will then blossom out into different branches within the ecosystem.

[guyz]

Thanks @floAr. Grant is approved, but we're expecting even with this grant to see this lasting for 6 months. Beyond that, our (joint!) goal is to see it grow into a long lasting successful game on top of SN. Let us know if we can further help as well