If you think back to 2021/2022, you’ll almost certainly remember the NFT hype. That period of time where people were dropping their life savings for pictures of apes.
Yeah. Well, during that time, I was in possibly my peak hustle culture phase.
But, I was also broke.
So how did I try to get in on that gold rush?
Just like I’d been taught. Not by mining gold, buying and selling NFTs.
But by selling shovels.
That’s right. I created an NFT project.
THIS is my full NFT story.
From a guy that speaks the truth and was in the weeds of an actual project, from start to end.
Let’s get into it.
Chapter 1 – How It Started
So, I don’t remember the specifics of how it started, but I know I spent a good year working on a variety of projects.
And we’ll get to my main project – Solana Showdown – but first I have to show you how I got there.
It’s October 2021 and I’ve been binging videos about how to make money in this latest craze, NFTs. But being the self-improvement obsessed, broke, early hustle-culture-brainwashed 23 year old I was, my mind was on making money with selling the NFTs themselves.
I couldn’t afford to flip NFTs, so I did the next best thing.
And when I say brainwashed, I mean it. At one point, I literally set up a call with my manager and his boss to ask to drop down to part time, where I pitched how NFTs were gonna change the world. Yeah. It was bad. Shout out to George and Ross at JMI for being with me through that.
So anyway – I’m researching, watching videos, and I learn how NFTs are actually ‘made’ with this code that randomly takes parts and sticks them together. And I was like, well, I can do that.
So I did.
The process was quite simple. An NFT stands for Non Fungible Token. “Non-Fungible” essentially means unique, and token refers to a specific thing. So essentially, each image is unique.
Meaning, each ‘NFT’ you create has to be distinct from everything else and from anything else (ideally with a purpose, but more on that later in the video).
And the way we achieve that is by randomly combining elements or ‘parts’ of an image into a whole. Since they’re randomly chosen, each combination is unique. Most generators have a way to detect and avoid duplicates too.
So you design a bunch of ‘parts’ which act as layers of an image, using set artboard dimensions.
You then export those parts in the set dimensions so each image has the same size but only takes up a portion of the bounding box. These have a transparent background so that they can be layered on top of one another.
Then you run those parts through a combining script, which stick the layers together and exports an image. This repeats a set amount of times based on what you told the script – that could be 100, 1000, or even a million if you fancied waiting that long.
Theoretically, less is better because you have more scarcity, but nobody is going to buy 1 of a set of 10 unproven things unless they have real value.
It’s quite simple when you think about it.
And with my media production degree, this seemed both easy and fun. I knew how to use Adobe Creative Cloud – Photoshop and Illustrator – for creating images. Then I run it through HashLips’ NFT generator and boom, I’ve got NFTs.
So now all I had to do was come up with a project idea and we’d be rich.
Right?
Chapter 2 – The Totem Poles
My first idea was – as you’d guess from the chapter title – generating totem poles.
Those symbolic monumental carvings from the Indigenous North Americans.
They were really cool and had a clear separation of parts, which I could randomly generate.
The layering process seemed easy – randomly combine symbolic animals on the different layers of the totem pole and voila, you’ve got your NFT.
Only problem is, I had to come up with the designs. And I knew nothing about totem poles. Or much about design.
I’d done a few sketches of ideas for what they could look like, but the execution and actually creating them looked VERY different to what I had in mind.
Like, check out this first draft. I thought this was good.
Yikes.
I’d talked it over with a friend at the time who was giving me feedback on design and the project itself. He also mentioned the risk of cultural appropriation which turned out to be pivotal for my overall direction.
Ultimately, I decided against it – due to both the fear of accidentally doing something bad and because I didn’t have the confidence to execute something that looked good for this theme.
After all, nobody is going to spend money on a digital image of a goofy looking totem pole. Particularly when it could be potentially offensive.
It was a good starting point to introduce me to the concepts of NFTs and how things would build together, but didn’t have enough leg room to be anything serious.
But it set me up really well for this next idea, which actually got off the ground…
Chapter 3 – D20s
At the time, I was playing DnD – Dungeons and Dragons – with a group of friends I’d met online.
Yeah, nerdy, I know.
I’d always been interested in trying DnD and had been binging Critical Role, so thought fuck it, let’s try.
I was in a stage of experimentation and didn’t really have any friends, so gave it a shot. Fuck it.
Long story short – DnD isn’t really for me. Other people seem to be far more into it than I ever could be, but it was fun going round fighting all the time. Yes, I was the murder hobo. Zero regrets. Apart from that I never got my backstory answered. Anyway. Back to the story.
One natural quirk of being into DnD is you start to grow an interest in dice.
Dice are, after all, literally life and death in that game. So you give them a certain level of respect.
And they also look nice and are fun to play with.
Sooooo…
You get dice. You start collecting dice. Different colours, different styles, different patterns.
Assigning dice to certain rolls, characters, whatever.
And so I joined the dots as you do – what if these were DIGITAL?!
Bingo – my next NFT idea.
I thought it was perfect. You could do each of the number of the die between 1 and 20, with 20 obviously being good and 1 being bad – but with each having a certain appeal.
You could randomise the texture and colour of the die itself.
You could randomise the location of the die, or what it was sitting on.
And the ‘power’ of the die could be influenced by the background.
So I got to work designing. The colours, outlines, podiums, backgrounds, and textures.
And ended up with 2000 randomly generated d20s.
I was proper chuffed at this, can’t lie. A fully fleshed out generation of NFTs.
All made by me.
Now all I had to do was sell them. How hard could it be?
I’d be a millionaire before you could spell fungible.
But, of course, it’s never that easy.
I’d set up an OpenSea account for the “Crypto D20s”, designed a header image, a featured image for marketing, exported all the images and prepared some basic social posts, then listed everything for sale using Eth.
And waited.
Crickets chirping
Yeah, nothing sold.
I had no idea the importance of marketing for a project like this, particularly for something unproven or without creator backing.
But I thought if I could give them a purpose of some kind, surely that would be enough for it to take off? So I was scheming up competitions and RNG based activities…
But still, nothing.
I was hoping to get lucky but hadn’t yet learned how bad my luck could be. Ironic, since d20s were the very thing that determined my luck in DnD (and in that I was notoriously unlucky).
Ultimately I just let it be because I lost interest and saw no traction, and didn’t believe in it enough to build further.
But the NFT hype hadn’t died yet, and I was still a hustle chimp getting blinded by the dollar signs these digital apes were generating.
So we started again. This time with something far cooler.
Chapter 4 – Blockchain Blades
Look, you know it’s cool when there’s alliteration in the name, right?
It’s a marketer’s wet dream.
Or, at least, mine. And I’m a marketer.
And I still use alliteration. Just look at one of my businesses, Chess Cheat Sheets…
But Blockchain Blades, that was my baby. And 3rd time’s the charm, right?
The concept was simple. A collection of ‘blades’ generated and hosted on the blockchain (the NFT space).
The blockchain was growing in concept at the time and I’d always thought swords were cool so, fuck it.
Blockchain Blades.
Then for added coolness, let’s not make them just blades. These are swords in stones. King Arthur style. Sick, right.
That idea would go on to blossom into a full project.
So I got to work designing.
And let me tell you… some of those early designs were shocking.
Like, WHAT IS THIS??!!
But to this day, I value this project so highly because of the design and creative illustration skills it taught me.
TRUST ME, it gets better, but I can’t show you all the polished stuff yet, can I?
Gotta get that sweet sweet YouTube retention and engagement.
#metahumour
By the way, if you’re enjoying this so far, hit the subscribe button. I’m trying to release more videos and want to put this level of effort into each, but yo, they take time, and a man’s gotta eat, so any support helps. Even if it’s free. Cheers.
Back to it.
The early drafts were rough. One of the main challenges was designing the pieces so they consistently apply with each other and look like cohesive, finished designs when randomly generated.
This wasn’t a problem with the D20s because the pieces didn’t need to actually ‘fit’ together.
But swords, well, a sword with a disconnected blade and handle wouldn’t really be a sword…
It’d just be a bit of metal stuck in the ground and a hand holding a bit of wood.
Eventually we get there and start designing something that kinda works.
And the key to getting good was stupidly simple.
I found ✨inspiration✨.
Essentially, I found cool looking swords and got to playing around, copying their components into Illustrator for random combinations.
Check these out.
Not bad, eh?
At this stage, I was growing in confidence in the project and could see actual potential.
I was still watching NFT YouTube content, and one of the videos I’d seen suggested the idea of creating a team to launch a project.
One other thing I’d learned was that for NFT projects to take off at this later stage, after the initial burst of hype – i.e. buying a png simply because it’s an NFT – had worn off, they needed to have some form of utility or purpose.
And I’m like, how on earth am I going to give these swords any kind of value or purpose?
Further, how the fuck do I implement that and actually build it?
Having a team solved both issues.
I’d been brainstorming and thinking, what are swords? What do they do?
They’re for fighting, battling. War.
It hits me.
Sword fights.
Holy shit, that’s it. WE CAN FIGHT WITH THE SWORDS.
And we make it a game.
But how are we going to build a game when I have zero coding experience (outside of HTML and CSS)?
We need a developer.
Enter the team.
Chapter 5 – Assembling The Team (heist assembly montage)
Drop and Fletcher.
The dudes.
HashLips had a Discord server where you could chat to other people running NFT projects or interested in the space. Maybe join a project or start something of your own.
So I started recruiting.
Long story short, met these two dudes, Drop and Fletcher, who were programmers living in Portugal who found the project interesting and wanted to get in on the development side of things.
After all, they weren’t artists, so needed someone to do the designs if they wanted a project.
We had several meetings to brainstorm how the game mechanics etc would work, and without them the project design wouldn’t shape into what it is.
NFT games were growing in popularity and we thought it would be a good fit for this project, and Solana was the blockchain we were planning to build on, so the public name became…
Chapter 6 – Solana Swords (Chapter 6)
Alliteration again, of course. We love it.
We had several meetings to brainstorm the project and settled on the ‘play to earn’ model as our form of utility. We talked about how the game mechanics and NFT valuation would work.
Eventually, we settled on making an elemental system to determine the ‘value’ of the NFT and thus its damage and ability to perform in game. This was in my head initially when I pitched it, and the guys liked the idea.
Here’s how it all works.
We’ve got 9999 randomly generated swords.
Each sword is made up of a combination of parts. Those parts come in different rarities, which have different visual designs and/or styles, then elemental variations for each.
We export all the individual parts as pngs and group them into folders to represent the different parts of the images.
Those part groups, in reverse order, are:
- The gemstone – the ‘power’ of the sword and its primary elemental typing. There are only 11 different variations here, one to represent each elemental power.
- The pommel – this serves no value to the sword’s score, but necessary for embedding the gemstone and to make it look like an actual sword. There are 5 variations with minor shape/design changes to give visual variety.
- The crossguard – to attach the grip to the blade and block incoming attacks. Here we introduce the concept of rarity. Sometimes, parts come in different rarities, which have better or worse scores based on their rarity, and visual designs to show each distinctly. There are 5 different varieties here. In order of rarity, they are: common, rare, epic, legendary, and mythic. For each of these 5, we have 11 variations, one for each element, which has distinct colours to show the typing.
- The grip – this is used for connecting the pommel & gemstone, and the crossguard & blade. The grip has 3 levels of rarity: rare, epic, and legendary, each with the 11 elemental variations.
- The stone – the elemental ‘hold’ which the sword is stuck within. There are 11 stone designs, one for each element.
- The blade – the actual damage of the weapon. 55 total variations, 5 times 11, the same as the crossguard. Except mythic rarity is replaced by uncommon. The key distinction with mythic is that it acts as doubly powerful, given it hosts a gemstone. More on that later.
- The background – an elemental scene in which the sword resides. Only 11 variations again here, one for each elemental type.
As you can imagine, this is a LOT of potential combinations. That’s what makes NFTs so fun and unique. The random generation is part of the appeal.
The damage of the sword is essentially a combination of how rare its parts are and the associated damage value of those parts. Mythic being the best, legendary the second best, etc.
Now, I’ve mentioned the elemental parts so far, but they go beyond simply being different types. Of course, we DO need that typing, so first let’s calculate how that works, then I’ll explain why it’s useful.
Each part of the sword has an associated elemental ‘weight’ to help determine it’s type and power. The gemstone is worth 2, the pommel worth nothing (which is also why the gemstone is worth 2), and everything else is worth 1 elemental point apart from the mythic crossguard, which, given it houses a gemstone, is also worth 2.
To calculate the elemental type, we add up the elemental scores determined by the parts the sword has, then take the largest score as the primary type.
For example, if we’ve got 3 electric parts, 2 earth, and 1 grass, that becomes an electric sword.
But what if it’s a tie and the score between two types is even?
That’s partly why the gemstone is worth 2. It’s the ‘main’ elemental typing, but also means that weighting could be more reliable. The gemstone is the primary power source of the sword, so it makes sense that it’s more essential to the sword’s elemental typing than, say, a crossguard or blade. So it becomes the fallback for typing.
For example, if a sword has 2 fire parts, 2 water, 1 air, and 1 dark, it would be tied between fire and water. Each have a score of 2. However, since the gemstone is worth 2 and 2 is the largest we’ve got, we know that part of the elemental score comes from the gemstone. In this case, it’s fire, so we fall back to that typing. This, therefore, is a fire sword.
If each part was worth 1 elemental point, and we rolled all different elemental typing, we’d still need to fallback to something. The gemstone being worth 2 makes this easier, and, like I said before, makes sense.
In the very rare instance it’s 3 and 3, which would be a VERY powerful sword indeed, we can again fall back to the gemstone as the primary type.
Why would it be powerful? Because elemental types also synergise with each other.
Think about it. A sword made up of random common parts from different elements shouldn’t be as strong as a sword made up of all common space-typed parts, right?
We took this into consideration. Elemental combinations act as multipliers. If you’ve got 2 parts of the same elemental type, your sword gets a multiplication to its damage value of x2. If you’ve got 3 parts, it’s x3. This is true for every combination of elemental parts.
And if you’ve got two sets of 3 parts with the same elemental typing… that would be x9. x9! Because you multiply by 3, then by 3 again! Meaning a 3 3 sword would be extremely powerful.
So you generate your sword, take value data from json files associated with the parts when generating, do your calculations, and output the 9999 swords. Then boom, you’ve got a set of images that pair with json files that contain data about the sword, including the primary type, the damage, multipliers, part types, etc.
And that’s how you make a Solana Sword.
Easy peasy, squeeze the lemon.
Swords would be randomly generated upon minting of the NFT, so people wouldn’t know what they’re getting ahead of time. This adds randomness and intrigue and encourages people to invest.
So, that’s the project right?
We’ve got the art.
We’ve got the functionality.
We’ve got the value of swords.
All we need now is to actually sell it…
But how the FUCK do we do that?
Chapter 7 – Marketing
The easy answer would be, ads.
Pay to put the project in front of people who are potentially interested in it. Get them to invest by minting.
Re-invest that money into more ads. Repeat. Scale.
And this was actually the most effective way to be successful in the space.
People with money – or an audience – are the ones who most often succeed.
You’ve seen big influencers like Gary V or Logan Paul get in on NFT projects and make a killing.
But, aslas, we were broke, so the only real option was to bootstrap things a bit…
And I didn’t want to launch something shallow, because of my own morals. I wanted this to actually be worthwhile. Have some depth to it. Otherwise, what’s the point?
I wanted an MVP game made by launch. It would build trust and show we were serious about the project.
Anyway. Marketing.
After a lot of back and forth trying to find someone to help with the marketing, I decided to just do it myself. It was taking too long to find someone serious, and people don’t really want to do work for free for a project that isn’t there’s, unless there’s a huge and likely perceived payoff.
And, after all, that WAS my day job…
I was just cautious to be taking on too much: leading the project and team, doing the art, and more…
So, here’s the thing. Like with any online business, you need a digital presence. A place where people can go to learn more about you and what you offer.
A website.
Initially I was half-working with someone on this who would do the actual website building (i.e. the development), but they still needed a design to work from. And given most of the art was done, and I was essentially the creative director, this was the perfect excuse to jump back into something creative while the team were working on the game.
So I got to work – just another job I was taking on. Even if I did like it. But of course, you didn’t hear that from me.
On the screen now, you’ll see a couple drafts of what the website looked like. This was a living project and kept getting updated as we went through and iterated on the designs, gameplay, and how the minting and play to earn functionality would work.
As part of the marketing, I also set up the social media accounts and designed some posts. I wasn’t super experienced with growing organically on social, particularly with a completely new business, but these looked cool and I let my naivety get the better of me, thinking that if I just posted a few cool-looking pictures promoting a project I believed in as part of the NFT craze, surely it would blow up, right?
Right?
Eventually, as things do, this was left in the background while we finished things up elsewhere. As you’d expect, me having so much to do meant that I wasn’t really doing one thing completely or fully, since I had to keep dipping between different parts of the project. All while living my life and working a 9 to 5 job.
It was hectic. But I was enjoying the process and had ambition, and the NFT hype was still booming, so dollar signs were in my eyes.
And then the team got together and we had a conversation…
Chapter 8 – Showdown
At this point, we’re at least several months into the project. It’s got legs. We’re moving.
The game is making progress. The art is pretty much done.
But we’re seeing new projects pop up left right and center.
Which, obviously, makes us panic a bit. How are we going to stand out?
This comes around the same time as the concern around marketing. And for some reason, we thought that the best way to market ourselves was to literally have such an enticing proposition and reason for investing in the project that people would feel stupid saying no.
We’d already toyed with the idea of Play to Earn, but this is where we finally settled on it and decided it for sure.
And so we had to actually solidify how the game would work. At present, the game dev team were having some issues with how the combat was working, so finding feasible workarounds was tricky.
But before I explain how we changed the game, let me first share how it works.
So, remember the elemental typing from before? Well, they aren’t just to make the swords look different and cool.
They have a use. Each sword’s typing gives it an advantage or disadvantage.
This is where it gets pokemon-like (and a little bit complicated).
Typing is useful for combat because some swords are more effective against certain sword types than others.
So, like in pokemon, some types like water are effective against other types like fire, and weak against types like grass. This ‘effectiveness’ was a % influence of the sword’s total score.
This allowed us to add an element of randomness to the game, which was important for the play to earn side of things. Otherwise, you’d simply get the best sword of the 9999 that existed and win every game you played. It simply couldn’t be beaten without an element of randomness.
But, of course, we wanted to give an advantage to the ‘better’ swords so that they’re considered rarer and more valuable. Plus, without better swords being, you know, BETTER, there’d be no excitement for getting a good sword. Like, imagine if CSGO crates contained only pistols, and all the pistols did the same thing and looked basically the same. Why would you spin?
Then, to add more variability, we added elemental ‘arenas’, where each fight would take place. There were 11 different arenas, one to match each elemental type, and the arena that the swords battle in would also influence each sword’s score. I can’t remember if this was just a buff or a buff and a debuff, probably the latter, but either way it added more randomness to the fighting and helped ensure the best swords didn’t win every single fight.
The way the play to earn functionality would work is through a tournament-style “king of the hill” series of battles. People who wanted to participate would pay an entrance fee of a certain amount of the Solana cryptocurrency, link their NFT sword using their wallet, and join the tournament. They’d then be randomly placed in a series of bracket battles against other swords, using the score of those swords and randomly determined arenas.
Each battle won would advance you along the bracket until the semi finals, finals, and runner ups. First, second, and third place would split the prize pool, with us taking a commission for hosting and running the event and project.
That, combined with the initial sale value of the NFTs and the commission from future resales, gave us a pretty solid business model.
Later we expanded on the idea of the winner remaining at the ‘top’ as the king, and essentially fighting off other swords to be the best, with weekly rankings from people’s entries and the top 3 getting paid. So it was like an NFT passive income stream. Which again, being the hustle culture brainwashed 23 year old I was, I thought passive income is a great thing. And it is. But yeah.
We also had to be cautious of gambling laws, since, from some perspectives, this could be considered gambling. Thankfully, from what I can remember, the get-around was that it wasn’t entirely random; the outcome of the battle was heavily dependent on the sword you entered. While it’s theoretically possible the worst sword could win, the chances were incredibly low compared to entering an extremely good sword. Combined with the ability to ‘choose’ which sword you entered (even if most people would only have one, they’d still pick their sword), it just about made it legal. I think.
So. Different swords have different elemental types. Some of those types are more effective against some types and weaker against others. Combined with the randomness of the arena, there were multiple factors to consider in each battle to determine who would win.
If your brain is starting to hurt, that’s a fraction of what we had to go through when creating it. Trust me, it’s a nightmare.
I remember one session in particular where we went for like 2 hours trying to wrap our heads around the combat system, making it pokemon-style with type matchups, combinations, and more. Then figuring out all the damage calculations etc. It was a heavy brainstorm.
Thankfully, I was just project lead and in charge of art, marketing, and everything BUT the game implementation. So I could leave that to the devs for now.
Looping back, then. How did we think we could make the project more enticing?
By offering more value and NFTs, of course. More ways to play. More variations of gameplay.
So, we decided to expand. We went from Solana Swords to Solana Showdown.
Essentially, this meant having a whole new range of NFTs as part of the larger project, and allowed us to give investors ideas for future developments to the project.
Initially, we had the idea of elemental Shields, much like the Swords. Naturally, swords and shields are a good pairing, so we were thinking you could enter both a sword and a shield when fighting. Shields would have less attacking potential but be more effective at blocking and minimising the attacks of opponent’s swords. Essentially, swords for offence, shields for defence. It was essential that you had a sword to compete, but a shield was optional and could help your chances of winning.
And, given I was in charge of art and the devs were still working on the game, it gave me something to do while I waited. Of course, looking back, that time would have been better spent on marketing the game, but hey. Lesson learned.
So I designed the shields. We already had rough colour palettes and background designs, so the task became creating different shield shapes, patterns, and the like.
You’ll see those on screen now.
And now, since we’d expanded beyond just swords into Solana Showdown, we had the option to add even more weapons with different abilities and designs. Axes, bows, spears, etc. These were all part of our long-term roadmap for building the project, should it be successful. Alas, things never got that far, so it will remain as an idea.
And that was about as far as the project got. The game barely got developed much beyond a prototype, and we never properly launched. The full mint never happened since we wanted interest first (and there’s an associated cost), as well as a working game and website. None of which we had the budget to pay for.
So where does that take us?
Chapter 9 – Why We Never Finished, What Went Wrong, and Reflections
Thinking about it, it was a mistake simply leaving stuff to the devs. I think this was one of if not THE main reason the project never got off the ground. The game just took too long to build. And without a working pay to earn game, it was just a collection of fancy looking PNGs.
The others weren’t as into the project I was, you know, given it was MY project… yes, I could have paid for help and actually gotten results, but I couldn’t afford it.
If this project had financial backing from a larger investor from the outset, we could have gotten somewhere. Or if I had an existing audience on social media or email, like I’m trying to build now. But my impatience with building a following prevented me from trying.
Looking back, I think the biggest mistake we made was leaning into Solana Showdown rather than finishing and launching Solana Swords as it was, getting it out and public, collecting investments from the mint, then expanding with time to include shields and other weapons.
The premise of the swords alone was really cool in my opinion, and from the people I had shown – including my barber, who you know you can trust with random conversation topics – there seemed to be general interest. Which, of course, was great for my ego, given it was all my idea and I’d done all the designs.
In the end, things kind of just… fizzled out. We parted ways after recognising the marketing required a lot more than we could put into it, especially with the little time we all had. I kept the rights to the image and designs, the devs kept the code for the game. And that was pretty much it.
So yeah. That’s the full story of my NFT project. Now that the NFT boom is over, there isn’t much reason to try relaunching. So I thought fuck it, let’s make this video and actually get SOME use out of the work I put in and the cool art.
If there’s enough demand, I guess I could sell the images alone, or perhaps give away a unique image to the first 10,000 subscribers or channel members, to show appreciation. It would be like a pseudo NFT, with a right of ownership through a text file or something. If that’s something you’re interested in, make sure to subscribe and follow for any updates and announcements. I’ll probably make a Skool community or a Patreon and distribute them there.
For now, that’s pretty much it. This has been a beast of a video, so I hope you’ve enjoyed and/or found it useful. Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments, or to ask any questions about the project I might not have answered!
And again, please do like and subscribe – particularly if you’ve made it this far in the video. Costs you nothing and really helps the channel to grow. To be frank, it’s the least you could do if I’ve given you this much entertainment.
That’s it for now. Not sure what or when the next video will be, but if you liked this one, chances are you’ll like the next too!
Alright. Catch you then. Until next time, peace.