This year has been a year of many setbacks. In February we decided to merge with Pigs At War, which led to some distaste from some of our stakeholders, then eventually dissolved the entire approach. This dissolution prompted further discussions about the future of Gif Games, where shareholders of Gif Games were not satisfied with the direction of the company. These discussions started in Late March and placed a lot into question about the future of Tezotopia and the company.
6+ months of back and forth with our lead investors and we’ve finally come to an agreement that satisfies all parties and allows the company to move forward. These matters are internal and the specifics of the discussions won’t be made public, but it is the reason no roadmap or major updates had been presented throughout most of 2023: there was a major uncertainty about the future of the company itself.
It was a deeply stressful period for the company, for members of the company, and we lost some team members in the process. But Anshit, Joab, Shwetal, Rohit, and Ayushi are still here, still moving forward. We’ve found solutions that work for us to continue working on Tezotopia. We feel it is very much a part of our duty to the community, and it’s very much our baby that we have to see it through.
Despite some of the setbacks we did catch a couple Ws in the process with the launch of our Google Playstore app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=games.gif.tezotopia
And, we also received some grant money from Tezos Foundation to continue the development of Tezotopia mobile app.
As most of the original team members are on board to churn out some new things for Tezotopia, we’re reaching for low hanging fruit, the quickest things we can do to achieve progress with UNO use cases.
Last week, we leaked a quick set of notes of some of those things we’re looking into.
https://x.com/tezotopiaio/status/1705306881093161366?s=20
On that list were a few items related to future tasks we’re hoping to achieve in the short term. We’ll have a longer term plan in the coming weeks that details some other exciting stuff we have been cooking up.
Let’s get into a few of the things we’ve been talking about for the last few months.
This has been in the works since the early summer, UNOBall is a lottery that’s run with UNO as the main prize. It’s 1 UNO per ticket, you select 6 numbers (01-50) and you’re allowed to buy multiple tickets each with any combination of numbers selected.
At the end of a cycle, a winning set of numbers is generated and your numbers are matched against it.
A perfect match of 6 takes the entire prize pool and nobody else gets a prize. But if there is no perfect match then tickets will get a degrading amount of UNO based on how many numbers they match, for example:
Tickets with 5 matches will get 1000 UNO
Tickets with 4 matches will get 100 UNO
Tickets with 3 matches will get 10 UNO
This is an example, but the actual number will follow a similar pattern, and will depend on the probabilities of getting these matches. So if the probability of getting 3 matches is 1 in 50, then 10-20 UNO should work, plus we can make the prize amount more reasonable as the game scales.
The development of UNOBall is about 75% complete and continues to be developed. We need to test to see if there’s a large enough player pool to justify 6-number match, might increases chances with maybe a 4 or 5 match, but we’ll keep this open for now.
You can see the original idea for Killswitch here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s5RrrhZ-nuH-rKKMQK4-1hv_PkzdOcRKD7NmUYxtnQI/edit?usp=sharing
Getting to that version of Killswitch would take many months, what we’re proposing for the Killswitch idea is something much more drowned down for the first version.
Version 1 of Killswitch would quite literally be a magic button type situation where you use UNO to turn on and off the Killswitch. The Killswitch turns off ALL UNO production across the board. This wouldn’t just be UR production that it turns off, it would be all of it, or a percentage of it. This only because how it was originally coded, the UNO production is all bulked together.
The Killswitch would replace Halvenings or at least be offered as an alternative to Halvenings based on community feedback.
This would create a dynamic environment where players would sabotage UNO production to create some drama between landlords and warlords.
Version 1 of Killswitch would be the magic button idea.
Version 2 of Killswitch would be one where players can guard the Killswitch with units and you’d have to then bribe or autobattle against the units to access the Killswitch.
Version 3 would look like the board game setup in the above Google Doc with use cases for Spies and Diplomats. Much more complicated mini-game that can be played on any browser.
So, as many of you already know, battles are multiplayer and we suffer from empty lobby syndrome because the player pool is quite small.
Anshit has thought up a remedy for this problem where we create an AI-based bot that will readily attend to a match once an opponent is available, if no other human player is around. This would be a bit like a hybrid single player mode, but the AI bot will join a match as if it were a human player.
Thinking upon this remedy did lead to further ideation on this type of setup.
What if we allow players to lock their units up and let those units be controlled by AI and battle against human players or other locked units, allowing players to passively earn rewards for locking units up.
This would populate the lobby, as well as allow users to play with their units and earn without having to do a thing but locking and healing. The units would battle on their own over time and keep the game populated with opponents for any opportunity a new player strolls into battle looking for a fight.
We’ll be looking for some community feedback on what approach we should move forward with implementing.
The lowest hanging fruit for UNO use cases is using UNO for healing units. This can be done in a matter of days and can be implemented fairly quickly. We’ll be coming up with an updated formula for costs associated with healing and sharing that publicly.
The next on the list would be to finish UNOBall, having that live is important as it should be a fun little experiment and usefulness for UNO. We’ll be populating the first prize pool with existing UNO from our treasury. We have discussed having an UNO-only marketplace, but this might bring some unforeseen consequences that we’re exploring. Anshit has suggested we do more research on this and hold this off for a period of time before jumping straight into it.
Anshit and Shwetal are excited to dive into the autobattler and create some AI to fill the gap in the lobbies. That will be the main focus after UNOBall. We’ll be meeting with Quicksave to see how far into their game engine we can go to tweak these aspects and get some bots in there doing the dirty work.
Again, this is a short list of short term things we’re doing for Tezotopia. The company has other plans that involve a much broader vision for the future that include Matterlight as well. Once that’s all in its place and fully-documented we will be sharing.
Stay tuned!