Inspiration
The recent randomized avatar collectibles craze has inevitably led to as many, or likely far more, failed projects than successful ones; based mostly on the fact that many are primarily bought in the interest of flipping for a profit, and a few days later have little interest from most people.
What it does
Polygoonz is an attempt to raise the bar on the NFT collectible avatars craze. The NFT's will be accompanied by the deployment of an ERC-20; which will be earned by staking the NFT assets. The erc-20 token will then be used to buy the final 10% of the set. The entire collection will then be useable in a game we'll be developing, which will be similar to risk; with the NFTs used as units, staked in the different territories to gain control.
How we built it
The artwork for the NFT's is sourced from an asset library of over 300 hand-made traits covering 10 different sections of the image. A custom script is used to generate 8880 unique artworks, which are then stored on ipfs/filecoin, and randomly assigned with a URI each time an NFT is minted through the mint function being callled by the contract. For the game; we aren't 100% certain just yet, as the time window for the hackathon was occupied by getting the team together, creating the art, and learning how to program the collection, which is the core of the project.
Challenges we ran into
Coordination while working with a globally distributed team; all of whom have a number of other prior obligations, made it a bit of a time crunch. Aside from that, things went rather smoothly, with one of the biggest challenges being the one in enforcing a "bottom-to-top" layer heirarchy while randomizing the art, as well as making certain that the provided traits were not only set in the proper layer order, but were the right dimaensions throughout all of them, and that they shared the exact positions from a perspective of an invisible grid
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We actually created more than twice the number of possible traits than originally planned; and considering that the collection is done as pixel art, the quality is rather impressive. We also think we've added a unique aspect to our generative collectibles set, being that the traits any one Polygoon can be assigned are gender-agnostic; intentionally, in the interest of more diverse representation. (as an example, a Polygoon could easily be generated with a beard and a skirt, or a male appearance aside from their high heels.)
What we learned
What's next for Polygoonz DeFi
We plan to spend the next couple of weeks on marketing, then launch the collection toward the end of September. Assuming that the marketing is successful, along with the added appeal of DeFi features, and the collection sells out, we'll be hiring a game developer, and building the Polygoonz RTS, currently it's not been named, but the working title is Polygoonz Dominion. Beyond that, we intend to develop Polygoonz into a metaverse-native IP franchise, including a 3d 'Gooniverse' (likely to be built on top of Sandbox or Minecraft), a comic book series, and maybe even an animated movie.
The vercel app link leads directly to the minting function, hosted as a single page, which will be included in the website soon, but currently is omitted from the site to avoid people spending their crypto by mistake. If interested in testing, it is running on Polygon's Mumbai testnet.
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