>> Quick link to mint your own Naughty Monster <<

Twas the night before christmas and all through the house, the sound of a lonely developer (me) could be heard wrangling together this snowglobe monster project. The goal was to get this drop ready before the holidays so people could share them.

There were a few firsts I had to figure out. Snow? A translucent globe? Modeling a ribbon and snowglobe base in Blender, getting enough equirectangular backgrounds, randomizing the options deterministically.

Then there were the mechanics of getting this to work without external dependencies, all on IPFS, and to be performant enough to render quickly in the browser.

The first version of the system was pretty cool, and I intended it to launch it on an up-and-coming chain that I thought could use a fun boost. I ran into problems almost immediately. There was a testnet problem, a rendering problem, a contract creation problem. I got the feeling I was very very early there.

Then the curation team started reaching out to me. "Can you change the backgrounds?" "Can you simplify it?" "Can you limit supply?" "Can you submit the proposal for this project yesterday?" "Can you make a project website, twitter, discord?" "Can you fit our idea of what a project is?"

I must admit, I'm not sure if it's artist ego or some kind of myopic singlemindedness, but I had a tough time processing the feedback from several different stakeholders and synthesizing it into a passion project I felt already fit my vision.

I appreciated their interest, but after they'd told me the drop would be postponed because of their curation choice, I decided to release it on tezos. Unfortunately, my people-pleasing nature cringes at the feeling of upsetting anyone. But since my goal was to spread holiday cheer, and help the naughty monsters achieve global domination, the path was clear.

Enter fxhash.

In one day I ported my code to fit the fxhash specification. I reached out to my friends on tezos, including people whose pieces I'd collected for some time. The response was beautiful and heartwarming. They got it!

I used the OpenAI chatbot to help tell the story, and my friend James Hapax did the incredible voiceacting:

All about the attributes

I wanted each monster to be something that was fun to collect, trade, and gift. I also wanted them to have holiday spirit. This makes the collection all about the attributes.

Here's a sample of one monster's attributes:

There's equal probability for all of the attributes except Naughty or Nice.** Obviously nice is way more rare. There's a 10% chance of getting a nice monster.

Each of the backgrounds were handpicked from hundreds of options. As we know, the Naughty Monsters are bringing holiday cheer (and potentially global devastation) to locations around the world, even those that don't get snow. I wanted people everywhere to feel the holiday spirit.

Having fun

There are many reasons to lament a tough year by any standards, but sharing cool stuff with your friends can certainly help. Thank you to everyone who reaches out and supports indie developers and creators.

Go ahead and mint your own. Gift a Naughty Monster to someone! They're only 0.5 tez! And have a great holiday!

Open Source Assistance

Snow shader sample code from Pontus Arnesson https://arnessonpontus.github.io/procedural-snow-globe

Inspiration and awesome models from https://poly.pizza

The awesome monsters are by Quaternius https://quaternius.com

Equirectangular backgrounds were curated from https://pixexid.com

Holiday patterns were curated from https://pixabay.com