Butterfly Prawn Farm: A Pioneer of Farming in Decentraland
By Decentraland DAO, , in Community Highlights
Butterfly Prawn Farm is a play-to-earn game in Decentraland where users play as farmers and harvest crops, catch farm animals, go on treasure hunts, craft items, ascend a Magic Beanstalk, and explore a special cloud castle.
Initially a pet project started by metaverse enthusiast and founder of BPF, ButterflyPrawn, the game rose to popularity, being the first farming game in Decentraland. Amidst rising interest in the game and a growing workload to continue developing Butterfly Prawn Farm to benefit players, a development team was brought in with the help of a DAO grant (Oct 22 – Mar 23), to help support the game.
Gaming Experience
Being one of the most popular play-to-earn games in Decentraland, Butterfly Prawn Farm offers multiple activities and monthly events, with Wearable giveaways for Decentraland players to partake in. Butterfly Prawn Farm's goal is to boost the community and retain players in world by being a place players want to visit frequently and hang out in with friends.
Butterfly Prawn Farm strives to cater to all varieties of players: casual players who visit every few days to plant and harvest their crops, strategic players who optimize their crop planting times for maximum output and event scores, and even extremely dedicated players that grind sunflowers for maximum experience points and coin gain.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/jlu7Bfe9uNc
Introductory Video on how to play Butterfly Prawn Farm
New players are greeted by a fresh plot of land where they can start to plant and harvest. Upon clicking on the land, players can choose from a selection of plants to grow: sunflowers, eggplants, peppers, carrots, strawberries, or pineapples. Each plant gives different experience, commodities, and BP coin; an in-game currency that can be used to purchase in-game items or Wearables. Besides planting and harvesting, players can also catch animals. The rarest of the animals is the golden goose. This animal will grant players a chance to acquire a golden egg; The rarest in-game commodity that can be exchanged for rare Wearables.
On top of the game’s basic farming experience, the development team is always looking for new sources of inspiration to enrich gameplay. From classic children’s stories, like Peter Piper, to holidays such as Halloween and Christmas, the development team has created fun monthly competitions where players can win even more attractive prizes. Many events are built to ensure most players have a shot at winning an event exclusive while some test players’ grit and skills at resource optimization. In a short span of 3 months, Butterfly Prawn Farm gave out more than 540 Wearables and more will come.
Design Considerations and Inspirations
Butterfly Prawn Farm strives to be a low entry barrier, low learning curve, and high reward game for new players. Furthermore, Butterfly Prawn Farm also challenges competitive players, by providing various game features for players to focus on optimizing time and resources. Unlike other strategy games, Butterfly Prawn Farm events are simple to enable and provide an enjoyable experience. These events provide versatility to gameplay and reward players generously with giveaways and prizes in exchange for their participation.
On Butterfly Prawn Farm’s future sustainability, supporters of the game can accelerate their progress by purchasing Wearables and Emotes with utilities from Decentraland’s Marketplace. Of course, players do not need to purchase these items to get full enjoyment out of the game as their experience will not be diminished by not having them. However, such purchases contribute to the DAO treasury and funds Butterfly Prawn Farm’s future development efforts.
The Butterfly Prawn Farm team greatly appreciates their players as their social interaction and feedback is highly valued and always taken into consideration when planning the game’s development. As such, there are many channels where players can voice their concerns (usability, newbie guides, cyber concerns, event feedback, etc) including a ticketing system in Butterfly Prawn Farm’s Discord channel where an administrator of the development team will personally attend to every concern.
Upcoming development
Butterfly Prawn Farm’s DAO grant ended in March 2023 with the game’s development team having overachieved on their original development roadmap with the amount of crafting items, monthly events, and Wearables/Emotes they launched during the grant timeframe. In addition, the development team will be launching two major releases; Cloud Castle and Garage of Vehicles. These two releases are advanced features for players to encounter a different challenging experience and more strategic options in their gameplay. In the future, Butterfly Prawn Farm hopes to develop pets unique to the farm as well as trading features, and more Emotes with utility.
Butterfly Prawn Farm hopes to see you on the farm one day! Visit Butterfly Prawn Farm at coordinates, 97, -132. You can also follow the project or contact them on Discord and Twitter for new updates!
The metaverse is full of yet unrecognized potential and opportunities. Do you have an idea that could benefit the Decentraland community? Learn more about the DAO’s grants here.
Do you know of a cool Decentraland community project that you think should be next in the Community Highlights series? Contact the Decentraland Foundation team @decentraland on Twitter.
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