play nouns propdate #3 (dec 27)

Intro

GAME IS LIVE — play it here!

hey yall, welcome to propdate #3. last propdate, i was struggling with scope (proof here).

i shared my thoughts on a nouncil call and got mixed feedback. some liked the pivot, others said, “wtf, you said you’d do XYZ.”

in the end, i decided to just stick to what was in the prop. other stuff can happen later.

below, i’m listing the originally promised deliverables as completed, in progress, or not started, with timelines, ETAs, and next steps.

Jira Board

Completed

✅ CC0 Nouns game assets:
i used 3dnouns.com (throwback to prop #2). bad news is it’s a manual conversion process to get the avatar exported from that site into the game (which requires a specific VRM format). until i find a better way, please reach out on discord or twitter, and i’ll add your noun. i can’t add them all at once because it takes time, so if you want yours in the game, let me know.

✅ onchain logic functionality:
it works but needs testing. i don’t own a noun (yet) so i haven’t tested voting, but i believe it should work. only RefundableVote (without reason) is supported. i can add support for “vote with reason” if the community wants.

✅ multiplayer/chat functionality + walletconnect support:
all working!

In Progress (ETA: jan 1st)

⚠️ auction support:
i’m working on enabling bids on nouns in the game.

⚠️ event space:
i’m integrating support for twitter spaces, streams, etc.

Not Yet Started (ETA: before end of jan 2025)

❌ nouns player profiles + social integration:
currently there are no player profiles in the game. i’m still brainstorming how and why to add this. also, i want to develop some other features first to see how best to plug social features in.

❌ minigames, in-game items/currency, and HUD:
i haven’t really dug into these yet, but i do have some ideas. i’ll talk to other devs and the community for suggestions on what they’d like to see.

wrap-up + notes

sorry for blowing past the original timeline. there’s a lot to do in making a game, especially solo dev style — from picking the engine and hosting to coding and asset creation. shifting scope didn’t help. i was stoked on the success of the suika game but got stuck figuring out what game to make next instead of sticking to the plan.

now i’m set on how to develop and host the game sustainably for nouns. sorry it took longer than i said.

the game is live. please play it, give feedback, share ideas, request your noun in the game — thanks for reading my propdate!

play nouns propdate #2 (october 19)

hi everyone welcome to the third propdate on prop 459.

setting the context

first off, playnouns is back live on www.playnouns.com. i had it down due to some issues i faced with the AWS bill associated with it (~$1000/mo cloud expenses). i was able to rectify those and now it is properly managed and giving a reasonable cloud cost for hosting.

after the successful traction of the hypercasual game (check the last propdate for metrics on that), i have been thinking a lot about the first version of playnouns, the proposal, and how it all aligns with current narratives and where things are going. im gonna argue/outline the following points, here they are up top. let me know what you think.

outline

1. focus on user growth over nouns tooling

2. mobile over desktop

3. what game next?

4. wen DAO tooling?

5. how to scale/plan forward

1. focus on user growth over nouns tooling

when we started, i was new to nouns. having been here for a year now, i have some new perspective. I think every prop falls into two categories:

1. bring more ppl into nouns
2. enrich existing nouns community in some way

obviously these arent mutually exclusive but usually there is a focus on over and/or an order in which it goes either 1 => 2 or 2 => 1

when we envisioned and created the prop a lot of ppl i spoke with spoke about point 1, but the prop as it was written in december 2023 ultimately to serve point 2. e.g. it's a web app product for existing nouns community to use and engage with onchain stuff in a funner way (its a word i swear).

the way it's been so far -- we started, and saw traction, with 1 first. so 1 => seems like a better strategy to me instead of 2 => 1. we should bring more people in. we already have really good governance tooling and a core group of active members. we dont want another beautifully made web app that 3 nouners use. what's more appealing to the dao and the community, i think, is think is broadening the reach of the nouns meme and brand image.

a lot of people were shocked and excited about the numbers we put up with playnouns. hypercasual gaming is a massive space. everyone plays hypercasual games. so i think this is a natural momentum to keep, let's keep going for huge user numbers. that brings us to #2....

2. mobile over desktop

hypercasual is basically exclusively done on mobile. mobile user acquisition is cheaper (more phones than desktops), and people spend more time on their phones. so, if we want to go for the most users, we should go for mobile, because that's where the most users are at.

there are a slew of other reasons why mobile is better. user experience for games is better. e.g. loading times, the game feel, it all works better on mobile phones than it does in your browser. i found play nouns v1 to be fun but a little clunky feeling on browser. we can really add a lot of polish to the feel of v2 on mobile.

3. what game next?

this begs the question, what does v2 look like? this i am hoping we can have a discussion about but i am feel good about a hold em or balatro game. balatro is incredible and me and and all my friends are obsessed. but there is already a fantastic balatro mobile game and just skinning it with nouns would just be, well, a less-polished, skinned-nouns balatro.

what im more excited about is poker. i dont really play it alot but i have a folder of twitter bookmarks of web3 ppl just saying 'i wish there was onchain poker i could play with my web3 friends'. it makes sense for this to be on mobile. if we could build this, this doesnt exist currently, and skinning it nouns would be natural. we can have privy auth so you can choose to sign in with metamask, or with an email, so it's abstracted for a non web3 user.

i anticipate ppl saying that gambling and nouns dont mix and i would like to remind everyone that lots of ppl play poker without gambling and we can have free play and non-free play rooms.

4. wen DAO tooling?

i think if this is something we still want -- for DAO conversations to be happening in a mobile game and game ui / interface -- we can put that in. a poker game has a lobby, there can be a lobby area for dao chat, discussions, this sort of thing. but i think focusing on a solid game mechanic first makes sense. i would like to nail down one specific area for this based on some community feedback that fills a gap that's not getting filled right now.

5. how to scale/plan forward

so let's say we have an incredible nouns poker mobile app with abstracted web3 integration. what now? i would at this point want to ask for some budget to scale it. that proposal would include really rigorously tested projections and information about how i plan to scale to n # of users. from my experience as a mobile app startup founder who has scaled to millions of MAUs i know how this works and have a lot of anecdotal data and knowledge about how we can test and make a plan.

this would be contingent on feeding fees from the game back into the DAO. idk how it works with this, e.g. if there is precident and this is allowed, but i would like to make this an effort to increase the treasury. but idk if everyone feels that way so i will wait and see.

closing thoughts

i left this open and abstract to show my thought process in the hopes of spawning a more active conversation. i have not been as active in nouncil and posting on playnouns twitter account this summer so i will commit to that as well so we can all jam on this.

• algo

play nouns propdate #1 (march 24)

hi everyone welcome to the second propdate for prop #459, play nouns! it's been an exciting last few weeks, let me break it down into sections: product, traction, next steps, action items.

product

playnouns as per its proposal scope is a gamified ui layer to nouns, so you should be able to do onchain dao activities on it (like nouns.wtf or agora) in a game-like setting. on top of that there is additional scope like education, community engagement. I have decided to focus on user traction first, before building the dao functionality out. this is for a number of strategic reasons having to do with mkt timing as well as finding core product-loops (game loops) that are flywheels. we need that if this prop is gonna be successful. we can always add in the dao game func later, but if no users are coming on there outside of a few people that are already in the community, it's not really solving anything.

so all that is to say I focused first on building a simple onchain hypercasual game that is free to play. playnouns.com is just that currently -- a connect wallet screen (where you select a nouns character), an overworld (where there are links to nounish projects), and a core game -- which is modeled after the suika (watermelon) game, a popular hypercasual game from japan.

Login/Connect Wallet/Char Select Screen

Overworld

Core Game Loop

for the game-dev curious, it's built using unity. one problem with unity is it's pretty heavy compared to other game dev frameworks (e.g. phaser). right now it takes about 75 mb to load. i believe i can optimize this alot and it's big on my roadmap for this month, especially since i am still on the fence about what game engine to use for the capital P Play Nouns game. i think likely unity but i need to push it to its optimization limits to ensure we are not gonna end up with alot of tech debt.

for the tech curious, handling the traffic came with a unique set of problems that i had to quickly pivot and adapt to in order to stabilize the server costs, rpc calls, everything. i had to iterate the site leaner a bunch of times and get into tg chats with infura, consensys, thirdweb, and other sdk providers to get credits, ask best practices, and make sure we could handle traffic at scale.

traction

the big contributor to traction so far has been getting into linea park, an onchain game/social dapp quest festival that runs from mid-march til april. we have been able to bootstrap user growth from being featured in here. i thought it was a good way to wedge ourselves in with some traction and have kept a tight communication loop/building relationship with people i know from consensys and linea teams.

here are the social #s:

playnouns twitter: ~6K followers at time of posting
playnouns discord: ~750 members at time of posting

here are the onchain + web traffic #s:

google analytics:

infura (rpc calls):

playfab (player + leaderboard database):

i also put links to /nouns farcaster channel, and would reasonably expect to see an uptick in the # of members who joined since March 21, when Linea park started.

and in next 1 day we will announce some raffles within the game in partnership with zero pod as well as linking to rounds.wtf, we should see increased lift there.

next steps

once the linea park madness dies down, we will build the multiplayer overworld, and hope to retain a decent % of those linea park users, as well as have good footfall from nouns ecosystem members. this should be done by end of april. we can then revisit the #s and see what sorts of #s we are putting up then, which is a more stable indicator.

we will continue to partner with projects, both nounish and non-nounish, to bring cool stuff to our users in the overworld. i think this is a really good user loop to follow since if users know that the game is not only fun but it is bringing cool onchain opportunities to them.

i do not expect to begin building out dao func until may -- the scope i would like for end of april is, to restate:

• connect wallet screen (if holds noun, character = their noun, else character selector)
• multiplayer overworld with chat + some nounish projects represented/interactable via links
• hypercasual game with leaderboard, perks for leaderboard leaders + loyal players

for may, we will start to build out the core dao functionalities, and we can start to test to see if playnouns.com WITH non-nounish people hanging around in it (in the overworld) is somewhere viable for dao governance to occur onchain. i think the answer is maybe!

action items

• please join the playnouns discord and follow the twitter --
• please dm me on twitter (@yungalgorithm) or discord (@yung_algorithm) to discuss your nounish/other project and how we can put it in the game to bring value to users, and also how i can build out more features to nurture and help grow the nouns eco
• please put me in touch with anyone relevant that you think would be interested in this and have value to add

closing

thanks everyone for reading til the end :)

play nouns propdate #0

welcome to the first propdate for #459, play nouns!!! this is yung algo speaking, and here are some updates:

• three month game dev sprint officially kicks off tomorrow, feb 1st.
• ETA for a finished product is 3 months, or ~end-of-april.
• first playable version will be live by end-of-feb.

since the prop passed right before holidays and new years, there was a bit of a break after the prop passed. then i quickly realized what a large content/mkting opportunity for nouns this is, so i began hiring process for content team, for both long and short form content creation. i am really happy with the team i landed with.

i also got the socials and web domains all set up. i would really appreciate follows on twitter and joins to the discord!!! i will be putting the game releases and all the content up on there and would definitely appreciate the core group of nouns ppl here on propdates to help get the word out so we can reach a great audience. links are below:

twitter
discord
youtube
tiktok
domain

thanks to everyone so far who has helped, if you have any questions or ideas please hit me up on discord (yung_algorithm) or twitter dms (@yungalgorithm).