DAOventure (previously DAOball) - A simple DAO based roguelite

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We’ve got some news to share about our project. DAOball is evolving into DAOventure (working title). This change comes from what we’ve learned and the feedback you’ve given us. If you’re curious about how we got here, check out our post-mortem on the Internet Computer forum: DAOball Post-Mortem

DAOventure carries forward key elements from our original DAOball concept, aiming to create a unique gaming experience that intertwines with DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) principles. Our goal is to provide a low-stakes environment where players can experiment with DAO mechanics without the high pressure often associated with financial-focused DAOs. We recognize that despite the growing interest in Web3, relatively few people have direct experience with DAOs or opportunities to experiment with them in a fun, accessible setting. DAOventure seeks to bridge this gap by offering a persistent game world that can evolve indefinitely through community contributions. By allowing any contributor to potentially shape the game’s future, we’re not just creating a game, but fostering a living ecosystem that can adapt and grow with its community. This approach allows us to explore the potential of DAOs in content creation and game governance, providing valuable insights into decentralized decision-making processes while offering an engaging and ever-changing gaming experience.

The Game

DAOventure is a text and image-based roguelite adventure set in a rich fantasy world. It’s designed to be a simple yet engaging experience that combines elements of classic text adventures with modern roguelite progression. Here’s a deeper look at what you can expect:

  • Procedurally generated scenarios: Each playthrough offers a unique experience. You’ll encounter a series of randomized scenarios, each presenting different challenges, choices, and outcomes. This ensures that no two adventures are the same, with varying difficulty levels from one run to the next.
  • Survival and progression: Your main goal is to navigate through increasingly challenging areas, making crucial decisions that affect your character’s survival and development. You’ll face moral dilemmas, combat situations, puzzles, and resource management challenges as you strive to reach the end of your journey.
  • Persistent unlocks: As you play and explore the world, you’ll unlock new content that persists across playthroughs. This includes:
    • Classes: From traditional warriors and mages to unique roles like monster tamers or chaos agents.
    • Races: A diverse array of fantasy races, each with their own strengths and quirks.
    • Weapons and items: Discover and unlock a wide range of equipment to aid your adventures.
    • Creatures: Encounter and potentially unlock new creatures that can appear in future runs.
  • Accessibility and depth: The game uses a simple text and image interface, making it easy to pick up and play. However, the combination of randomized scenarios, meaningful choices, and persistent unlocks provides depth for more engaged players.

Example Character Selection:

character_select
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Playing Solo or in Groups

DAOventure is flexible, catering to different play styles and time commitments:

  • Solo play: Perfect for when you want a quick adventure. Jump in, make your choices, and see how far you can get in a single run.
  • Group play: Team up with friends or strangers for a collaborative experience. In group mode, each decision point becomes a mini-vote:
    • Players have a limited time to cast their votes for each choice.
    • The option with the most votes is selected.
    • In case of a tie or if no one votes, it will be left undecided, which is usually a bad outcome…
  • Persistence across modes: Whether you play solo or in a group, your unlocks and progress carry over, allowing you to experience the game’s evolution regardless of how you choose to play.

Example scenario with choices:

scenario
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DAO Integration

While the core gameplay is less DAO-focused than our original concept, we’ve shifted the DAO’s role to a more impactful area - the ongoing development and evolution of the game:

  • Game development contributions: The DAO’s main role is now in creating content, balancing gameplay, and upgrading the game systems. Community members can propose and implement new scenarios, items, or game mechanics.
  • Decentralized governance: We’re working on models for community-driven decision making about the game’s direction and features. This could include voting on new content additions, balance changes, or even major feature implementations.
  • Phased approach to decentralization:
    • Initially, we (the core development team) will be the primary contributors, setting up the foundation for community involvement.
    • As the game stabilizes, we’ll gradually open up more aspects of the game for community contribution and governance.
    • The long-term goal is to transition from owners to core contributors, with the community taking a more active role in shaping the game’s future.

Development Status and Roadmap

Here’s where we’re at and where we’re headed:

  • Current focus (Phase 1): We’re finalizing the core roguelite gameplay loop and scenario generation system. This includes implementing a basic set of classes, races, and scenarios to provide a complete, if limited, game experience.
  • Next steps (Phase 2):
    • Implementing basic DAO functionality for game contributions and voting on proposed changes.
    • Exploring and implementing a sustainable tokenomics model that rewards contribution while maintaining low stakes.
    • Expanding the content base with more scenarios, classes, and items.
  • Beta release: We’re aiming to have a playable beta version ready in the next few months. This will include the core gameplay loop and a basic implementation of the DAO contribution system.

Stay in Touch

We’re still using our DAOball channels for now. Here’s how you can keep up with the project:

We appreciate your interest in this project and look forward to sharing more as we get closer to the beta release. If you have any questions or ideas, feel free to reach out through any of the channels above.

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The concept shift is exciting. Th idea of making it more of a familiar gameplay than a sports simulation

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I was highly looking forward for this update, and well worth the waiting as it’s proven even better than expected! :tada:

Some very important changes that you are making, highlighting my favorites:

  • the fantasy theme.
  • the play alone or together (or both!), uau really looking forward to see how you will implement that, but sure is smart!
  • the examples shared (maybe it’s because I am not a baseball fan, but these examples were so cool, just want to jump in and play!)
  • the best new feature is the permanent / upgraded items. The permadeath of roguelike is hard and bad due to the churn, but the upgrades are nice and uses the blockchain stack well.

I like the “DAO” governance part, but I reinforce your idea of letting it be a phase 2. First focus on figuring out what works and what kind of content keeps users playing, and only later try to “standardize” the roles and decide on what mechanisms (tokenomics) would incentive the right behaviour.

Last but not least, will keep following on OC, let us know when you need Beta Testers :grinning::wave:

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This looks really awesome and I agree with @PaviSan that this is more exciting than your previous sports proposition, I just love RPGs and Roguelites! What are you building the client in, Unity? If you need some Unity dev help give me a shout!

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No not a game in that sense, no engine, just the browser. Simple text with pixel art images

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If I understood it correctly, you’re missing out on the potential the technology has to offer. If the idea is that you have one character that you either control alone or via a group vote, then you either have a single player game or a tedious multiplayer game (constantly voting on everything is not fun). If you mean that everyone has his own character, so that you form a party of characters, that would be much more interesting already. But since everything runs on-chain already anyway, a MUD type game would be much more interesting IMO:

Novels can create deep immersion because the author can curate the exact flow and content of the story. In a game, especially procedurally generated ones, you have a mechanical progression that is based on simple rules and randomness. You cannot create any meaningful and deep immersion that way. The deepest immersion you can achieve is by having players interact with each other. The world of a novel feels alive, because its progression and inhabitants are carefully woven into a story by the author. In a procedural/random game, neither the environment nor the characters in the world have any inherent depth or significance to them. The only way to achieve a similar immersion and sense of meaning would be by having a shared overworld and maybe individual instance dungeons. If you build the game mechanics so that players are incentivised to cooperate in a persistent overworld, while maybe having solo/party dungeon diving experiences, that would give the game much more depth. My dissatisfaction with contemporary MMOs is that they are basically singleplayer games. There is no meaning to an individual player’s achievements, as everyone goes through exactly the same story line on his own, even if you play parts of the story as a group. If you can find a way to make the progression of individual characters affect the overall experience/progression of other players, people would actually have an incentive to cooperate and have a social experience. One such example would be that having a high level crafter can unlock collective access to higher tiered items. But due to permadeath, if that crafter dies, the collective access to that tech tier is lost, until someone reaches that level again. The same could go for stuff like alchemists etc.

This would lead to a much deeper experience than trying to have lots of flavour text and lots of different monster types. Having different difficulty levels for dungeons would also force cooperation as people need to work together more and more, the further they want to progress. If people want to gain access to more parts of the world, they have to form stronger and stronger parties, have higher-tiered crafters and extract higher-tiered resources from more difficult dungeons.

So, with not much change required in the actual code and mechanics of the game, you can create a much more engaging experience. And the persistent overworld also addresses the shortcoming of roguelikes where each character is basically worthless, and the collective progression makes churn less frustrating, and the characters more meaningful, and the social experience more engaging. The instanced dungeons keep the arcade-like experience of a roguelike, but the option to keep a character and his items after beating a dungeon would allow for more satisfying progression.

This also greatly reduces the pressure on the dungeon diving part to be the main source of immersion and depth in the game. Rather, it can stay true to its roots and have an arcade-like mechanical experience, while gaining additional meaning due to the collective progression in the overworld, which would be the main source of depth and immersion, and would give additional meaning to dungeon dives. Being on the blockchain, you can also have people trade high grade items for actual money if desired (though I recommend having an in-game currency as an option, too, as pure P2E games are distasteful IMO).

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I appreciate the feedback though i think you should know that the goal is not to be the best game but rather a place to play with DAO ideas and have a place where a DAO doesn’t revolve around financial investment but either working together/participating in governance BUT it would really help if the game was fun

I’ve actually been debating internally on how to handle the gameplay because you are right, the multiplayer aspect using voting really can be tedious unless you can figure out how to streamline it and design around the limitations, but I’ve been struggling with that
It made more sense with DAOball and management at a high level and over the week vs a more real time game
Also it’s hard to make the multiplayer more fun than just doing it solo in the current state, which would potentially just lead to people playing solo or just not at all
An option I’m evaluating is just keeping the game similar but have it a simple single player game and no voting multiplayer. Would open up the design to not be so limited

It will still have the DAO aspect on more game management and content creation, using more fun tokenomics that can reward play throughs and content submissions that can be used towards voting power and unlocks

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I find the DAO aspect quite interesting but I think if the game itself is not designed with excellence in mind, nobody will really want to commit to contribute the DAO. If a DAO is based purely on financial interest, it will be dropped as soon as profits go away or don’t materialise as expected. But if you actually have people who genuinely are in it for the project, then you have a proper sustainable structure in place that does not have only financial incentives.

You can make multiplayer more fun if you have a party of different characters that each can act each turn. Everyone can make his own decisions and maybe multiple characters deciding on e.g. diplomacy at once may boost the effectiveness / chance of that roll. The game interface or general gameplay does not even have to change for that. You just add one set of choices per character, which are then enacted simultaneously once everyone has chosen. You can also let one player control multiple characters simultaneously that way, which is good for when there aren’t many players around. You can have minimum / maximum party sizes per dungeon, as well as XP sharing to balance the game between safety and rewards. And you can have healers and attackers etc., and due to the permadeath, supports actually become much more valuable than in RPG type games with infinite respawn. If you make it so that characters persist across dungeon sessions if they survive to the end, that allows for much deeper long-term planning and agency. I don’t like how most roguelikes/roguelites feel entirely like a reskinned slot machine and give you barely any agency or ability to plan. These games mostly devolve into an endless grind, where you repeat the game until you get a good starting roll. Usually, luck in those games is much more dominant than planning, strategy, or skill. And mostly the luck is so inconsistent that you can basically abandon the game immediately if you didn’t have a good start. Skill usually has little effect on how far you can reach in most roguelikes. And permanently unlockable boons just encourage more grinding. And they paradoxically turn the game itself easier each time you play, rather than rewarding effort and skill. So you mostly start with an unbeatable luck-based game that goes easier on you the more you play it. I think that a cooperative persistent overworld and the ability to keep your character after a successful run is a much healthier structure. It gives you longer-term agency and by carefully choosing which difficulty to tackle each time, you are not as reliant on having good rolls in the beginning and compensate for bad luck a bit.

And again, these changes would be minimal compared to what you currently have in place. You just need multiple player characters with one set of choices each, every character makes an individual choice (whether multiple actual players are involved or whether one player has multiple characters is irrelevant). And in the overworld you just need an item box per player and the ability to craft items and trade with other players. The overworld doesn’t even need graphics. Each dungeon can be a mini-adventure of preset length and difficulty, allowing for a more casual, session-based gameplay compared to a single long adventure per character. Over time, more dungeon types/themes and more abilities and items and crafting options can be added.

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I agree on the better game == more DAO participation
but due to my limited resources and being over schedule as is, i dont really have the capability right now to make big changes
The current structure that I have makes it essentially a prototype that can evolve over time
I don’t really expect the DAO to have much participation, especially at first, until there is good gameplay/community, except for people interested in designing and building a good game like you

So im going to be pushing this thing quickly to get out to a simple beta/prototype, that I, or anyone else (probably just me though), can contribute to and build over time.
So you are welcome to hop over to the open chat

and talk more in detail if you wish
or checkout the github

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