The problem Cat Town solves

Cat Town

Cat Town aims to be a core part of onboarding the next billion onchain. Our primary target audience is gamers who have played video games, but have not yet had an onchain experience. We offer something that feels familiar, like our weekly fishing competition, but different as it is onchain.

Community

We want our project to have a friendly, welcoming community that are treated as part of the Cat Town extended team. Our community rallies together to create content, spread the word about our weekly Fishing Contest, and even manually onboard their friends.

We have community members helping to onboard users to Cat Town in the Philippines and Indonesia by creating content in their native languages. Additionally, we have community members translating documentation into other languages to reduce the barrier to entry for our game.

Core Game Loop

Cat Town currently has a yield generator (revenue share from mini-games), with hopes to move into Cloud Staking when the product is available on Base. This will allow players to stake-to-earn.

We have a Lucky Ticket system: if you perform an action in the game once a day for three days in a row, you will receive a KIBBLE (our ERC20 token) reward. The tickets are stored onchain, all calculations are onchain, and anyone can build a frontend onto our contracts.

Weekly Events

We have streamlined one weekly event as part of this Buildathon, which is the core of our submission. The Fishing Event runs from Saturday 00:00 UTC to Monday 00:00 UTC, aiming to bring traffic onchain during times when there is typically less activity. So far, we have minted over 300,000 fish and treasure for our players.

The Future

Cat Town is building an adventure mode, quests that will provide utility to all of our previous NFTs minted, for example fish caught will restore stamina & HP in the adventure mode. Come join us for the weekly updates!

Challenges we ran into

Challenges

NFT Generation and Processing

One of the challenges we faced was trying to find an adequate NFT ruleset manager that would allow us to create complex exceptions and pairing for our profile picture NFT collection. Due to the nature of our art being sprite based we don’t get many pixels to work with so often designs need to be clean and concise. With nine total possible traits this led to some outputs being very busy. Our solution was to create our own rule-engine for creating exceptions and pairings for particular items that our profile picture characters could wear. We created our engine using custom Lua scripting that acted as an export extension for the sprite software “Aseprite”. Additionally, this also allowed us to create additional custom rules for our trait outputs, enabling us to replace “Villager #333” for “Tiny Tony” and other NPC names for the uniques in our collection.

VRF

Finding a reliable VRF (RNG) provider on Base was initially a challenge, our first provider that we integrated with weren't able to handle the traffic (50k mints in a weekend) which caused an outage for them and us.

We then got in contact with a few of the other providers and are in the process of moving to Gelato for our next weekly event game.

RPC Limits

Our fishing game at the peak of the Smart Wallet fishing weekend was hitting upwards of 1,000 mints a minute. Our fishing game uses an event listener callback in wagmi with Alchemy’s RPC endpoints to provide feedback to the user on what they caught during their session.

We found that we continually hit the upper limit of Alchemy’s RPC allowance on the Scale plan and we are now on an Enterprise contract with Alchemy to allow 2bn prepaid CUs a month.

Marketing

Marketing is tough, and it's hard to reach the market we're trying to reach but we started YouTube Shorts and TikToks and we've seen some success with the short format video and meme contests that we run on both platforms.