Trident is more than its team and developments. Its the people that make up the future we build towards. Without them, we only live as long as the team is building. To make tools for the future, is to make future generations have an easier time following the same footsteps in changing the world.
Graphical Overview
tl:dr
OasisSwap
- Cycle Sprints
- INK Airdrop
- Loot Box Airdrop
- Blitz
- Item Lending/Borrowing hooked into the Atlantis Exchange via OasisSwap
3. R2E Competitive Modes + Exclusives
- Combat
- Matchmaking
- Spectator R2E
- Leaderboards
- Exclusive in-game events for specific badge groups
4. MMO Development (In rough order)
- Procedural Generation Algorithm(s) for planets
- Boss, Dungeon, and Enemy Development
- Cambrian Gauntlet
- Player Housing
- Exclusive Benefits for Specific Badge Groups
- Skilling & XP Systems
- Deep Ocean Exploration
- Alchemy System
- Gear
- Player bank and inventory
- Atlantis Exchange
- On Chain Bounty System
- Generate Proc-Gen Dungeons
- AI NPC’s
- Kraken Governance
- Custom TWAP/VWAP Creation Tooling for Atlantis Exchange/OasisSwap
- Trident in-game economy derivatives (Greatsword weapon class index, or other in-game item baskets)
- Permissionless on-chain ERC20 tokenization of NFTs via Trident-ize.
- Market watch tools for Trident assets
- Player-submission assisted MMO Wiki
- Badge-Specific Cosmetic Items
5. Ecosystem
- Trident Grants for Premiere Projects
- SDK’s
- R2E Infrastructure Plug-And-Play
- Permissionless Development Support via Trident API
- Off-Chain and On-Chain Support for the crypto-unfamiliar
- Infrastructure for asset commerce of independent developer products such as, indie games, art + animation assets, sound packs, etc (itch.io, either homeroll or purchase itch.io)
- Access to in-person events+event bonuses (such as POAPS) via Kraken or Mortimarrow NFT
- Official Trident Esports Sponsorships
- Official Trident Game Tournaments + Prize Pools
All milestones will be in roughly chronological order, where, they are tagged with relevancy to the piece of our engine on which they build upon. Key milestones are large releases, and indicate a tag for a key piece of that ecosystem engine. Key pieces of our engine are as follows:
1. OasisSwap
2. Blitz
3. MMO
4. RiskToEarn Modes
5. Software Development Toolkits
6. Esports Scene Development
All of these key pieces fall under the umbrella of “Ecosystem Expansion”. Our main goal with Trident is to provide an ominous presence of foundational tools, products, and revenue generating value captures, so that we can change the way the world not only looks at the crypto gaming industry, and the crypto industry, but what the gaming industry itself could be, when hooked up to the great decentralized ledger.
Composability, decentralization, and permissionless-ness are at the constant forefront of our minds when developing the Trident ecosystem, and the milestones we are about to go over in depth, are our way of rooting those tenets into the gaming and crypto industries.
Most of these milestones are in rough chronological order, however, it is possible that some are finished before others, due to the community finding one thing more important than another at a point in time. We want to focus on what the community wants first, rather than sticking ourselves in the mud on some plan, when that plan doesn’t reflect the collective desires of the people who believe in us.
Key Milestone 1 : OasisSwap Initial Launch
The deployment of OasisSwap will occur on the weekend of February 24th. Launch may happen Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.
OasisSwap is the DEX of the Trident ecosystem, a powerful tool for vertically scaling our value capture framework. Vertical integration of the ecosystem is the name of the game for our master plan during the time of writing (currently February 19th).
By adding a DEX to our ecosystem, and Arbitrum One chain, we can go toe to toe with not only comparable GameFi projects, but also, the brooding DeFi space on Arbitrum.
Something we have not seen before in crypto is an integrated DEX into a live and playable multiplayer MMO. Nor have we seen it be integrated as a tool into games in the umbrella of a GameFi ecosystem.
At the same time, we have yet to see a tiered fee revenue share model in crypto. These are powerful tools when attached to a gaming ecosystem. Future legos we will add on top will only exponentially increase horsepower on the turbo engines which warp this ship to greatness.
There is no reason to give away valuable user funds to another DEX, especially when we can route those funds back to our treasury, the team, and the people who believe in us in the first place to even use our protocol and give us those funds.
We simply share back, and OasisSwap is our first value capture vehicle to do just that.
“Cycle-Sprints”
Upon launch of OasisSwap, we will begin our “cycle-sprints”, which are a set of time periods where we will collect data on what actions users perform on OasisSwap with regards to volume traded, trades executed, size of trades executed, and many other variables.
For more detailed info on cycle-sprints, check out this article below, and the subsequent OasisSwap Pieces.
Milestone 2 (OasisSwap)
Blitz. Blitz is an attachment to not just our DEX, but likely all DEX’s. At the time of writing, we won’t reveal our plans with Blitz just yet, but what we can say is the following.
Users of DeFi often face losses that go unseen when they press the “Confirm Transaction” button on their wallet extension. We seek to protect users from these threats, and route back funds that would otherwise have been lost, back to them. This is an extremely powerful upgrade to any DEX, let alone our own ecosystem.
We look forward to releasing information about what Blitz is, and what Blitz does, in a future article.
Key Milestone 3 (MMO Alpha)
The Trident MMO is something we think will not only shock crypto, due to its free to play nature, with no pay to win, but also due to its uniqueness as a game, without the crypto even involved.
Trident team is working on the Alpha release of a 2D, procedurally generated, infinite universe, Rogue-like, Metroidvania-like MMO.
The gaming industry has never seen a game like this before, and games of adjacent genres have been lost to the past due to the homogeneity of the Triple AAA gaming industry. Most MMO titles released today are cookie cutter copy/pastes of past favorites, without the heart and soul that made them great in the first place.
We see a brighter future for gaming, and that brighter future is available through the pathway of crypto, and its gift of lifting new independent developers to the frontlines of the gaming industry. Just as people placed their faith in us, and gave us the permissionless tools to develop a game that we would love to play, we seek to do the same for future independent developers via our ecosystem.
As a proof of concept for our models, and our ecosystem feedback engines, we will launch the MMO Alpha around April. The reason for delay on this, when previously stated as March, is due to a recent rapid growth phase of Trident, and we want to make sure we launch a safe, secure game, that does not cause players to lose progress, and isn’t susceptible to hacks/glitches/exploits which could potentially infiltrate into the on-chain side of our game, and damage the valuable game economy we are building towards. This also gives us time to add a plethora of more features, and really harden our direction on future development in the MMO.
With that said, it can be expected that users will be retaining progress on day 1 of the release, all the way until the heat death of the universe, due to the composability of the game and its blockchain enabled puzzle pieces.
We will release the trailer for the MMO soon as well, likely within the next 3 weeks. This depends on when we believe it is the best time to show it off. We like to parse out developments and announcements, rather than overload our community with too much at once.
For milestones purely focused on the MMO and its development, we will release a second article this week. There currently is one existing on our Medium page, but it could use some updating.
Milestone 4 : RiskToEarn Competitive Modes
RiskToEarn is the first grand innovation of the Trident team, and we will bring it to life via our matchmaking duels.
With RiskToEarn deployed to our ecosystem suite, we will not only gather fees, but break the grounds of what people consider GameFi to be, and even competitive gaming.
For more information on what RiskToEarn is, and why it flips the entire industry on its head, here is an article about that.
Our competitive modes involving RiskToEarn will firstly be, a heavily updated new version of Sprite Duels, which has been in the works for some time. In addition to that, we will also take the pure combat from our MMO, remove the progress on characters that stems from the MMO (to make a fair match regardless of starting position), and place it into 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 modes.
These will serve as our first pure competitive modes, from which we will develop an esports scene with our many upcoming esports and GameFi Guild partnerships we have yet to announce.
This leads into our next few milestones, and really kicks off a set of flywheels that other projects will have a hard time competing against.
Milestone 5 Leaderboards, MMR Based Matchmaking
For a thriving competitive scene, and to implement our spectator R2E engagement flywheel, it will be important to have leaderboards, and a sturdy matchmaking system.
We currently have the equations for this matchmaking system, and leaderboards will be based on a composite of variables that we use to derive the final output MMR. We will also make leaderboards able to be viewed from any one of these public variables, such as, “filter by kills”, “filter by match average times”, “filter by match count”, and many more statistics. Along with this, we will have our data analyst folks put together some Dune dashboards for observing metrics in real time.
Currently, our Trident account system has over 5,000 players registered. Data metrics we plan to show tracking on include but are not limited to:
- Daily R2E system fees gathered
- Daily Active Users (DAU)
- Total matches played per day
- Cumulative time played per day
- Amount of accounts registered
- More
We believe these metrics will be extremely useful for developers and players to know, and will help them pick peak times to play, as well as observe the growth of our game(s) and ecosystem.
We plan to add API tools for developers to use these same dashboards, which will come with our Trident ecosystem SDKs, so that independent developers can build off our backs and observe the same metrics for their own games they choose to build alongside us.
We see leaderboards and metrics as a way to know who is performing well, and who to place faith on when watching tournaments and high-profile matches in the future.
Milestone 6: Official Trident Tournaments
This one is quite straightforward.
Since we will be collecting PSI via fees on R2E, we might as well use it to bolster our competitive scene. Large prize pools are in store for our own combat modes. High-profile tournaments can be streamed via the Trident website, and we hope this aids in bringing a bustling entertainment factor to our game
Milestone 7: Exclusive In-Game Events
Trident accounts can currently receive badges, which will yield many benefits. One of those benefits is the access to exclusive events within the MMO, and competitions with prize pools dedicated to only those groups.
Milestone 8: The Gauntlet
This one is one of our favorites. The Cambrian Gauntlet is a collection of bosses, in a row, that is globally set and the same for all players at any given time. Players will give up some X amount of PSI to enter the race. The first person to defeat the entire boss run gauntlet, will claim the victory and all the spoils. The more players in the running for The Gauntlet, the higher the difficulty becomes.
Milestone 9: On-Chain Bounty System
With leaderboards, there are targets, and with targets, there are rewards. Putting yourself on the map is the quintessence of the RiskToEarn philosophy. Not only that, but you may have risked some things in your universe exploration, and a death may have resulted in the loss of those items to another player. The good news is, we’ll have a “bug bounty”, but in this case, the bug is a player who erased you and picked up your gear, and the bounty claimer is the person who can hunt them down and get those things back. Put up a bounty, whatever those things are worth to you, and watch folks swarm for vengeance on your behalf, depending on the value of that bounty. Decentralized gaming at its finest. On-chain bounty hunters, marked anonymously by wallet. See a fat wallet on Nansen? You can probably assume they have a lot of stuff in their inventory if they have a Trident account. Even if they didn’t kill you, and they simply dumped your project’s token, you can place a bounty on their skull.
Milestone 10: AI-enabled NPC’s
This one is a new innovation, not just in crypto, but in the wider gaming industry. With this system, players will be able to submit their own text to specific NPC’s. This way, the NPC becomes a reflection of the collective consciousness of the player base. This does not just affect what they say and how they say it. It will also affect what quests they give out, and subsequently, what rewards they give out as well.
One big tactic of financial warfare that we at Trident foresee is in likeness of the following scenario.
Lets say there is an NPC, we’ll call him “Brent the Squid Butcher”.
Brent the Squid Butcher gives out a quest to mercilessly murder 100 squids in any deep ocean biome. This quest yields the player some reward, lets call it the “Dumpster Armor”,
“Armor made of rusted metal found at the bottom of the ocean. Provides +10 water breathing to the wearer”. Thats quite the bonus, and the Dumpster Armor might be a sought after item in the MMO.
If Player A finds this NPC, completes the quest, and is the first person to complete this quest, they might try and corner the market on such an item by changing Brent the Squid Butcher’s dialogue, and questline through this system. If Player A is successful in doing so, it may be extremely hard to find another NPC in the universe to give out this quest again, if it even ever happens.
That armor may become a 1/1 piece of gear…
By offering a decentralized gaming experience and platform, we can also enable a very free market, one that is little forced by the hand of a centralized entity. This is one way we seek to implement that vision.
Milestone 11: Kraken Governance
Once our ecosystem is up and rolling with all the parts we deem to be foundational, such as,
- OasisSwap
- Blitz
- SDKs for independent developers
- Trident Grants to premiere projects we have vetted
- AI NPCs
- Atlantis Exchange
The next part is to install our pseudo-kraken governed, content submission model. The content submission model will look something like this (which we have covered in a previous writing)
- Have a pseudo-kraken
- Identify a break in the meta, or, simply have the desire to see a certain item or NPC exist in the game.
- Review the guidelines, and ensure it is following those content guidelines. (Check payoff matrices guideline to ensure the gear is not overpowered, check to make sure the NPC’s set of dialogue is not *too* vulgar, etc)
- Submit the content via pseudo-kraken NFT.
- Every X time period, lets say, 30 days, we will hold votes on categories of content. NPC category vote, weapon category vote, armor category vote, even possibly content submissions in the skill category (such as the fishing skill stat).
- Everyone, during the X time period, will vote on the content they want to see in the game, by using their pseudo-kraken.
- The highest voted content will receive a place in the MMO.
One can even see this be used as a replacement for the unfortunately discontinued “Steam Greenlight Program”, where independent developers were allowed to put up indie games for voting, where, the highest voted games got placed onto the Steam marketplace. In this case, the highest voted games could be given Trident Grants, so long as the community votes it in. This latter explained system would likely need some extra vetting by the team, just to ensure the community doesn’t get rugged by the team proposing the indie game, so we will make sure to do our due diligence once an independent game does get voted into the ecosystem for a Trident Grant.
Key Milestone 12: Trident Ecosystem SDKs for Developers
Ideally, we open the floodgates for all independent developers to take their shot at making great games, because thats what its all about. We want to use our momentum and strength to improve the gaming industry, so, if we can offer a really powerful foundation for developers to launch their own ideas on top of what we’ve done, then SDKs are extremely helpful for them to do that. This includes API’s, libraries to help them out with hooking their game up to web3 and contracts, and many other tools we will outline in a future article specifically dedicated just to Trident-eco SDKs. We believe that there will be a time when crypto-unfamiliar indie devs exodus en masse to crypto, just as NFTs brought hordes of digital artists, in a renaissance-like manner. The golden age of gaming and digitalization of things is upon us, and we want to make our mark and do our part to accelerate and remove inertia for the new migrants.
We wouldn’t want to short change such a large milestone, so we will go over this in-depth in the near future.
Milestone 13: Trident Grants
Some projects will devote extensive time, energy, and passion into their game. They will hit all the marks on what makes something entertaining, and appealing to the players. We want to show off these projects, and Trident Grants will be our way of doing that.
Instead of blocking off developers from building on our ecosystem and using our tools, we will allow all folks to do so. It doesn’t mean we route them any PSI, but we simply offer them things such as our SDKs and whatnot, so they can remove barriers for themselves.
However, some projects might catch eyes, and could use the extra hand to grow them into superstars. This is where Trident Grants will come in. A Trident Grant would not just come with funding to the project and its developers, but also, attention directed towards it from the team, as well as hands-on support from the team in advising the project.
Milestone 14: Infrastructure for Independent Developer Commerce
We see the likes of itch.io and Steam be very anti-crypto. Well, somebody needs to step up to the plate, and offer a platform for the future crypto game developers. We think having a similar platform, that is non-KYC, and uses PSI as the token to acquire assets from independent artists who make things such as sound packs, animations, and even games themselves that are sold one-time and downloadable.
This would be a valuable web3 implementation of an existing platform, and we think it would be a very nice addition to the Trident ecosystem, and the gaming industry as a whole. If someone had purchased the NFT of a certain artist, they could offer continual drops to their holders via this platform. There are many possibilities with this piece of the puzzle. It is quite far down the road, but we plan ahead for the long term, and never want to run out of ways to grow our presence in the gaming industry.
Conclusion
For the most part, this covers just about every big piece of what we plan to do with not only Trident, the MMO, but also how we can reach our tentacles farther and farther out to the crypto and gaming industries, for the better. We seek to build value, and we want the community’s vision and support in doing that. Just as we did not accept funds from VC’s, we won’t cater to their ways when developing. The best way to make something people want, is to figure out what they want, not sell them something they don’t want in hopes to make a profit. By making something people use on a daily basis, and rely on for their own games to be developed, we bring a brighter future that the current crypto, and gaming landscape, desperately needs.
