Decentraland DAO gains open-source tower defense building kit

A grant proposal from The Crypto Trader sought an allocation of $34,200 from the Decentraland DAO to create several tower defense games and build an open-source tower defense creation kit freely available to the community.

The grant proposal passed on the 21st of November 2022, with 76% voting yes- 74 votes equating to 2,368,281 voting power- and 24% voting against- 2 votes equating to 7,835,725 voting power.

Tower defense games have long been a staple of the gaming ecosystem, and this grant seeks to bring this much-loved genre to Decentraland. Interestingly, The Crypto Trader specifically outlined that he wanted to hire community members citing the long-term benefit that would come from upskilling the Decentraland community.

The creation of tower defense games will yield benefits for users, who get to play the games, creators, who will be able to use the open-source kit to develop more content, and land owners, who can host games on their land and potentially monetize the user base.

The Crypto Trader’s motivation goes far beyond creating tower defense games. At its core, it centers on creating a blueprint for open-source creation in Decentraland that could be leveraged with other game types. The flywheel effect of training community members as developers and fostering existing skills could have enormous second-order effects on the ecosystem. Naturally, creating a skilled set of in-house developers would attract more talent and allow a compounding rate of growth for development within Decentraland.

The third monthly update has been released, and the tower defense creation kit is live for users to experiment with!

The Crypto Trader outlined the following roadmap:

Stage 0 - Viability

Stage 1 - TD Creation Kit Development
Estimated Length - 2 months
Allocated Budget - 23.8k
- Project/Community Management: 1.2k
- Programming: 11.2k
- Visual Design: 11.4k

Stage 2 - Playable Field Creation
Estimated Length - 4 months
Allocated Budget - 10.4k
- Project/Community Management: 2.4k
- Programming: 3.2k
- Visual Design: 4.8k

Stage 3- Deployment
The final stage will see the release of the tower defense creation kit and all playable tower defense fields as open-source repositories for everyone in the community. These repositories will be monitored for any missed features/bugs and amended with their addition/removal.

A successful grant proposal meeting its roadmap targets and looking to improve the skill level of the community: a solid example of how DAO funding should be allocated.