Writer, Editor: VaporAviator (M), Jiahui (F)
🎄Merry Christmas everyone 🔔 Welcome to the new episode of {PotatoEng}! In this episode we invited Andy Boyan, founder of Infinity Keys, to talk about the Web3 treasure hunt~
Infinity Keys is a Web3 treasure hunt platform and creator community for brands to create engaging metaverses and web3 treasure hunts. Today’s podcast is PART1 of our conversation with Andy, and PART2 is scheduled to be released next week around New Year’s Eve 🧧 Also, we prepared mini-Potato Christmas gifts at the end of this article! 🎁 We may prepare a mini treasure hunt with Infinity Keys in PART2 as well! 🎄
🥔 In {PotatoEng}, we’ll continue to deliver technical projects we found interesting, and invite core team members to share their stories with us.
Note: All content does not constitute investment advice. Some of the content is a paraphrase and does not represent the position of Meta Potatoes
🌟 Project of this Episode: Infinity Keys
Infinity Keys is a no-code creator tools platform for brands and fans to build engaging metaverse treasure hunt experiences. More details in IK’s Thesis.
🥔 Our Potato Guest and Hosts
Andy Boyan | Co-founder, Infinity Keys
CoHost | F. Ex-theatermaker; Building Web3 infra
CoHost | M. Experience designer, Strategist in Web3 & immersive tech
{ 1 }
Andy’s Personal Journey, and the Story behind IK
Summary
The original intention of IK was to make some really fun Web3 games. In games, what people actually interact with, besides the story, are the mechanics (what the player needs to do in the game, like bouncing). So what mechanism is native to Web3? Private-public key pairs, token transactions, NFTs, etc. The concept of Key is very interesting — locking and unlocking — is like a treasure hunt. But IK should go beyond treasure hunts — treasure hunts just keep giving out rewards — IK should be a platform where everyone can create mini-games and interact with any communities. At present, IK has been released, and you can test it on the platform.
Q: Quick introduction of yourself and the project?
Prev career in academia. Was a prof/social scientist for about 10 yrs. Got Ph.D. in communication, media, and entertainment, primarily video games.
In 2017, started exploring other techs, such as AI, big data, VR, etc., and crypto. Knew a thing called Bitcoin existed, on Reddit. That was early 2017, all the excitement was not only around price but around smart contracts — what can we do with tokens, how can we incentivize, etc. Then crypto kitties came out.
It was a whole bonkers yr and I was fortunate enough to get plugged in a great podcast community. This one was called the Bitcoin podcast and is still very active. It was not exclusively about Bitcoin but a group of ppl who are really interested in research: decentralization for security, how things work out (not just numbers going up). And I got plugged in another good community, where I started to write on the side and do a small amount of professional work for crypto projects to stay involved, and eventually had the opportunity to leave my academic job for a fintech. So I entered crypto in the bear market.
I worked on some projects since the 2019 crypto winter. Experience: Status is a private messaging app, they do ETH validation and infra as well — various Cosmos projects — Ava Labs, doing marketing and writing — Chainlink Labs, full-time from DeFi summer 2020, 1.5 yrs, working on a podcast (Chainlinked), YouTube shows, writing. I had the opportunity to talk to anybody who integrated chainlink and hear about what they were building. What they did enable me to see (esp as Metaverse/gaming/NFT took center stage last year) the opportunity of building my own project (gaming-related). So I started formulating the idea, went and talked to a number of friends/advisers who eventually gave me the guts to go for it and actually build it and that is Infinity Keys (IK).
An overview of IK: right now we’re trying to make sure that Web3 games are actually FUN. What I always studied in academia was: What is the content of games that ppl actually interact with and learn from? Stories are part of it, but one of the major parts is mechanics (what are the things you do in games). For example, in Mario games, being a plumber is not why ppl play this game. (The story is that Mario is a plumber and he’s lost in doing these things but nobody cares about plumbing even though there are pipes everywhere). What you’re doing is how to control the character — speed, gravity, etc. those are the mechanics. So what are the mechanics that are native to Web3? There are a few that stood out to me: private-public key pairs, signatures, token transfers, NFTs, open permissionless systems where we can actually go on-chain and look at things, see and verify them, etc. some of the technology affordances in Web3.
That was really cool — keys and unlocking things & hidden secrets — to me, that’s naturally a treasure. So Treasure Hunt made sense as a game that has very aligned affordances or mechanics with the underlying blockchain system that we use. And that’s where IK came from — let’s do Ready Player One, let’s make treasure hunts and put them in smart contracts and we can build mysteries and ppl can figure them out and go find things. But IK should be more than treasure hunts. Because a treasure hunt is just giving away a whole bunch of money and is not a profitable business.
But what did happen is as metaverses/on-chain games/Discord communities grew, they needed a lot more engagement with their communities. To me, games and hunts are engagements that anybody can build, you don’t need permission, and you can build a treasure hunt based on trivia, mini-games, riddles, or whatever it is, and set incentives as well. That’s what IK turned into: a platform where people can create their own mini-games to engage with whatever community they want — you could build mini-games for your friends, you could give NFTs or tokens or just a thumb up as a prize, and it could be an official project saying: hey, we have a community, and we want ppl to read our whitepaper so we’re going to create games that encourage ppl to go look through these things.
So IK is a system where ppl can set these up. For instance, they can require passcodes or NFTs, and they can be gated passcodes so you’ll go into a game and collect a special sword as part of the IK quest. If anybody can set those things up, we can see the possibility of using the composable elements of NFTs and permissionless transparent blockchains and that’s what IK is still becoming.
We’re live, there’re hunts and quests that anybody can play, and we’ve learned a lot in the past few months of being live about what games ppl like, what games ppl want to build, etc.
{ 2 }
How does IK lower the threshold for creators?
Summary
Creating a treasure hunt often requires setting up many elements (smart contracts, clues, custom content) with low ROI. The problems with most treasure hunts are that: there is only one winner, and the puzzles are too difficult. The solution adopted by IK is that everyone (even if they can’t write code) can use the platform — to provide templates for game creators, motivate community members to create and vote for good templates, and ultimately form the autonomous loop of creation, management, testing, and evolution of the game.In addition, different game creators can be freely composed (technically and community-wise), and IK (ideally) can also be integrated with existing game manufacturers.
Q: If I have no coding background, can I also build a mini-game using IK as well?
One of the things we noticed when I got interested in treasure hunts is they can be very intensive. You should build landing pages and smart contracts, think of clues, test it, and all the custom stuff. And the ROI is typically really bad — you don’t get much engagement. Even at conferences, they set up treasure hunts and get really low engagement. There’re a few reasons for that.
1. They always have one winner. If you don’t have the time you’ll just pop out, so fewer and fewer ppl do them. If one person does win, (and it’s pretty easy to cheat), it’s been “Sybil-attacked”.
2. People are busy, and treasure hunts can be really intense. If there’s a big prize, the game designer’s default is to make the game really hard so the prize is worth the effort (which is true, you don’t want to give away tons of stuff for free), but that really disincentivizes ppl to participate.
So our approach is different:
1) It’s a system that anybody is able to use. Come in and tell us what password you want to use, what you want in the text, what image you want to put on the page, what link you want somebody to go to, etc. In that way, you’re actually building puzzles/clues/hints on your social media, in your metaverse, or somewhere. For example, you can point to a particular timestamp of a particular video and there’s a clue, and you can come back to our website, plug it in, and earn a prize. It is designed in a way that marketers (or non-technical ppl in general) who want to do this engagement in their communities don’t have to go to their engineering teams. The idea is that we should be able to make really simple mini-games — they can be as simple as: come to my Twitch stream and I’ll give you a passcode and then you go and redeem an NFT.
- If you’re designing a game and you don’t have game design experience, that can also be a challenge. So the next step for IK is to provide a set of templates, where you change the elements you’ll have infinite variations (“Infinity” Keys). And a step beyond is a community of ppl who create their own templates and vote on each other’s templates. They will self-govern, and test schemes on quality (good), type (mini-game), duration (1 hour), and so on. We will leverage the power of the crowd to create these systems and the result should be: anybody can come and participate at any level, so we can create thousands/millions/quadrillions of games. That will be an incredibly rich and deep world of activities (can be simple as: go to a Twitch stream, find a special code hidden in the Lord of Rings stamps, get a gaming item, call an API, etc.) and we can now leverage all the opportunities in Web3. There can be different components and requirements in games, so we’re trying to build a system where that is made simplified and ppl can just plug and play, and then a community can come together, validate and refine them, and make them really enriching experiences.
Q: It sounds like a sandbox for game builders…
Yeah, but I don’t want to put ppl in a sandbox. What’s cool about composability is that you can make a sandbox game and put anything (passcode/NFT/etc.) in there. You can set up whatever you want and it’s composable with any other game builder system. I’m not building a 3D metaverse, not even 2D metaverse. I’m just building a place where ppl can come and think about where I want to put games: Twitter, other social media, etc. IK games can be anywhere on the web — it should be that.
What has always succeeded (and I learned from Chainlink) is that successful crypto projects work with other ones. It’s not just composability with technology but with communities as well. Bring communities together and show everybody the value of both projects, 3 projects, or however many projects, that’s how we grow. You don’t need to have an official partnership with IK to build the project. In my perfect world, (hopefully) in the next year, somebody who’s a holder of an NFT collection and wants to promote it can build their own quests and link with some other games, (nobody should have any say in that except for somebody who wants to come and use the system), in that way, we get genuine community-created content that’s not gated and is permissionless. I think that’s part of the value in the future of (not just) Web3. As the Internet grows, niche communities emerge and talk to each other more, and those communities can be composable. Now we’re leveraging the Internet of value and decentralized secure systems to validate, check that out, and make it work together.
Q: Super cool! So, IK can be technically integrated with other gaming platforms as one of their components, right?
We’re still too early to know what that looks like. We’ve had a number of requests from games to do a white-label version of IK hunts and we’re not doing that because my goal is not to build a white-label product but a community where people can come and build things. But the idea of native integration would make sense and a couple of projects are already doing Web3 achievements — basically, an aggregation and display of in-game NFTs/assets/ achievements — which IK can be tied with.
So we’re trying to figure out what “build an IK” means. What’s in our mind and in the mind of many other projects is how we give communities more options and what that looks like. Right now I’m not sure what the UI/UX of a native integration is, but I can give you an example. We got a Lens grant. We built a pretty straightforward relatively easy puzzle, there’s a little bit of searching based on Lens dApps. There’re a number of dApps built on top of Lens and you need to go to 3 different ones and find the passcode for each one (you don’t need a Lens account for that). Right now it all happens on IK’s website but there’re links so you can go out and come back — so it’s not natively integrated. But we’re working with a number of projects (including Lens) on what those native integrations look like — there will be sharing at some point.
We’re also building our own platform that has leaderboards, profiles, and all that fun stuff that comes with games. So there’re tons of cool opportunities in the future.
{ 3 }
Know-How to Design a Gamified Quest Experience
Summary
The trick with designing a treasure hunt is avoiding puzzles that are too hard or too easy. Starter Kits need to be simple enough so players are motivated to continue. From idea to execution, the caveats are: Avoid turning a fun gaming experience into an educational “multiple choice question”.
Q: It’s really like Ready Player One, the entire structure of playing and the final treasure hunt…
I love the idea of Ready Player One, but it’s a centralized single-creator game, a giga billionaire creates one quest for one winner, and at the end, split among 4 ppl. (The plot of the second book is the challenge of decentralized governance, anyways). The idea of IK is that anybody should be able to build a quest, and it turns out a lot of ppl really enjoy building these treasure hunts. It can be challenging because your default is to go hard, but if you want people to play your game, you need to balance that with accessibility. And it can’t be too easy as well. That’s why we work with advisors and a number of game designers (from AAA studios, mobile gaming, etc.) to make sure that we work it out. It’s meant to be sharable with anybody (friends, kids, etc.) and not that crazy. We’re trying to make it a little bit of fun and these games are usually 10 mins max — if you spend longer than that, you should come to our Discord and ask for help. We’re figuring out a Wordle-like experience. 5 mins a day, you get it, feel good, and go on with your life. It’s a great onboarding opportunity as well — after 10 days, maybe I will think that I should get a wallet and check it out.
Q: I actually played The Starter Kit on Infinity Key’s platform already.
The Starter Kit is a nice little example. Most ppl like a brief start — they feel smart and they feel good — that’s what it should be, and then there’s one where you need to go find some info in our whitepaper. We’re going to make those a bit more fun but they’re some of the basic games that demonstrate the capabilities of what you can do with IK.
Q: We both like playing virtual puzzle games that require us to look for clues and find keys, especially in the past two years during COVID. We went online and played online murder mystery games like Swamp Motel where there’s a Zoom performance, and you need to go across multi-media platforms (Google Map, etc.) to find the spec code and unlock the next steps.
There’re a lot of escape rooms that’s moved online because of COVID. Geocaching was popular a couple of yrs ago and we’re thinking about metaverse geocaching. What I found is that ppl get really excited about the idea and when you’re going to build them, several things will pop up.
The first and most common thing is that they are not fun. Oftentimes it takes the user experience from “I’m going to play a game” to “I’m going to do a test”. Like in school, they say “it’s game time” and then they hand out a multiple-choice quiz. They used to call it edutainment or educational gaming but it’s really hard to get it right. **The most powerful learning is from intrinsic motivation and you learn by doing. **When ppl started thinking that they’re going to build these experiences, they’ll inevitably go to “multiple-choice questions”. Like Coinbase Earn — Yes, it’s a proof that you watched a video. Did you learn something? Maybe. That’s not a fun experience, and that’s not what we’re looking to build. Optimism just did a big Wordly-like treasure hunt and it really came down to “multiple-choice questions” at the end. It’s useful to have staged achievements and things that you do to prove that you’ve done them. But it’s not fun. It’s far from fun and it’s a different onboarding experience. People don’t want to come from Web2 (Facebook) to Web3 (AirDrop) by doing “multiple-choice questions” to learn about RPC endpoints and all that stuff. Instead, we make simple actual fun experiences (solving a riddle, playing a mini-game, visiting a Twitch stream, etc.) and reward ppl, and incidentally, they’re learning stuff on the way — now we’re not telling them about the utility of coin X on Y blockchain, we’re asking them to go do it when they’re ready. So just be aware when you started building your own stuff, be really careful when it comes to the default mode that “we could educate ppl, we could force ppl to do quizzes, etc.”
Q: Yeah, agreed. A lot of blockchain-based games follow a play-to-earn model where “Earn” is the core of that game, rather than the actual fun of playing. I think that’s why IK chose a gaming-like experience as the entry point.
Another interesting example is Duolingo. It’s a really nicely designed app and it used gamification. It is fun, but how many languages have you learned using Duolingo? Nobody learns anything, because gamification only goes so far, all the achievements, level-ups, and sparkles, only go so far. It needs to be paired with good game experiences, and how to make good games is a really hard question. The answer the gaming industry showed us is that you test again and again until you find a group of people that play this well and the game is balanced and it works. So to me: first, we have to use established templates, things that ppl can enjoy and do enjoy; second, we need to recruit a community of ppl who build and test games and work together to create experiences. It’s an unleveraged part of Web3 and to me, it is governance — let’s govern the product, let’s test it, and put it out. It’s a hard thing. In our game development, we trashed so many games that we thought were good but didn’t work. Similar to editing after writing and podcasting, it’s the same process for any content design, including games.
{ 4 }
IK’s Team and Community
Summary
The team basically comes from previous networking. The most important thing is to leverage the community to attract like-minded people and retain them. IK does not use influencer marketing, nor does it sell NFTs and tokens, because it does not want to attract speculators who are only interested in price. In the short term, IK will generate revenues by customizing Web3 gamified quest solutions for enterprises until it finds a product-market fit for end consumers.
Q: Speaking of recruiting, how did you gather these game designers and all the talented ppl together in your community? How did you form the core team?
Mostly ppl I’ve known. The core team is from good old networking when I studied games. For one of the first puzzles we made, one of the fans found it, played it, and loved it. And he joined the community, and it turns out he’s got mobile game design experience and he’s become an advisor at IK. You just need to work on it, meet those ppl, and retain them.
When it comes to how we help avg ppl (without game design experience) come and design games, first, we’ve got a community Discord where we talk about this stuff, and ppl come in with their own ideas, then we have community submissions that we help revise. We’re building a system of advocates who will come in and guide others.
And building a game that ppl play is so rewarding. It’s like being on stage, singing to a crowd of ppl, and it’s a thousand times crazier than just watching the show. So why would ppl want to come and make games? It’s really fun to have ppl play your games. The incentive is in the community. We’re at a point where the community needs to be coordinated and organized, and that’s where our governance token model comes in. There’re lots of components in IK’s game system (progressions on premium profiles, potential monetary value transfer, etc.), but first and foremost is the intrinsic motivation that games need to be fun to make and fun to play.
Q: Very interesting. How big is your current community?
A couple of hundred ppl across the platforms. Some are really hardcore and they’re finding hidden puzzles. By hidden puzzles I mean, things we’ve taken off public because they’re not “good” anymore — but there’re still ppl smashing at them. And then a larger community who come and play new games for rewards. And then the largest community who keep an eye on things. We’ve done zero marketing, for all podcasts and speaking events we just got invited. We don’t have influencer marketing and we don’t sell NFTs or tokens. That’s deliberate because we don’t want a community of ppl wondering about the floor price. We focus on revising the product. What we have now is an alpha version. We made NFTs called alpha trophies for ppl to collect, so we had records of who’s gone and who got done. When it comes to the next version we know exactly who supported us from the beginning and we take that into account. Also, we were surprised that some major enterprises checking out Web3 have messaged us and pitched for doing an IK-style hunt with their brand. So in the short term, what we’re doing for revenue is working with projects one-on-one (not our long-term goal tho). That’s how we reach out to other communities and prove the PMF (Product-Market Fit) as well. It’s a multi-pronged approach where not only individuals but corporations can come in and build out something for their community.
{ 5 }
What is IK, eventually? What are the technologies used?
Summary
The essence of IK is a creator platform. In order to provide this platform for creators, we need to think through a series of questions at the very beginning (what do these games look like, how to mint in-game NFTs, what are the prices, multi-chain or not), and provide examples of good games. At present, IK has released a public beta version. Later, the community will be motivated and self-organized to create more sample games. At this stage, users still need to use a Google Form (Web2) to submit the five elements of “input, challenge, instruction, hint, and reward” to the IK team to create their own games. IK hopes to further lower the threshold, so that users can first receive NFT through email, and when they are ready they can enter Web3 in more native ways such as wallets.
Q: IK is trying to combine a lot of things, it can be a gaming platform, a community engagement tool, a creator studio, etc. How would you define IK, which track does it belong to?
The creator platform is the most important component of it — ppl can come and build stuff. So what can they build? They can build mini-games. In order to do that, we should have at least a core game that’s sticky and with good experience. We’ve seen great evidence of ppl enjoying the main IK alpha game: they play whatever we put out there. We put out a game for Saga (a Cosmos-based chain) and ppl with no exposure to Saga would come there because they wanted to play the game.
Mostly it’s a creator platform, but it would be foolish of us not to build our own game on top of that for ppl to play and give other projects more exposure to wider audiences. I do see these elements are linked and they make sense together, but the creator platform is really the core — what does it look like? In order to figure that out, we have to define: what does the game look like? How do we check the passcode? Where do we mint the NFT? What is the price? Can we do that multi-chain? …We need to figure out all these hassles to be a creator platform. We need to have the technology that lets us be a game first so anybody can make their own game, in order for the creator platform to thrive and really grow. It needs to have a community that supports it and can test games.
Right now, we focus a lot on the game because it’s a public-facing demo. You can play different types of puzzles, redeem different kinds of treasures, and see how project-sponsored challenges work. Then we will have profiles coming out in a while where ppl can track their progress and it feels like a coherent thing. After that, we’ll be looking at the creator platform: how do we optimize this? How do we make it so that somebody can come in and get a free offering or pay a little bit for a premium offering? Eventually, there’ll be a demand for community, and then let’s incentivize and organize them. They’re coming in stages, they’re interrelated but still separate for now.
Q: What kind of technology are you using to make this no-code functionality accessible to the users?
Right now it’s a Google form. There’re several components to make a game: input, challenge, instructions, hint (if they get the answer wrong), and rewards. Now we have all those things, it’s just a matter of determining what’s the user experience. If we have templates, how are those integrated, a side guide gated by NFTs, or something else? That’s part of the challenge, but the core infra of puzzle creation is actually Web2-based. Serving a front end, pulling it into a database, constructing it, pretty close to WYSIWYG (a type of editing software that allows users to see and edit content in a form that appears as it would when displayed on an interface, webpage, slide presentation or printed document. It is an acronym for “what you see is what you get.”)
At least you have an idea and go on IK to create your games, tech-wise it’s very Web2-oriented — it’s about setting up your preferences and the system says OK. Then on the Web3 side, if you want somebody to have an NFT, you have to put it in a smart contract address. Is that no-code? It gets a little bit trickier. But if you’re already asking ppl to do that we’re assuming that you know: the contract address, which (EVM) chains the NFT is on, etc. So the question is: what can you do to make the puzzle go live? If it has an NFT component, how can you keep or sell or share it with others?
Q: Yeah, maybe they don’t need a wallet to receive an NFT, maybe you will create that for them.
Very close to that. For example, you send a puzzle to your friend, and they solve the puzzle and there’re two options: claim the NFT by wallet, or by email. And we’ll make a bookmark in our system that says this email claimed this NFT. Now we have your profile with an email address, if one day you want to claim the NFT as a digital asset, here’s a wallet to set up.
We’re still working out the exact user journey, and there’s a lot to explore. You should be able to play casual games without having a Web3 wallet, but at some point, if you want to save this achievement as a digital asset or NFT, maybe you’re motivated to get a wallet. We want ppl to do that when they’re ready.
🎁 Special Christmas Gift from Meta Potatoes 🎁
For the first time, we prepared some Christmas gift NFTs !!! We hope that this holiday season brings you joy, happiness, and all the things you hold. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
All are welcome to collect the Christmas gifts here!🎄
PS: This is our first NFT attempt. Initially, we wanted to send them out as free-mint gifts, but OpenSea requires a minimum price, so we set the floor price at $0.01, plus the gas fee, they should be around $0.02 each. Hope you like it :)
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