House of Titans

Overview

House of Titans is a revolutionary NFT & DePin Aggregating ecosystem developed for the Cardano Blockchain. To this point, House of Titans has released 3 assets, each with its own functionality.

  • The first is a collection of traditional PFP (profile-picture) NFTs called “Titans”. You can swear an oath to one of 20 unique Houses, providing unique bonuses and access to a private community. Holders of Titans can send them out on Missions to earn resources for that House. Collecting more resources will raise your Houses' status on the community leaderboard.

  • The second is a collection of passive revenue generating assets called Strongholds. Strongholds are generated with a variety of sizes, themes, and sites. The sites found on every Stronghold generate passive Reward Points corresponding to various revenue streams. At the end of each 4-week period, called an Age, the holder will earn an amount of ADA scaling with the amount of Reward Points held.

  • The most recent product is a new Cardano token called $TITAN. $TITAN is a DePin aggregator that makes targeted investments into high-potential DePin projects across the Cardano and other Blockchains. The rewards garnered through these investments are used to scale our investments and reward investors.

All of these products are independent, but have certain features that connect each other, rewarding those with larger commitments to the House of Titans Ecosystem.

Metadata as a Mechanic

An incredibly important tool on my belt is the metadata of an NFT, which can be referenced to apply certain bonuses in the gamification platform. There were concepts to add mechanical functionality to every trait within the NFTs metadata, however, as the product is targeted more so towards collectors or investors, as opposed to entrenched gamers, simplification is key.

I decided to limit the mechanics to the most prominent and significant metadata traits, namely, the “Class” and “Species” of the NFT. There are 6 Classes of NFT of escalating rarity; Peasant, Townsfolk, Military, Mystic, Royal, and the elusive 1/1 Titans. There are only 20 Titan Class PFPs in the entire collection, with each one acting as the de facto head of their House. The Titan & Royal class PFPs have governance over the structure of their house, allowing them to manage and direct the members of their house to complete specific missions.

Each class, including Titans and Royals, have unique benefits and perks for completing specific missions. For instance, peasant class PFPs are better at Food gathering missions, as opposed to military class PFPs have increased proficiency in raid missions. This, combined with the literal rarity of the class trait metadata, provides value to the holders of “better” PFPs.

Stronghold NFT Collection

A few months after the Titan PFP release, we released our Stronghold NFT collection. This collection of 5000 NFTs were built as passive income conduits wherein specific traits of the NFT generate abstracted values called Reward Points. Reward Points themselves are a catch-all term to refer to the 5 types of Reward Points:

  • Mining Points

  • Whiskey Points

  • Staking Points

  • Royalty Points

  • IAG Points.

Each of these points refers to a specific revenue stream that we pay out to holders. The amount of rewards you earn from a given revenue stream is determined by the amount of Reward Points a user has compared to the total. For instance, if we have $100 to pay out, and there are 10 Stronghold holders each with 1 Reward Point, since each holder has 10% of the total Reward Points, each holder would thus earn 10% of the total or $10. This pricing distribution structure ensures the most equitable and simple way to calculate rewards and is employed in our $TITAN token release too.

The way these Reward Points are generated depends on various factors within the Stronghold. Once again, leveraging Metadata, each Stronghold is generated with a class trait, a realm trait, and various site traits:

  • The Class determines the size of the Stronghold. There are 3 classes;

    • Garrison

    • Fortress

    • Citadel

    The class applies a minor multiplier to Reward Points earned, and, most importantly, determines the amount of Sites present on a given Stronghold

  • The realm applies a different visual aesthetic to the Stronghold, adjusting the different sites and background of the NFT. Additionally, the Realm applies a reward point multiplier

  • There are 7 types of sites, each with unique functionality. However, each site can be upgraded to improve its effects and rewards. Certain sites also have additional gamification elements built into them, such as the Barracks site, which gives the option to perform “Stronghold Raids” that allow users to pilfer reward points from other Strongholds.

If you're curious and want to learn more, check out the Whitepaper that outlines all the specifics about the Strongholds.

My Role

I have been a crucial part of the House of Titans ecosystem since the beginning. Initially starting as a Game Designer, my roles slowly expanded into: Marketing, Economy Design, Backend Development, UI/UX Design, Discord Bot Programming, Community Management, and Consulting. So, after the success of the $TITAN token pre-sale, I am formally the “Product Designer” for House of Titans.

For each product we've released, I've performed various tasks to see these products to release. Below are the specific details about my work for each product.

Titan PFP NFT Collection

The Titan PFPs were the first product released to the House of Titans ecosystem. This collection has 6500 unique PFPs, each with a variety of traits, both visual and mechanical. Each one of these Titan PFPs can be sworn to one of 20 Houses that each provide some unique perks. Users can then send those PFPs out on Missions to collect various resources for their House, either through gathering them passively, or raiding other houses for their resources. There are 3 resources in this system, Food, Gems, and Eyeballs.

Food is often used as the cost for a Mission. Gems are a multipurpose resource acting as a premium currency within the House of Titans ecosystem and occasionally a cost for starting specific missions. Lastly, Eyeballs are a rare currency that provide a massive status boost for a houses' ranking on the leaderboard.

Missions are structured similar to idle games, wherein users don't actually embark or have any mechanical input over the outcome of a mission. Rather, the user just selects which PFPs they would like to send on a mission, and after a set amount of time, the result of the mission and any rewards earned is generated.

Key Takeaways: Titan PFPs

Imbalance is Balance
Given the intrinsic worth of NFTs, holders of rarer PFPs expect better bonuses. Creating an asymmetrical balancing scheme where certain users are far and away better than others feels counterintuitive, but essential for satisfying major investors.

Time is a Cost
The missions were initially structured with easier missions being both shorter in real-time length with a higher success rate, and harder missions having longer lengths with lower success rates. Given that the missions are a zero-sum activity, players quickly stopped attempting the harder, less-likely missions because waiting a longer time only for a failure is a feel-bad. I attempted to remedy this by multiplying the rewards these missions earned exponentially, but the true problem was the time investment.

Strongholds & PFPs: Bridging the Gap

We knew that cross-project functionality would be integral to widespread adoption within our ecosystem. We tossed around a bunch of ideas, but eventually landed on a PFP Staking method. Users can assign their PFPs to a Stronghold to improve certain reward points generated by that Stronghold. Staking was the term used, despite it not being an “actual” staking system involving Smart Contracts, as it appeals to the colloquial terms used in the ecosystem.

$TITAN Token

The development of the $TITAN token was my first foray into the real world of decentralized finance. The goal of $TITAN is to rebuild the stronghold’s aggregation of revenue streams in token form. To do so, we were able to simplify the systems built in the Stronghold project, by removing the abstracted sites, realms, and class traits, to just focus on the quantity of the token.

My role focused primarily on establishing the rewards’ distribution model, and designing various multimedia marketing material. Included in my tasks was my learning and deploying a custom discord bot to display large transactions and provide details about how the token sale was performing. This was done in Node.js JavaScript, and learning how to call and reference APIs with various Get or Post methods was challenging but rewarding. I recommend it for anyone learning the basics of JavaScript, as I've been able to expand that into much larger projects.

The $TITAN presale managed to sell 4.2 Million ADA (~$1.7 Million USD at time of sale) which was historic in the Cardano ecosystem. I feel so proud to have been part of this monumental release, and am glad that I was able to contribute to it. While, on the development side, there's not too much to outline, it was an incredible learning experience. Diving into the tokenomics, and how to attract potential investors, was eye-opening and really grew my perspective.

Key Takeaways: Strongholds

Build for Scale
The way Strongholds were built provides notable, but minor bonuses for rarer Strongholds. This results in individual Strongholds feeling way more valuable than other Strongholds in terms of the rewards they earn per Age, but doesn't, by any means, invalidate the reward points earned by any Stronghold. Since rewards are split evenly depending on the cumulative amount of Reward Points for a given revenue stream, this means that automatically, any rewards are divided by 5000 with the scales being tipped in favor of higher-rarity assets. This goes to show that building a system and framing it from a certain perspective can provide value to an individual asset, despite the measurable difference being very minor.

Adapt Quickly
The initial vision we had with Strongholds ended up far from the final result. This was caused by certain partnerships coming to fruition, measuring community interest in revenue streams, and listening to feedback. Being able to add these features and dynamically shift where functionality lies.

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
While there is appeal to incorporating depth into game systems, abstracting a lot of these reward points into multipliers, spreadsheets, cycle times, and more made Strongholds feel more complicated than they needed to be. Drilling down to the core aspects that every potential customer would immediately recognize, then making those the primary levers to pull, helps immensely with onboarding new users.

“The $TITAN presale managed to sell 4.2 Million ADA (~$1.7 Million USD at the time of presale) which was historic in the Cardano ecosystem.”

Here are some videos I created leading up to the launch of the $TITAN token presale.

Key Takeaways: $TITAN Token

Fail Fast
When working with new technology, it's always good to ask questions and try out ideas as quickly as you can. You learn a lot by seeing why things break, then going through the process of fixing them. This applied to my work with learning about decentralized tokenomics where I would incessantly ask questions to shape my perspective about market trends for tokens. It was also incredibly important for programming the discord bot, where I could see the errors of my work immediately.

You can't be prepared for everything
The Discord Bot in particular had me expanding its scope exponentially over a very short period of time. Initially hosting the bot locally, I realized that to keep a bot live and operational when my computer was off, I would have to set up a hosting service. The hosting service may also require an uptime bot assigned to it. In my case, the hosting service I was using used ephemeral files, causing me to have to build and implement a database for transaction IDs to be logged to as to not re-post messages repeatedly. This came to a head during the presale. The bot overloaded when producing the right text. This caused some panic in our community as they believed their purchases had produced an error.

AI is incredible
While I have always been a big skeptic of AI for development, I would not have been able to solve a lot of the implementation errors I was seeing without it. People often abuse AI, just copy and pasting code or text. However, with even a cursory understanding of the underlying language, utilizing AI helped me debug issues with the code that would have taken me ages to solve. AI isn't a replacement, it's a tool that I certainly intend to continue using.