EtherDoggos: Not just another CryptoKitties clone

Just two months ago, the unprecedentedly successful game CryptoKitties was launched on the Ethereum blockchain. Fast-forward a week, its explosive popularity was already straining the Ethereum network itself. Cat pictures were selling for thousands of dollars. Since that glorious peak 1 to 2 weeks after release, the average price of cats has steadily been declining. Meanwhile, several others have tried to reproduce the success of CryptoKitties by releasing sloppy clones with little innovation. To understand why EtherDoggos is different, it is important to understand the frenzied rise of CryptoKitties as well as its slow decline.

So why did CryptoKitties get so popular?

Was it the gameplay? Surely not. Breeding, while amusing at first, offers no real excitement in the long term. It is based largely on RNG and does not challenge the gamer. In the absence of a challenge or competition, a pure gamer loses interest fairly quickly.

Was it the belief that this is a decentralized game? Doubtful. Ignoring the built in mechanisms in the solidity contracts that the developers can use to “pause” or modify the game, calling CryptoKitties decentralized is a gross oversimplification. The game is completely dependent on their central servers to render the cats and provide a user interface. Without their servers, a kitty owner becomes the proud owner of an integer. Note: this is not necessarily a criticism of CryptoKitties; even if they wanted to, they could not make their game completely decentralized because of the limitations of programming on the blockchain. Sure you could fork the contract and someone could write another front end for it but even if someone was inclined to do all this work, it is unlikely your kitties would look the same. The community would most likely fracture, and kitties would lose their value.

So what gives? I hypothesize that the rise of CryptoKitties can be explained by treating them as speculative assets. The novelty of a blockchain based game plus easy convertibility into monetary value(Ethereum) created initial demand. The supply was dictated by solidity contracts which limited breeding and minting. Hype spread more quickly than the rate at which the supply increased and so scarcity naturally lead to higher and higher prices. However, it is important to note that the demand was not driven by the game being particularly fun, nor the kitties being stunningly cute. Instead, people were in a frenzy to get in early, produce more kitties and sell to others that come after. This phenomenon could not last long because of the hyper inflationary nature of breeding. This in combination with bored users selling their kitties and moving on is the cause of the current overly saturated market and steadily declining prices. New cosmetic features and improved website, while technically improving the “game-play”, does nothing to revitalize the market since it fails to address the core problem namely that users are no longer convinced that someone will come after them who are willing to pay more money for the same kitties. The game is just not fun enough to stand alone without the promise of your kitties mooning.

How are EtherDoggos different?

Do you even have to ask? Everyone knows doggos are way more adorable than kitties. Just kidding. When building EtherDoggos, we strove to learn from both CryptoKitties’ successes and failures. We used the same ERC721 non-fungible token standard and implemented many of the same features like minting, auctions, transfers, breeding etc. However, we also added two innovative features that we feel are game-changers: animation and racing.

Animation:

That’s right, your doggo is animated. You can forget your cryptokitty, forever frozen in its icy stare. EtherDoggos feel alive. They run, play, sleep just like real dogs. You can even pet them and watch them jump with joy. Personality attributes aren't just some text on the screen but actually affect how your doggo acts. Animation is integral not just to the aesthetics of EtherDoggos but also to game-play features. This brings us to our first major game-play feature: doggo racing.

Racing

It is hard to get excited about PvP gameplay where you press a button and have the blockchain crunch some numbers behind the scenes to tell you who won. This is exactly what most blockchain games out there offer. This is not the case in EtherDoggos. We bring races to life. You can watch your doggos perform against others directly on an animated racetrack. Should you be so bold, you can even bet ETH on the outcome of races and have your hardworking doggos earn you money and carry you to the top of the leader board.

So, how does racing work?

There are many aspects to consider when designing races. Some of the possibilities were:

P2P decentralized betting vs centralized counter party(bookie)
Variable bet amounts vs fixed bet amounts
Global betting vs private betting

We may revisit some of these options in the future based on community feedback but as it stands, we settled on a model that features fixed bet amounts, global race queues where anyone can join, and fully decentralized P2P betting. There are several queue types each one having duration, number of doggos per race, and a ticket price in ETH required to participate. The process to participate in a race is as follows:

Each contestant picks a doggo to race and enters it into the queue by making a call to our solidity contract . The total cost is the ticket price plus a small fee used for gas.
At the end of the queue’s duration, all the dogs that signed up are randomly shuffled into subgroups of up to 4 dogs. The dogs in each subgroup are then placed into a race.
ReleaseRabbit function on solidity is called which in turn uses our super-secret Radar contract to determine the speed of the doggos and adds a bit of randomness.
The winner of the race gets to claim a reward in ETH which is equal to the sum of the ticket-prices of the other participants.
This is the gist of it although there are some extra steps involved behind the scenes. I strongly encourage those interested to check out the solidity contract source code at:
https://github.com/EtherDoggos/EtherDoggosContracts.

After the blockchain crunches the numbers and determines the speed of the doggos, you get to watch the doggos race on the front-end.

How does it all come together?

Our features were designed from the very beginning to synergize. The addition of racing turns breeding into challenging game-play that rewards you in ETH for your efforts. I am sure gamers will have a lot of fun trying to figure out the breeding algorithm while selectively breeding for the fastest doggo in dogdom. An objective goal to work towards satisfies the competitive nature that many gamers share.

Our front-end animation allows you to actually see your doggo in action and opens the door to other potential mini-games in the future.

The blockchain ensures ownership of you doggo and the fairness of racing/betting.

Won’t this model also succumb to the same inflationary pressures as CryptoKitties?

You cannot completely solve the inflation issue without either deleting dogs(distasteful user experience), or severely limiting breeding. We believe breeding is one of the funner aspects of the game and so we opted for a similar inflation control mechanism as CryptoKitties i.e breeding cooldowns. Our plan for fighting inflation long-term is to consistently provide excellent game play that will keep gamers engaged. As the population of dogdom increases, we plan on releasing new game-play elements that will give our users a chance to make full use of their collection of doggos. We believe that this will lead to more sustainable growth and preserve the value of your doggos.

We welcome you to try out our beta release for free on the rinkeby network:

https://etherdoggos.com/