Atocha Protocol

Atocha Protocol is built to inspire your curiosity transcending space, time, and culture. With the protocol, one is able to create, play, and sponsor games in a fair and transparent manner.

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What Inspired You

The fun and challenge of the puzzle game

The whole idea of starting Atocha Protocol is from the passion and love by our founding team towards the puzzle game itself. From treasure hunting to deciphering logical puzzles, the mind game is a way for us to introduce some excitement into our life. We would enjoy the moments spent in finding the clues, cracking the codes and solving the riddle just for the sake of fun. If we are lucky, we may even win some prizes just by finding the treasure or solving the puzzle first.

From this first-hand experience, we realised that such an experience will never get bored and it even creates moments of excitement for the players. As long as we are focusing on the game, there's a flow of mind where we are immersed in the game, trying to win. Hence, it makes us think why not we can create a platform whereby puzzle games can be largely participated by more players.

The fun in playing while learning

Let's imagine when we are trying to crack a puzzle with a hidden easter egg containing $100k USD, but the puzzle is a total stranger to you, how will you deal with it? The first thing is to start researching the puzzle, gather a team to delegate workload, and start cracking the puzzle. In other words, with the right incentive and kick, anyone can start to learn and try to solve a puzzle. Of course, this comes with different considerations like the opportunity cost, the probability of winning, and familiarity with the puzzle-solving culture. 

What we believe is that any puzzle game is not just a game to pass time but a game that really works your brain and may even require you to have some knowledge base to understand and solve the puzzle. With that, it can become a new tool for transferring practical knowledge to the players from the puzzle-solving experience. 

Imagine that in the near future, education institutions start to implement gamification of teaching and learning whereby puzzle games are also part of the methodology to carry out education. Puzzle games can play such an important role to enable the loop of teaching and learning a complete one. 

The fun to engage and build

We are all into building something that is sustainable and most importantly creating an impact on the future generation. That led us to think about what will be the one niche that we can have fun while creating a legacy mechanism on what we have built. This brings us back to puzzle games where the fundamentals of the game mechanism will rarely change but it can be applied in a different context. Furthermore, 

What You Learned

Puzzle game is all about the mind and thrill

Being an appchain, in other words the infrastructure for puzzle games, we may tend to forget about we are actually another form of gaming platform. This means to keep things fun and having the element of thrill are part of the crucial criteria to be considered when we are developing the features for the protocol. We learned this from the feedback of Webapp Demo Testers whereby players give honest opinions about some puzzles that make no sense or poorly design. This is where we learned that we need to have features that can encourage more quality puzzles and create incentive mechanisms that can benefit those who are really good at it. 

Tokenization of the puzzle game experience

Throughout the journey of building Atocha Protocol, we learned about the possibility of tokenizing different parts of the puzzle game which includes entrance tickets, clue pieces, achievement records, winning moments, game moderation service, rental service (game room, accessories, avatar, etc), and more. 

Don't limit yourself

In the beginning of ideation for the project, we were constrained with the concept of providing the puzzle game protocol for the question and answer type puzzle which is very single-dimensional and basic when we looked back. While we are developing the protocol, we saw more opportunities as we engaged with different creators and players in the industry. Hence, this is a wake-up call for us to create a roadmap of features adding that could accommodate different types of puzzle game mechanisms on the protocol. 

How You Built Your Project

Onboarding creators and forming a sustainable creator economy

Technical development aside, we are aware that without the support from the gamer community, the protocol will not succeed. It is more than crucial for the founding team to understand the core value of puzzle games so that we can develop a protocol that suits the various needs and flexibility in the puzzle game industry. 

From our team's perspective, creator and puzzle game are the core value generator for the protocol. That means a good puzzle game with the right incentive in the prize will naturally generate attention and engagement organically. Players are here for fun and some are here for the prize. In addition, there are also people that play to earn fame. Thus, by understanding the underlying psychology behind the players' desire, a good protocol can help the creators to develop 

NFT to enable multiple revenue streams

As mentioned from the lesson we learned from the NFT experimentation experience and brainstorm, we take NFT as one of the key value capture components within the ecosystem. The revenue stream that we see possible are as follow:

Subscription/Rental Service - Puzzle game like online multiplayer social deduction game (Among Us, Werewolves, etc) has its unique attraction to the players just like how Escape Room in the physical world. The key revenue stream for this format of puzzle game is through subscription or rental fee whereby you can gain continuous access to different game rooms and play with different players. This ultimately will create a never ending unique game experience for all the players, which in turn brings the addictive element to the subscribing players. Atocha Protocol can earn through a small share of the fee collected which will contribute to the continuous development of the features.

Entrance Fee - Just like how Escape Room and amusement parks earn through entrance fee, puzzle games can be a sort of virtual amusement park that only can be accessed through an entry ticket NFT. Such models can be used in puzzle games that possess a longer playing duration like a treasure hunt or a complex cypher/logic puzzle. Players will acquire the NFT to gain access into the game and start cracking the puzzle either individually or in a group. Atocha Protocol can earn through a small cut from the fee collected.

Game Moderation Service - This service is crucial especially for social deduction games like Werewolves. With a professional that understands the game and knows how to create a good vibe, most of the players will definitely enjoy the game. With that, it will become one of the attraction points for players to choose and pay for the moderation service by the pros. Through NFT, the moderators can allocate their moderation session into slots and sell it to players. Atocha Protocol can earn through a partial sharing of fee collected.

Game Components Sale - This is one of the most common applications for NFT in the Web3 gaming apps. Components like the skills, equipment, upgrades can be purchased like how Web2 gaming works. A percentage of marketplace fee can be set for the revenue stream of Atocha Protocol.

Achievement Trophy/Badge - In the gaming world, the players tend to share their gaming results which is part of gaining credibility, respect and pride. By cracking different levels of puzzle, spending different amounts of gaming time, getting winning streaks, etc, one can acquire badges or trophies. With some incentive mechanism in place, by gaining these badges or trophies, there can be more rewards or a multiplier of point earning mechanism will be opened up for the players to get them more committed to the game. Atocha Protocol can earn through a minimal minting fee for the trophies and badges or from the holding of more $ATO when players intend to have a larger stake in the games.

Training Fee - Atocha Protocol has the vision to build a puzzle game academy and incubator. This would have a variety of services provided for the interested parties which include professional training. Such training service packages can be wrapped into NFT and to be sold. Atocha Protocol will either have the full sales or a share of the sale depending on the training scope provided.

Early Investment Return - Finally, Atocha Protocol has the vision to become an incubator and a Venture DAO with the capability to invest in an early puzzle game dapps project that is intended to kickstart the scene. This will ultimately form a closed loop of continuous new talents coming in the industry and succeeding. On the other side, making Atocha Protocol to be always relevant and sustainable with new blood joining the ecosystem.

Building the puzzle game global ecosystem 

As we developed the protocol, we found that puzzle games should not be constrained by any culture, format or geographical context. In other words, puzzle games can be a versatile medium to contain the essence of people's creativity, culture and passion. We believe that the protocol will be an underlying connector to build a global puzzle game ecosystem whereby creators, players, marketers, developers, brands and investors can come together to join the movement to inspire the curious mind.

In terms of step-by-step development, we will be gathering a small group of talented creators as the foundation of the global ecosystem. From the creators, we intend to collaborate with them to build different puzzle games that could attract the first community of players to join the ecosystem. Once we have a proven community model, this will be duplicated to different puzzle game communities that can be led by the game master/guild master around the globe. Slowly, this will form a decentralised but connected puzzle game ecosystem based on the puzzle game genre and players' interests. 

The Challenges You Faced

The chicken and egg of building of an ecosystem

We started with only the idea of creating a puzzle game protocol with some simple riddles, cipher puzzles. From the start, it is hard as there are not many players that participate which is quite discouraging. This led us to think about whether we should focus on building a top-notch puzzle that can become a buzz so that it proves that a puzzle game is a thing. Besides, the puzzle game can become the attraction point for community building. Therefore, it is a chicken and egg dilemma for us. 

After several discussions and brainstorming with mentors, we found that this challenge should not be our main concern but to be firm in what value we want to provide in the puzzle game niche market. Finally, we settle on the positioning of becoming the ecosystem builder and infrastructure provider for the Web3 puzzle game community. This change in perspective and mindset has helped us to gain clarity and momentum in building both the technology and community from an early stage.

The different behaviour and needs from various puzzle games

When we launched our Webapp Demo and some experimental puzzle games, we received different feedback from the community about the bad experience, unfair mechanism, and technical bugs in our early works of ours. From the feedback, we concluded that there are different expectations and preferences from different groups of players which we need to understand further. This is also one part that we are not focusing on but realizing that it is a crucial piece to listen to the users.

From there, we have started to collect more feedback and suggestions from the community. In the meantime, building a feedback library that can help us improve the development and avoid some potential blunders that the team can make in the future. The challenge we see is that such a process will be a very long and painful journey as we go along. There's no point for us to stay conservative but to always dare to try and fix the problem as soon as possible. Thus, the challenge for us is to maintain a good equilibrium point where we want to maintain a good relationship with the community and at the same time be able to spearhead some innovation through trial and error. This challenge can be moved into a sandbox when the ecosystem becomes mature and has a large amount of supporting community members.

Onboarding Web2 puzzle games

While we were building the protocol, we had also talked with several puzzle game developers that are building in the Web2 scene. The response that we got was not entirely welcoming. Some of them showed a negative vibe where they think we are just another platform builder that tries to onboard creators and earn through commission or so like how the Web2 works. Not only do they have skepticism on what we are building but the lack of interest and willingness to listen to our pitch, this has been not an easy journey for us to onboard creators to try out our protocol. 

With such a challenge, we initiated different programs that can incentivize creators to join with a minimal cost like the Atocha Puzzle Creator Contest that will end at the end of March 2022. The contest aims to gather talented, small groups of puzzle creators that have their work ready (or can specifically build for the contest) and submit their interest to participate in the contest. The team will then choose the best 10 and reward them accordingly. Furthermore, the winning creators will become the first few puzzle games that can evolve their game into a Web3 puzzle game with the help of the Atocha Protocol team. This is how we want to overcome the challenge with real action that directly benefits the creators.

Achievements We Are Proud Of

Supportive Community

The people who supported us during the very early stage are what encouraged us the most. Atocha Protocol started her presence online around July 2021 and has organically accumulated over 4,000 followers on both Twitter and Discord respectively. For a niche genre, we are happy to see such growth within this period.

With the support from our community members, Atogang, we are able to kickstart several programs like Puzzle Creator Contest, NFT giveaways, AMA with community, Puzzle Bounty Program, Web App Alpha Tester Program, and many more to come. All of which is crucial for us to develop and obtain feedback from the community. Therefore, we would like to say a big Thank You to all who supported us and we will continue to build the vision that we always talk about, a place to inspire the curious mind.

Grant & Investment Support

Since we kickstarted this project, we have received financial support from VC investors and foundations as well. We have successfully closed our Seed Round funding which raised $300,000 USD and is on track to raise another $300,000 USD for the Strategic Round funding. In addition, we received the Octopus Star Prize from the Octopus Accelerator Program worth $50,000 USD and Near Grant from Near Foundation worth $50,000 USD. All of these are important milestones for us to lay the foundation for us to keep building what we envisioned.

Innovation in Game Mechanism & Economy Model

We are also proud of the innovation that we did for the game mechanism of Atocha Protocol and its economic model. The reason we are able to get to this model is a result of countless brainstorming, discussion, research, and advice from our mentor team. Knowingly that there will be no perfect model to fit for all-purpose, yet the final model has addressed some of the pain points in a puzzle game. The essence of the mechanism and economy model is to have a fair system, transparent distribution of funds, and flexibility for puzzle game design.

What's Next For Atocha Protocol

Incubate A Strong Creator Team

As of now, we are focusing on forming a strong creator team that consists of puzzle creator (someone that can design puzzles), developers (able to code like building HTML5 game app), and graphic/video experts (able to illustrate the puzzle in a more interactive way). It is literally a mini-game studio where we can create a sustainable stream of puzzle game supply on the protocol while getting the public to join and utilize the protocol for their own developed puzzle games.

We believe that being able to demonstrate how puzzle games can be integrated seamlessly with the protocol will be the strongest marketing tool for both creators and potential investors (also including sponsors). Thus, we already have a pipeline of features that are related to NFT that enables different revenue streams for the creators as well as for the project itself.

Build & Experiment Multiple NFT Functionalities

Continuing with the first goal which is to create a strong creator team, the equally important focus for the dev team is to build and experiment with different NFT functionalities that can enable revenue generation like subscription fee, entrance fee, professional fee, and more. Learning from the conservation with game guilds and game creators, we know that these are the important components that have to be in place as a protocol builder so that the creator can have the incentive to build and earn a living. This will also have a sustainable impact for the project team to survive without solely depending on the investment funds.

Nurture Puzzle Game Guilds Globally

When the ecosystem has several puzzle games that are available for the community to play, we intended to expand the community by building game guilds based on the puzzle game itself. Different categorizations like the genres of the puzzle and language can be part of the game guilds' focus. Eventually, we see this will become a self-sustaining small ecosystem that revolves around similar interests for the puzzle game.

Significant Development Update During Submission Period

There are 4 significant development that during the submission period of Metabuild Hackathon which justify our submission:

  1. Tokenomics and reward distribution completed during this period
  2. On chain basic puzzle functions developed during this period (creating, solving)
  3. Octopus Network testnet up and awaiting testnet to pass booting stage and up running (just kickstarted less than 1 month ago)
  4. Atocha Web App launched and continuous development

All the coding and progress can be traced through our GitHub: https://github.com/atocha-protocol

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