The problem STUMPED solves

Stumped is a strategy-based game where a user becomes the manager of a T20 cricket team.
On joining the game, the user will be placed in one of the leagues in the game with other players or with bots.
The goal of the user is to win matches by managing finances and building the best-skilled team.

The game does not involve any sort of monetary incentive and also a player cannot move further in the game by spending money. The game is solely based on strategies and remains fair to each player.

The users are provided with a Club, training facilities, a team of 15 players, and some finance in the bank.
The players can be bought or sold in a live auction or can be trained for a specific skill set every week.
The Club makes money in ticket sales whenever there are matches on the home turf.
The players have skills that are spread across 6 categories and the Game engine runs based on the skill levels of the players from both teams.

We have several reasons why we chose to use blockchain technology for building this.

1. Each player in the game is unique and comes with specific traits. Each player undergoes training as scheduled by the manager of the team - which makes irreversible changes to the attributes of the respective player.
2. The game also contains a live auction (bids are placed with in-game currency).
3. The game also involves elections towards choosing a Head Coach of their region for the annual world cup.

Smart contracts provide us with these capabilities straight of the box - stopping us from re-inventing the wheel.

Apart from the technical features, we believe in building a game that serves an open community and actively listens to their feedback. Cricket is one of the most popular games in India, this will serve as a platform for Fans and organizations to build interoperable products.

Challenges we ran into

Slower initialization with arcana protocol

We wanted to use upgradable NFT as a mechanism for updates to the player skills.
We started off with the Arcana protocol which had encrypted storage and RBAC features.
While integrating we realized that it was taking 2 seconds or more for initializing the SDK.
Since we were also using it for social logins, we were required to initialize SDK in each page leading to a bad user experience.
We decided to drop it and move forward with the Near protocol / Polygon network.

Covalent SDK failing to read NFT balance

The game revolves around creating players as NFTs and improving their skills further.
But once we minted the NFTs on the networks (Near or Aurora or Polygon) - Covalent SDK was returning status 562
for all queries regarding NFT balances.