SECTION 1: APPLICANT INFORMATION
Applicant Name: Diego Vidaurre
Project Name: The Beacon
Project Description:
The Beacon is an action roguelite RPG set in a vibrant, handmade pixel art world. Players can conquer procedural dungeons to earn unique NFT loot. Customize your character and home to your heart’s content, or trade your treasures on the market, all while engaging in MMO-like online gameplay.
Team Members and Roles:
Full time Employees:
Diego Vidaurre: CEO
Rafael Vidaurre: CTO & Game Director
Jeralt: Tech lead & Loremaster
JCA: Fullstack + Blockchain Engineer & Game Developer
Harb: Fullstack Engineer & Game Developer
Davide c: Senior Developer
Eriatarka: Front-end Engineer
Vaigo: Head of Growth & Marketing
Abab: Graphics & Content Creator
Nanzs: Community Manager
Jam: Web3 and AI Industry Analyst + BD
Ross: Lead Artist
Du: Pixel Artist
Moks: Chief of Staff
Project Links:
https://twitter.com/The_Beacon_GG
Contact Information
Point of Contact (note: this should be an individual’s name, not the name of the protocol):
Diego Vidaurre , divdaurres (forum)
Point of Contact’s TG handle: @diegovidaurres
Twitter: @DiegoVidaurres
Email: diego@skillcap.studio
Do you acknowledge that your team will be subject to a KYC requirement?:
Yes
SECTION 2a: Team and Product Information
Team experience (Any relevant experience that may be useful in evaluating ability to ship, or execution with grant incentives. Please provide references knowledgeable about past work, where relevant. If you wish to do so privately, indicate that. [Optional, but recommended]):
Diego Vidaurre (Founder, CEO): Diego is a psychologist and software developer ever since 2013 with multiple years of experience in different products and programming languages.
Formerly PM of Azure in Microsoft, Chile. Diego together with his brother Rafael decided to quit the corporate life to pursue their own business back in 2019, where they created Gambit, originally a software and blockchain development studio that had several clients on the Chilean banking industry as well as gamefi clients on the blockchain space. By the end of 2021 the company took a 180 degree shift noticing the opportunity to create a great and fun game within the blockchain space, both brothers decided to transform Gambit into Skillcap, where they pursued the full-time journey of creating web3 games.
Rafael Vidaurre (Founder, CTO): Rafael is a seasoned software developer with more than 15 years of experience. Currently one of the most rated devs on github by stars criteria on his country, Rafael has participated in several projects as both a core developer and Tech Lead.
Before forming Gambit and subsequently Skillcap with Diego, Rafael used to work as the Tech Lead on the front-end side of Polymath, a rather known securities blockchain.
Rafael has published a few notable open-sourced repositories for popular frameworks like angular, as well as publishing renown articles for JS programming Language.
Rafael has always been a life-long gamer, as well as having keen interest in game development, he and Diego attempted to build several games back in the day. Together with his co-founder, they co-created successful MMORPG spinoffs of popular games such as Tibia and Minecraft.
What novelty or innovation does your product bring to Arbitrum?:
The Beacon is already the most successful game within The Arbitrum ecosystem. We became hugely viral on late 2022 with the demo launch of our game.
This image shows a few of our achievements so far with just a demo:
During The Settlement Launch (initial demo launch), The Beacon had a total of 21k DAU, 41% of which were retained by the end of the event.
We currently have 260k total registered wallets. Our collection amounts to a total of 4 million USD currently on the top most traded collection on Arbitrum, with more than 20k unique holders.
The Beacon aims to be the game that bridges the gap between web2 and web3 games, helping our industry establish once and for all why blockchain will soon be a natural component within most games.
The Beacon features an easy to understand free-to-play experience accompanied by a fun-first challenging action gameplay. This coupled with great retro style, high fidelity pixel art graphics, a highly engaging social and competitive online landscape together with a vast and very unique creative gameplay results in the blend of a game that given it’s innovative nature can compete directly even in the web2 space. It’s a game that is both fun to play and inmmensley fun to watch.
The game is made for gamers. It’s a product made to appeal to the masses with its particular graphics and playstyle. It’s a game that is easy to grasp and easy to comprehend, free-to-play and portable to PC and mobile devices.
As a studio our aim to be able to solve the problem of bringing web3 gaming to the masses of gamers worldwide.
Please note that this application was submitted prior to a very important release of our game that will take place very soon. things are vague in order to prevent leaks, we are at this moment on The GDC in The Arbitrum Booth with a demo of our game *
Is your project composable with other projects on Arbitrum? If so, please explain:
Yes, true ownership of digital assets and the exciting possibilities of interoperability are core principles in The Beacon. We’ve actively implemented this vision by collaborating with other Arbitrum games like Bridgeworld and Kuroro Beast, where our in-game assets can be used. This fosters a fascinating interconnectedness between these distinct universes, allowing players to experience a more expansive and dynamic gaming experience. This can be extended beyond games to other other projects including defi protocols and other types of collections:
Do you have any comparable protocols within the Arbitrum ecosystem or other blockchains?:
There are other games within Arbitrum, however things like genre , mechanics , revenue channels and type of users vary widely and The Beacon distinguishes from them in several ways within the category, the game is very unique even for web2 standards.
How do you measure and think about retention internally? (metrics, target KPIs)
As we are currently in pre-launch development and working towards our Alpha this year, our focus is on refining core gameplay mechanics and features for a successful launch. Currently we just have a Demo open. Therefore, at this stage, we are not yet formally measuring user retention. However, we have a well-defined strategy for measuring retention metrics once we enter early alpha and launch phases. These metrics will be crucial for internal monitoring and informing future development decisions:
Daily Retention: We will track D1 , D7, and D30 retention rates to understand how effectively the game engages players and keeps them coming back in the short term.
Long-Term Engagement: We will monitor Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) to assess the overall health and growth of the player base over time, (although these metrics will be more meaningful upon the global launch)
Monetization: We will track Total Paying Users (TPU) daily and monthly to understand how effectively the game’s monetization strategy is converting engaged players into paying users as well as TLV. One of the major indicators during this period will be our NFT mint, where we are expecting a full mint (10k + supply)
We of course track relevant chain activity such as
Dailiy/Total volume (currently sitting at more than 2400 ETH in Total Market Volume) and contract interactions (withdraws/exports, mints, etc)
However, the game is currently closed and on demo format, we will have in the following months our initiative The New Frontier Quest (more on this below) followed by a global release of the game in web3 and web2. Metrics need to adapt to the different phases of the project.
Daily/Total transactions are tracked by our dune dashboard. Most of the activity of our project took place on December of 2022, where we closed the game afterwards in order to develop the features that we will release on the following months
https://dune.com/skillcap/the-beacon-arbitrum-ltipp
Do you agree to remove team-controlled wallets from all milestone metrics AND exclude team-controlled wallets from any incentives included in your plan:
Yes
Did you utilize a grants consultant or other third party not named as a grantee to draft this proposal? If so, please disclose the details of that arrangement here, including conflicts of interest (Note: this does NOT disqualify an applicant):
No
SECTION 2b: PROTOCOL DETAILS
Is the protocol native to Arbitrum?: [Yes/No, and provide explanation]
Yes
On what other networks is the protocol deployed?:
None
What date did you deploy on Arbitrum mainnet?:
Nov-23-2022
Do you have a native token?:
We do have a token initiative planned for release later this year/early next year, all the game’s success has been achieved without any token whatsoever. We will announce details on this soon, but can’t disclose within this post for now given it’s public.
Past Incentivization: What liquidity mining/incentive programs, if any, have you previously run? Please share results and dashboards, as applicable?
Since our proptotype launch on November 2022 we have run several campaigns with other projects to attract more members to the community and the web 3 gaming space in general.
Current Incentivization: How are you currently incentivizing your protocol?:
As of today we don’t have any running program to incentivize our community. Nevertheless, in the past we have done several collaborations with other projects, rewarding our commited community members with special NFTs and in game opportunities, running activities with renown projects within the ecosystem, such as Kaiju Kingz, Treasure and others.
Currently we are working on a months long initiative where users will dive deep in The Beacon game as well as our Webapp. This initiative is called The New Frontier Quest (more info on the sections below)
You can check our twitter feed the latest marketing campaign on the buildup for this activity, where we uploaded 4 videos to announce The New Frontier quest. We are having sizable traction and a very positive reception:
https://twitter.com/The_Beacon_GG
Have you received a grant from the DAO, Foundation, or any Arbitrum ecosystem related program? [yes/no, please provide any details around how the funds were allocated and any relevant results/learnings(Note: this does NOT disqualify an applicant)]
Yes, although since these funds are subject to project milestones across several months, we haven’t received these funds yet, and they are structured to assist toward the project’s development and G2M, ranging from open testing, to early alpha and subsequent alpha launch (global launch).
Protocol Performance:
- More than 250k accounts registered in the game
- Peak of 21k DAU during our demo launch
- Biggest NFT Collection in terms of total volume on Arbitrum on Opensea
- We composed 25% of total network activity during the peak days of our launch
- More than 44k mints and 25k unique holders and details like the ones in the image below:
Protocol Roadmap will be vague given this post can be considered a “leak” and we will release announcements very soon
In short, these are the most important proximal milestones of 2024:
- The New Frontier Quest (Pre-Alpha that converges with LTIPP period)
- Global Release
Happy to discuss these in detail with the council
**Audit History & Security Vendors: **
In terms of security we plan to take all the necessary precautions in terms of auditing of our smart contracts.
We currently have no bug-bounty programs, however some activities mentioned later in this form act as a bug-bounty mechanisms.
Similar to how we did with our initial demo launch on Late 2022, The game is structured to be bot-resistant and secure
Security Incidents:
None
SECTION 3: GRANT INFORMATION
Requested Grant Size: 200k ARB
Justification for the size of the grant :
We believe that 200k ARB tokens are a reasonable amount to be able to reach a wide audience of new players and cause a potential impact as a marketing tool te draw more eyes on social media, as well as serving to help create a great foundation for our Global Launch
This amount is relatively conservative, as we intend to align these funds with the set of incentives we ourselves as a project will be running during the following months, where our own token and our own initiatives will bring the most traction.
However, these funds as incentives can prove particularly useful for deeper player retention, a richer referral system, more contract interactions within our protocol, deeper fidelization of users towards the chain, as well as acting as a clear signal of support from the DAO, compelling other games to join Arbitrum. The Beacon onboarded several games to Arbitrum in the past (Kuroro Beasts, Mighty Action Heroes, Monkey Empire, etc). By being one of the flagship games of the chain, we have been of particular influence to games that are still reluctant on which chain to choose. One of our main arguments has always been that Arbitrum backs their builders in a way most other chains don’t. The LTIPP is a tangible example of this, and the impact of onboarding more games to the chain can’t be understated, yet KPIs to measure their impact are hard to produce, as the outcomes are not immediate.
Grant Matching: [Enter Amount of Matching Funds Provided - If Relevant]
Grant Breakdown:
- Community and incentive rewards (100%): $ 200K ARB
- These will be used to fund the grant token reward system within the game and the activities that will take place during The New Frontier Quest, incentivizing user activity and engagement through:
Retention incentives (80%) :
- Quest completion rewards
- Referral bonuses
- UA mechanisms that reward users trying the game for the first time
- Daily login bonuses
Chain Incentives (20%)
- Minting/import of items inside and outside the game(contract interactions on Arbitrum one)
- Secondary market transaction rewards
- Refunding of fees
We will evaluate distribution based on player feedback as well as council feedback, given The New Frontier Quest will last several weeks.
Funding Address:
0xfa2EBd5aE6fdA003376555165ffF683e87D1CcB1
Funding Address Characteristics:
The Address is a 2/3 Gnosis Safe
Treasury Address:
0xfa2EBd5aE6fdA003376555165ffF683e87D1CcB1
Contract Address:
TBD, likely 0xd6a6b9FC4589d690117724Df893ae8BB1A4542f1 that we use for tx fees as well as to fund project initiatives
SECTION 4: GRANT OBJECTIVES, EXECUTION AND MILESTONES
Objectives:
- Increase net user base of The Beacon
- Increase user engagement and retention: Drive daily/Monthly active users (DAU/MAU) to ensure a vibrant community prior tu launch and beyond.
- Incentivize player progression: Encourage users to explore the game’s depth and mechanics by rewarding completion of quests.
- Creating a deeper and more compelling Referral systems to onboard new users to the game.
- Increase chain loyalty by subsiding fees to users while demonstrating the ease of using blockchain within games in the import/export of assets on our webapp
- Lay the perfect ground for our Global Alpha Release (web2 included) which will take place shortly after the LTIPP period, where the global release can be of substantial impact for the chain.
Execution Strategy:
We are scheduling to launch the Full alpha of our game, accompanied by a global web 2 release on traditional gaming platforms like Steam as well as a mobile version that will be able to be listed on the app store (similar to how Heroes of Mavia did). This Global launch is scheduled to be released proximal to Treasure Chain’s launch (late Q2-Q3).
In the time between now and the Global Alpha Release we plan to ran a “Pre-Alpha” period accompanied by a a strong marketing campaign that will feature a particular NFT as well as several rewards for existing and new users.
The Pre-Alpha activity is called “The New Frontier Quest” and it will take place in both, our webapp and our game. These dates will take place soon, however we won’t post them here as we intend to do a huge announcement ourselves this week. We’ll be a bit vague in order to not spoil our own announcements, and will disclose internally with the DAO if requested. The main announcement will go live during this week, and this post will be updated with all relevant information as soon as the announcement goes live.
The new frontier quest is an online activity that consists of a series of nodes that are unlocked as the user progresses. Each node is a quest that can involve Social Media activity like (twitter follows) Game Activites (finish a quest or do XYZ within de game) and Blockchain activities with The Beacon’s Assets as well as other projects assets. Quests reward users in particular ways and heavily incentivize retention towards the project.
The New frontier quest will const of 3 phases.
Things will be rather vague to not spoil the announcements we plan to make as a project soon
Phase 1 will be available to everyone, users that participate will be able to be drafted a WL spot to mint a partircular NFT. This NFT that will grant early access to game features as well as phases 2 and 3. It will also feature a very impactful reward for the future.
Phase 2 and 3 will take place after the mint, NFT holders will be prioritized but will there will also be instances for all players to try. During these phases we will release several highly awaited game features and open instances for feedback and balance, rewarding players that help us polishing the different features and game mechannics.
The dates of the different phases this will take place mimic the LTIPP’s, time frames are very, very similar.
More details on rewards and incentives during this phase will be posted in here after our announcement this week.
Lastly we expect to launch the global release of our game shortly after the end of Phase 3.
The global release will take place in both web2 and web3 (similar to heroes of mavia).
Proper execution of The New Frontier Quest can prove of substantial benefit to the global release, where the grant funds can act as a catalyst to further increase traction and expectation for the full launch.
Phase 1 of the New Frontier Quest will be the period during which most users will be drawn towards the chain as well as during the Global Launch of our game that will take place after The New Frontier Quest ends.
This grant can come quite in handy for this particular phase, where incentives can be aligned for more users to try the game, reach wider audiences, have a deeper referral system as well as having more incentives to deepen retention.
Token Rewards: We will assign most of the grant tokens as rewards to our users that complete specific task and quest carefully determined to incentivize exploration, progression, community growth, and participation in specific activities, as well as boosting general community engagement and The Beacon’s reach. Aligning this with a compelling referral systems as well as giving players a a pleasant on-chain experience when withdrawing/importing game assets within our app. We expect the grant funds of the LTIPP to be used within the New Frontier Quest’s duration.
What mechanisms within the incentive design will you implement to incentivize “stickiness” whether it be users, liquidity or some other targeted metric?
- Retention mechanisms for completing quests
- Player referrals
- Progression rewards
- UA + retention rewards (new users that complete the main questline)
- On chain interactions (imports/withdrawals) and secondary market incentives.
Sky is the limit here, where we can reward players in several ways depending on how much they contribute to the game and its expansion within this process. The New Frontier Quest features a built-in progression system based on points and quests are composable by us. We can align incentive towards the users that are committed, not only to the game but to other projects within Arbitrum itself if deemed useful by the DAO, we also can very quickly implement feedback in terms on reward distribution.
Most of these will be quests that take place within the webapp, as well as within the game itself, the game’s natural progression mechanics will be tied to the rewards as well
Specify the KPIs that will be used to measure success in achieving the grant objectives and designate a source of truth for governance to use to verify accuracy.
- Daily/Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU): Daily active users within the game and the chain
- New Accounts (wallets) and total accounts
- Quests Completed (Total and Per User): Serves as a retention metric
- Total Contract Interactions within the game
- Total Referrals
- Trading volume
- Twitter Follows
- Discord users
- Hours played and dungeons completed
- Other retention metrics that may be relevant to evaluate the project’s health and the effective of initatives. This will be a period of constant feedback
Please do consider these KPIs offer superficial quantitative data, however the qualitative impact of them is much harder to estimate and describe, yet much more meaningful.
We are basing some of these KPIs based on our initial demo launch on late 2022, however the impact of our launch was highly more sizable than what the KPIs suggest. At the same time, it is currently hard to measure the impact of previous DAO grants we’ve seen on other similar projects that received the STIP a few months back, the impact varies highly from project to project.
We were one of the relevant factors that positioned Arbitrum as a gaming chain back on December 2022, the impact of our actions was hard to measure with KPIs back then as it is now, where tons of our users didn’t know about Arbitrum’s existence, yet thanks to our game they stayed and later rotated into other projects like Defi Dapps. Several new games joined Arbitrum (deploying or moving over from other chains) given the success we had, as well as several interop opportunities that took place between us and other projects from other chains. A successful game launch usually implies on a series of reactions that are hard to measure by quantitative data alone (Pixels is a good example of this).
We expect our global launch this year to be way more impactful for Arbitrum than what we achieved on 2022. The KPIs we are pointing out in here are intended to fit the program’s description, and we are tying them to the current stage of our game, yet in this exercise there are tons of data(specially qualitative data) that we might be missing in here that can be of serious benefit to Arbitrum, as it was in the past.
Grant Timeline and Milestones:
Please do consider these Milestones are for The New Frontier Quest. Our global launch will take place AFTER this and the LTIPP, where all milestones and KPIs in here will pale in comparison to what can be attained if the launch goes well. This time we are launching globally on web 2 and web3, where most of the previously mentioned data was attained with just a demo. A properly executed New Frontier Quest will act as the foundation for the launch
-
Month 1 (Late April-May) New Frontier Quest Release:
- Achieve growth in DAU compared to pre-launch baseline.
- Release phase 1 of planned in-game quests and rewards
- At least 10k new followers on Twitter
- At least 5k new joins on Discord
- At least 30.000 new accounts
- At least 40.000 accounts completing the main questline
-
Month 2 Phase 2 of the New Frontier Quest:
- Mint out the entire Writ of Passage NFT (10k+ supply)
- Obtain at least 10.000 users out of Referral initiatives
- At least 2.5k new joins on Discord and Twitter
- Be at least 3-5% of total network contract interactions on different days by the end of Phase 2
- Achieve at least 30% completion rate for core quests.
-
Month 3 Phase 3 of the New Frontier Quest:
- At least 80.000 new accounts by the end of The New Frontier Quest
- At least 15k DAU during public openings for player testing and competitions
- At least 2.5k new joins on Discord and Twitter
- At least 1k ETH additional Trading Volume on our different collections by the end of month 3
- Obtain at least a total of 15.000 users out of Referral initiatives
- At least 10.000 + item imports/exports by this period (these involver contract interactions)
- More at least 25000 attesations by this period
Month 4 after the LTIPP:
- Global launch will take place after Phase 3 of The New Frontier Quest. We expect this period to lay the groundwork for the global launch, however we expect the actual launch to bring much higher traction to our game and the chain, in terms of basically all KPIs. We mention this period here given that the LTIPP might influence the success of the launch, which affects the chain directly.
How will receiving a grant enable you to foster growth or innovation within the Arbitrum ecosystem?
Receiving this grant would not only fuel the growth of The Beacon but also serve as a catalyst for the continued expansion and evolution of the Arbitrum ecosystem. Our demonstrated commitment to Arbitrum, along with the tangible data and success metrics as one of the biggest gaming proyects in Arbitrum, positions us as an ideal partner in driving shared growth.
We onboarded plenty of users in the past, on our demo launch on late 2022, more than 200k accounts were created, we alone composed more than 25% of the total network activity and reached more than 2M in Marketplace volume quickly becoming one of the most successful NFT collections within the chain. We were one of the relevant factors that positioned Arbitrum as a gaming chain.
With the initiatives we intend to run soon, coupled by these funds we expect to achieve similar, if not higher results.
Expanding the Arbitrum User Base:
- Direct User Acquisition: Our targeted incentive program, powered by our own initiatives + the grant funds, will create a compelling mechanism draw to attract new players to our game. These players are likely to explore the ease of use, speed, and low transaction costs Arbitrum offers, increasing the overall user base of the ecosystem. Such as they did with our original launch.
- Organic Growth: As our game is one of the largest within Arbitrum, this influx of new players naturally generates positive network effects. Increased user activity within our game directly contributes to the overall attractiveness and reach of the Arbitrum network.
- Onboarding more games: We onboarded several new games to Arbitrum with our Settlement Launch (Kuroro Beasts, Mighty Action heroes, and more) The impact of launching a good game on a chain can’t be understated, as it draws more games towards the chain, which further increases userbase (Pixels on Ronin is a good example)
Increased Network Activity and Transactions:
- In-Game Transactions: New players will generate significant transaction volume through their gameplay. This includes in-game purchases, participation in secondary markets, and interactions with the grant token reward system – directly impacting the health of the Arbitrum network.
- Increased Visibility: Our incentivized marketing efforts will create a surge in visibility for our game. Since we’re a flagship project within Arbitrum, this translates into increased exposure for the ecosystem itself.
These are just some indicators of many more, as our game has proven in the past that it can work as a fantastic tool to expand Arbitrum’s ecosystem primarily through gaming, where a good poriton of the users we brought into the chain have not heard about it before, yet they stayed on it given the great experience and community it fostered.
Do you accept the funding of your grant streamed linearly for the duration of your grant proposal, and that the multisig holds the power to halt your stream?
Yes
SECTION 5: Data and Reporting
Is your team prepared to comply with OBL’s data requirements for the entire life of the program and three months following and then handoff to the Arbitrum DAO? Are there any special requests/considerations that should be considered?
Yes
Does your team agree to provide bi-weekly program updates on the Arbitrum Forum thread that reference your OBL dashboard?
Yes, we can provide several data for both off-chain and on-chain activity for the game and the New Frontier Quest webapp
Does your team agree to provide a final closeout report not later than two weeks from the ending date of your program? This report should include summaries of work completed, final cost structure, whether any funds were returned, and any lessons the grantee feels came out of this grant. Where applicable, be sure to include final estimates of acquisition costs of any users, developers, or assets onboarded to Arbitrum chains. (NOTE: No future grants from this program can be given until a closeout report is provided.)
Yes
Does your team acknowledge that failure to comply with any of the above requests can result in the halting of the program’s funding stream?:
Yes