Introduction

The project aims to make a fun, competitive and innovated game on the chia blockchain based around the innovated primitives offered by chia. There is a lot of shoehorning crypt into gaming as a glorified way to exploit pay to win mechanics guised in trendy crypto terms. That is not the goal of the project, nor is it the goal to make a grindy “Play to Earn” game, the opinion of the project is that crypto gaming should revolve around earning while playing, focusing on players control of their assets in a decentralized market and ecosystem. Every attempt so far at play to earn results in grindy mechanics, where the barrier of entry rapidly increases making playing an investment of funds into a market that almost always collapses. This results in a majority of plays being barred entry due to the high cost of entry, and those who don’t get in early or have the ability to grind constantly being left out or losing the majority of their money. The results of this can be summed up as an investment contract that requires a constant time sink to maintain any chance of profitability, with most projects being gamified securities on a downward trajectory. This project aims to be the opposite and doesn’t view crypto gaming as an investment platform, but as a way to have an decentralized ecosystem around assets, and chooses to stick close to a traditional approach around in-game asset acquisition.

The chia blockchain has many primitives and on-chain systems that make it ideal for such a project/platform. Through the use of DIDs and their advanced NFT protocol, players can maintain full control of their assets without having to connect a live wallet to the game. This allows for players to play when ever and where ever they want. With constant exploits, hacks and scams involving the space, if crypto wishes to move to the forefront of various industries, the process of authorizing your wallet for access to any and everything needs to stop, no one would want to log in to steam with their bank account. While chia offers more security in the area than most other blockchains, it is still a bad practice to have to expose your keys to a system every time you wish it interact with things in the crypto ecosystem. One of the biggest benefits of DIDs, is they allow you to link accounts off-chain to verifiable on-chain credentials. With DIDs and NFT ownership via DIDs there is no reason for linking a wallet through a browser every time you want to simply play a game with existing assets, not only is this more secure than existing crypto practices, it is more secure than gaming in general. The power of DIDs is that they let you verify yourself and link your identity to any other account through attesting your ownership of a DID. Once this is done everything attached to that DID can be monitored and recorded on chain, outside of any centralized system. In the case of needing to reset your account, you can just attest to ownership again. This avoids many common online pitfalls around an account being compromised, ineffective two factor authentication, and allows for the compartmentalization of interactions. While you still need to interact with a wallet for managing assets, that can be done separately on a different system and with an individuals self defined security best practices. Making a wallet act direct login waters down security around it through desensitization of proper security practices.

Project Goals

The project aims to foster a healthy ecosystem of community involvement and keep the barrier of entry, and need for constant participation low. Just because a game involved crypto doesn’t mean it is worth more and should have higher costs than comparable non-crypto games. The projects main goal is to build a community around the game and a circular market places, where assets are not held with the sole goal of appreciation and getting out before the inevitable collapse. All base assets of the game will have a set cost to acquire, with the community left to decided what specific individual assets like specific cards or rewards are worth. Speculation will never effect the the ability to acquire new assets within the project for a fixed rate and chance.

The project will be continually open to community feedback, with the primary goal of making an enjoyable, tactical PVP game for the community and chia ecosystem to interact with. Starting out this project is largely a proof of concept, the path the project will take is undetermined and will be heavily influenced by community involvement, sentiment and ideas. The chia ecosystem provides a large backing of primitives and protocols to build many different things and this project aims to experiment with that in the realm of gaming, ideally leading by example on what can be done and how it can be done differently than existing games in the space.

Gameplay

Card based games are a near perfect fit for blockchain gaming and NFTs, and the project chose to take a different approach than most games that do deck builders. Outer Fields is modeled liked a turn based RPG using cards as a replacement for items. Most cards relate to items or concepts in turn-based games, cards were chosen to embrace the art side of the NFT domain while allowing for more strategic game play than a deck builder. Over time the game will be balanced more as data comes in, and will evolve via community feedback and as new gameplay concepts present themselves.

Tokenomics

Overview

The project has 2 tokens for rewards and the acquisition of assets, these are OKRA and OUTR. OKRA is a community based utility token, it may have a volatile price and is a single issuance token of 500 Million, 33 Million of which have been airdropped to the community over the past year. The exchange rate for assets purchasable with OKRA will very depending on the market rate of the token, keeping all assets at a fixed price in USD, assets purchased with OKRA will come with a 10% discount to help ensure a circular exchange to ensure continual assets for rewards. OUTR is the projects own utility token and will have a set price, this means that the project will always sell it at a fixed rate, it will always be able to be purchased from the project for use in-game, and it will always have a fixed exchange rate for in-game assets.

The reasoning behind having 2 assets is to allow for OKRA to be an asset influenced by community sentiment and value, having OUTR as a second token ensures assets will always be acquirable, as to not bottleneck the acquisition of tokens needed to get card packs and in-game assets. If a user is wishing to purchase card packs they can use either OUTR or OKRA, but they will never be in a situation where market volatility and liquidly limits the ability to purchase packs or assets. Several options were weighed, one was having just OKRA and keeping it at a set price, which would involve always having an XCH price tied to every in-game asset, this would provide a hard ceiling for the price of OKRA and stifle an organic market around it. The other option was to have the same tokenomics around OKRA as OUTR wil have, this would result in only one token, and the project always having the ability to directly sell it. With OKRA being a community based token from the start and being of limited issuance, this seemed less ideal for the health of the ecosystem and would heavily centralizes the issuance to the project with very little constraints.

By Having both OUTR and OKRA, it can be ensured that assets are always accessible at a fix rated which fulfills the goals of a low barrier of entry and accessability that the project pledges, while also allowing for OKRA to be a token of the community with its value being tied community sentiment and utility. Both OKRA and OUTR will be issued via rewards in the game, with OUTR directly available from the project at all times if anyone wishes to purchase card packs and game.

The cost of in-game assets acquired with OUTR with be +10% more than OKRA, this is to make OKRA a more preferable option. This is to help ensure that OKRA is consistently coming back into the project to form a circular economy, while speculation around OKRA is unavoidable it is not meant to be a non-liquid held asset, continued issuance is dependent on OKRA coming back into the project to be redistributed to players.

OKRA

As outlined in the overview, OKRA is a utility token with the purpose of being community driven, the project will hold a purse of a maximum of 60 Million tokens with the terms outlined below. Outside of the project purse all OKRA tokens are either for community distribution via rewards or already in circulation.

OUTR

As outlined in the overview, OUTR is the projects utility token, meant solely for rewards and redemption of in-game assets. The price will always have a ceiling of 100 OUTR = $1, which is the exchange rate the token will always be available from the project for. Re-issuance of more tokens is possible, but will only be done in the situation of the held supply running low. This should not be an issue anywhere in the near future, but is left as an option to ensure there is always a supply available to players for rewards and that it can always be purchased at the predefined exchange rate.

Project Purse

The project will maintain a purse of up to 60 Million OKRA (12% of total supply), these are reserved for use if the project needs additional funding. There are no plans as of launch to touch this supply, the project aims to accomplish funding needed for development and running the service through other means. If the project grows there may be a time when these funds are tapped into for continual operation, to cover development costs, and to reward/fund community contributions and outside developers.

In the case of the project purse becoming active any sell of it assets will be bound by these terms:

There no current plans to activate the purse.

Sustainability and Maintainability

Maintainability

As outlined in the social contract, if the project ever reaches a point of not being maintained, everything related to services and backend needed to run the project will released under the GPL 3.0 license to the community. With a pledge commitment to open-source, everything but the game logic backend will be open-sourced from the start. Any changes to the services provide will be announced at-least 90 days out, in the case of the project not being able to be maintained a suitable maintainer will be sought out, as mentioned prior if this is unable to be accomplished the community will gain access to all service code to continue how they seem fit.

There are no plans to stop supporting the project and the project has been designed with maintainability in mind with large portions of it full automated. All it needs is compute to run and monitoring, but it feels unfair to ask people to invest their time into a project and not have a continuance plan in place. Many games get shutdown and everything goes offline forever, one of the big benefits of blockchain gaming is that players control all their assets, even if the service goes offline, the assets never do. As such the project pledges to give the community everything it needs to run the project in any situation where the project cannot continue, as this only seems right.

Sustainability

As mentioned the project will maintain a project purse that can be used to sustain the project, but this is at the end of options the project plans to take to sustain itself. The main avenues for the project to sustain funding are:

Commitment To Ecosystem

As also outlined in the Social Contract the project pledges to open-source all services and internal libraries to help better the ecosystem and community development.

Commitment To Charity

Once the project reaches a point of sustainability the project will make contributions to charities that focus on the access to technological knowledge, skills and resources to under privileged communities/areas.