Game building progress: Vision, challenges and tough choices

🦧 WOO-HOO-HAHA!

👋 Hello Ape frens!

We’ve been silently building the GREAT escAPE game for the past two months and made real progress with it! That’s why, we thought it was time to give you a little update on what is awaiting us and how YOUR decision will have a major impact on the course of the project!

🎮 Time to play!

Now that the game is starting to look like something, we’re happy to announce the first Alpha testing session will be organized with a handful of Wise and Alpha Apes on Saturday July 9th, 2022.

The idea is to get about 15 to 20 people to play a few game sessions on the Zoo map to collect some feedback. Depending on the comments and reactions of the Alpha players, we will either schedule a second Alpha session or move directly to the Beta session a few weeks later.

To access the Beta testing session, you will need to win your invitation! The best way to get one is to join our fun escAPE campaign in July (2nd to 23rd) and obtain one of the 50 invites included in the prizes (Spoiler alert : there’ll also be JPTS and GLMJ to win).

After the Beta testing session, we’ll make the last adjustments to the game and get ready for the release of the V 1.0 of the GREAT escAPE.

Here is what you should know about it!

🌴 V1.0 August – November:

For technical reasons, the first version of the GREAT escAPE will only be made available on browsers. The V 1.0 of the game should be seen as time for experimentation. It will allow us to try:

• A few different pricing of the game session

• Several redistribution/burn ratios of the $BANANAS (GLMB) collected each week

in order to create optimal game economy/tokenomics.

During the time between V1.0 release and the launch of V1.5, players will be able to enter the game with their GLMR JUNGLE NFTs by paying a small $BANANAS fee for each game session.

Players will compete on changing maps for a WEEKLY PRIZE POOL.

When you play with your GLMJ , you won’t earn anything after your game session, but your scores will be added to a leaderboard.

Once a week, the top x* players on the leaderboard will receive y*% of the weekly prize pool (both GLMR and $BANANAS (GLMB)) , while z* random participants will share the remaining tokens

However, you won’t be able to rent your GLMR JUNGLE NFT yet, and this has important implications which are explained in Challengesand Tough choicesbelow .

*(will be voted by the DAO on June 28th 2022)

🖐 Challenges

Between June 1st and June 3rd 2022, the DAO voted to keep the staking ratio of 1 $BANANAS per day per GLMA.

We currently have about 900 GLMA staked, producing together roughly 6,300 new $BANANAS tokens each week (7 days x 900×1 $BANANAS).

It means that the circulating supply of $BANANAS currently inflates. Indeed, only about 500 to 1000 $BANANAS are collected back (through Paintings and JPTS live auctions) and locked each week in the JUNGLE BANK wallet.

Having an inflationary supply implies that the $BANANAS are gradually worth less per tokens over time.

It is most likely in everyone’s best interest to create a system where $BANANAS would not be inflationary, and would even be slightly deflationary to raise the value of our token.

Among the different tools available to our DAO to curb the inflation, the most obvious one is to automatically burn a fraction of the tokens collected by the Jungle Bank wallet.

In order to avoid inflation, the number of $BANANAS burned should be superior to the number of $BANANAS created through GLMA staking during the same period of time.

Assuming that the number of GLMA staked remains constant, we’d need to burn at least 6300$ BANANAS per week to avoid inflation (or more to create deflation)

This is where the game fees come into play. Each week, the Jungle Bank will collect a huge amount of $BANANAS through the game fees paid by the players for their game sessions.

💰 These collected fees will be used to:

- Reward B.o.B holders who share 12.5% of the weekly game fees with the following distribution:

• ¼ of these 12.5% is shared between the 59 bronze B.o.B holders

• ¼ of these 12.5% is shared between the 41 silver B.o.B holders

• ¼ of these 12.5% is shared between the 16 golden B.o.B holders

• ¼ of these 12.5% is shared between the 5 diamond B.o.B holders

- Fund a part of the GREAT escAPE weekly rewards.

- Pay the LP Rewards for LP providers on Bananaswap (GLMR/GLMB)

- Pay the team’s salary (at first) and then pay for the elected community member’s work as they gradually take over the full control of the DAO over the next 18 months.

- Possibly fund a GLMR JUNGLE lottery (if the adopted redistribution/burn model allows it).

The rest of the collected fees would be burned.

The more game sessions are played each week, the cheaper the price of a game session would be as long as during the same period of time we still have:

Number of tokens burned > number of newly created tokens (~ 6300 $BANANAS a week).

With that figure in mind, we can now move on to discuss its implications in terms of the duration, numbers and cost of a single game session while also studying the impact of several redistribution/ burn models on the number of $BANANAS collected weekly.

🤯 Tough Choices

🕐 Game duration

As we stated earlier, multi-holders won’t be able to rent their GLMJ yet. Given the fact that some holders have as many as 20, 50 and even 100 NFTs, it seems unlikely to expect them to play all the allowed game sessions within a day.

This is why, the shorter the game session is, the more likely the total number of game sessions per day we’ll have.

The difference between having an average game session of 2:30 min VS 4:00 min can be quite big if you hold a large number of NFTs.

We basically have a choice to make between having an average session that doesn’t feel too short nor frustrating, and making it too long ( dangerous for our economic model.)

We strongly recommend that you’d check our models more details:

Our DAO will vote on the duration of the average game session on July 5th.

🍌 Game session fee (for V 1.0 ONLY) :

With the game session fee, we’re facing several issues. On the one hand, if the cost of the game session is prohibitively high, chances are many players won’t bother playing and this will have a bad impact on our ecosystem.

On the other hand, having a game session fee that is too low will result in an insufficient number of $BANANAS collected each week. That means we wouldn’t be able to burn enough tokens to avoid the inflation of the supply. That’s also something we would like to avoid at all costs.

All the aforementioned issues result in the fact that multi-holders won’t be able to rent their NFTs yet. Hence, the total number of game sessions that we can expect is lower than after having the NFT renting enabled (V 1.5).

We ran several forecast to see how many $BANANAS would be collected each week depending on the percentage of potential game sessions* played with various game fees.

* During a week we can have a max total of 3333 NFTs x 7 days = 23,331 potential game sessions.

For example: 10% of active sessions in the chart below means having 2 333 game sessions effectively played.

You will find here the data on how many $BANANAS we collect each week following several scenarios.

We would ideally like to try several different pricing of the game session between the release of V 1.0 (August) and V 1.5 (November) in order to test its impact on the inflation/deflation of the $BANANAS tokenomics.

🔥 Redistribution/ Burn Ratio (For V 1.0)

Now, having in mind the impact of the $BANANAS game session fee on the total amount of tokens collected each week, we need to delve into how it could/should be redistributed/burned.

To help you see it clearly, we created these 3 different Redistribution/ Burn Ratios. They are only indicative but seem like reasonable assumptions to us. ( We will produce more models before voting on them).

We rated these models from the more re-distributive with a 65/35 redistribution/burn ratio to the most aggressive with a 51.5/48.5 redistribution/burn ratio.

What we’re putting under the redistribution name is the different wallets that need funding from the game fees (as mentioned at the beginning of the tough choices section of this article) : B.o.B rewards, game rewards, LP rewards, Team/DAO’s funding, DAO’s treasury and maybe GLMR Jungle Lottery (only if a high redistribution model is adopted.

The core team expects to only have about 30% of the potential game sessions actually being played during the 3 months of the V.1.0 game.

That is why, we would like to try to sketch even more models in the coming days and ask the DAO’s to vote on agreeing to try 3 to 6 different models during the first 3 months.

It would allow us to try out many different combinations, gather data and fetch an optimal tokenomic model for the release of V 1.5.

💡 Other options:

Another way (favored by the core team) to go around all these issues is to have the DAO voting on allowing the GLMJ holders to temporarily ( only during V 1.0) have access to more than just 1 game session per day per NFT.

For example, instead of being prevented from playing for a whole 24h period, we could say that during the first 3 months GLMJ would be able to play 3 or 4 times more than they would normally be allowed to.

The idea would be to prevent an NFT from playing another session for only 6h or 8h instead of 24h. Such a system could allow single holders or small multi-holders to play more than just a handful of game sessions per day and would, in some way, cover up for the non-played sessions of large multi-holders.

If more game sessions can be played by temporarily adopting such a system, it could also mean that we would be able to have a lower price of a $BANANAS game session while still collecting enough $BANANAS to burn at least 6300 tokens a week (hence avoiding the inflation of the supply).

Overall, we would like to say that the period of time between August and October should be seen as an opportunity for trials and errors when it comes to the tokenomics side. As there are no easy options, having the DAO agreeing on trying out many different options during V1.0 seems to the team as the best way to make good decisions for our definitive model.

Trying out several different redistribution models with various game fees during these 3 months would allow for ample data collection and help us decide collectively on an optimal tokenomics model for the launch of V 1.5 ( where we will aim at growing our audience).

🕶 Vision

↗ V 1.5 November – February 2023: Time to grow!

If we say that V1.0 should be the time for trials, it’s because we have a bigger plan in mind. We would like to wait for the release of V 1.5 with some upgrades and especially with GLMJ renting enabled to truly start expanding our game players base.

The idea would be that once we have good data on the tokenomics and the game economy, we would set them in stone for V 1.5 and start launching a marketing campaign aimed at NFT gamers from the Dotsama ecosystem and beyond to welcome them to try our game.

The goal here is to create a sufficient game player base to allow for enough GLMJ rented and hence having a higher percentage of game sessions played each week.

With more game sessions being played, the $BANANAS game session fee would go down and we could still manage to Burn enough tokens to have a balanced or even a slightly deflationary system.

This phase should be used to strengthen the $BANANAS token itself while reaching out to other NFT collections for partnership and welcoming new players into our ecosystem.

🚀 V 2.0 February : Let’s go big!

After welcoming more crypto users into our ecosystem, we aim at developing beyond crypto to onboard non-crypto users into using the Moonbeam blockchain.

We aim at achieving this by raising capital for the DAO’s and work on a mobile V2.0 of the Great Escape primarily targeting non-crypto users.

The idea would be to launch a marketing campaign in one country (to try) targeting mobile games users and to have them download a web 2.0 version of the game, playing it and having fun.

After a certain amount of time spent playing, these players would be able to claim extra game assets (NFTs). These NFTs will be similar to badges on V2.0 (proving small boosts to the characters).

To do so, the players would be walked through creating a Moonbeam wallet address, claim GLMR from a faucet and then finally claim an NFT (linked to the game).

In order to use this NFT, they would need to either rent or buy a GLMJ and move on to the crypto 2.0 version of the game. They could also decide to sell that NFT in $BANANAS on our own Marketplace.

🦍 Apemocracy is the key

But for now Apes, let’s keep focus on the present and build our Jungle. We have very important decisions to take in the coming days and we need you to carefully take into consideration their consequences on the course of our adventure!

We thank you for your involvement and can’t wait to have a healthy apemocratic debate in the happy Jungle or on Telgram!

❤ & 🍌

The GLMR APES Team