gm! 🧶
Long post incoming!
The topics today are two new improvements to our Development Diaries and one retrospective post about our journey until where we are now (in which I fud myself to death).
Dev Diaries upgrades
I decided to make it easier for our supporters to find exactly what they want in our logs.
I like everything super tidily organized, so I did a(nother) Table of Contents (ToC) for all the log entries and there are subjects for each entry.
So, for example, if you want to know more about our working process, you just need to look at the ToC and find which entries mentioned this subject.
I will try to maintain it the best I can, but it involves webhooks, meaning it’s a bit of work to do, and as the project grows I think I will have less spare time to do this. Also, I intend to be the only person allowed to mess with webhooks due to safety measures.
We shall see how it goes.
The second improvement is our Medium www.voodies.medium.com containing all our past logs. From now on, I will post every new entry on Discord and Medium.
The goal is to bring it to people that are not so much into Discord, so they can still access our development diaries without having to pay attention to our Discord server.
PS: I messed up with the log counting number on Discord! I started numbering it at log #40. There are a few logs exceeding maximum length on Discord, so I had to make several parts and that’s what got me confused. I did a fast check and considered parts 2 of a few logs as separate logs, ugh. The result: there’s a gap between log #37 and log #39 and I can’t edit them due to my own rules. I am sorry for that 🙁
Reviewing old logs
I took the opportunity to do a review of my previous logs. After all, I had to read it all over again doing that ToC and exporting to Medium.
Overall I think my writing process got a little better. I was too YOLO: just sitting down and typing without reviewing it.
There are so many grammar mistakes due to rushing and not being a native speaker. And to make it even worse, due to my own rules, I can’t edit anything once it’s posted. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve hit enter to post and a few seconds later I would spot grammar errors…
I noticed that at the beginning I was almost doing a blog, it was too personal, maybe due to the torrent of ideas coming. As the project progressed, I started shifting the subject and focusing more on the Voodies itself. Of course, there’s still a lot of me; all the influences and references are from stuff that I love.
You will notice most of the abandoned ideas and ethos were on the initial logs, when everything was just bursting in my head and there was too much to deal with. Then, the project started taking shape and as I kept posting logs, the structure was solidifying and the vision was forming, allowing for a more stable environment for the project to grow.
I’m not gonna lie, there are many, many things I wish I could just delete. There are cringe ideas and propositions that I’m ashamed of just thinking of.
Emotions aside, I think it’s just normal as the project matures to evolve or completely abandon some ideas.
Maybe it’s a mistake to overshare even stupid ideas, but I would bet all highly successful projects had their moments. We just didn’t get to know it.
I am always repeating this, we will adapt and realign as necessary. It’s part of the vision.
This development diaries is not a roadmap, it’s our spontaneous ideas coming to life. It’s a brainstorm, it’s a register and it’s part of our transparency process.
Enough said, let’s revisit some bad stuff and start this review.
Voodoo Bunnies
The idea started with amigurumis. We were deciding between making humanoid dolls or animal dolls. I think creatures in general can speak to a wider audience, it can portray ludic aspects that are harder to show in humans. The first iteration was making a collection about voodoo bunnies dolls. As I kept researching I found this girl that makes rabbits amigurumis and some had these voodoo characteristics. This hypothetical barrier made us think bigger and my wife and I decided to be bolder: a collection of several different amigurumi animals.
Solana community
Solana was growing nice and the community in general was really great. But at some point a few “influencers” got too big (brain) for the space. We have big guys on ETH, but the audience is massive so they can’t influence the whole ecosystem. Solana, on the other hand, is still too young and struggles to get more people from ETH and grow as a place for NFTs, which resulted in these influencers having a huge percentage of the total SOL users following them and they started dictating the scene. This discouraged me to further research on Solana. I hope it changed, its community deserves a good and healthy space for NFTs. ETH, on the other hand, just increased in value as THE birthplace of good projects. And there are solutions in place to counter the high gas price, like ERC721A.
Voodoo Pub
Voodoo Pub was an idea of a set totally made of crochet. It would be a classic pub where the avatars could hang out. It was a metaverse proposal but we abandoned it because it would suck too much work and I don’t think we need more metaverses right now.
Unique Series
It would be a collection to celebrate other projects and celebrities. TLDR: honoraries collection. I still want to do something like that, but the scope changed. Instead of looking for celebrities, we want to reach web3 leaders and pushers.
Artist
I was kind of stuck with the idea of bringing this artist to the project. It couldn’t be anyone else. Then, she rejected it. Well, another barrier that opened our vision. We started looking at all the people she followed on instagram and we found A LOT of other talented artists. And to be honest, we found people more focused and gifted than our initial option. I’m usually a patient person, but it reminded me to be more grounded and take my time before committing to something. We made a huge list of awesome artists and started contacting and interviewing. It turned out I couldn’t be happier with all the artists that worked with us and our Lead Artist.
Phase 2
The initial idea was making the Voodies and then start another collection of transformed Voodies.
I still have some stuff I wrote back then:
PHASE 2 is a twisted version of our cute and devilish Voodies. They will be transformed into evil, monstrous, malevolent and frightening beings.
The premise:
The veil preventing our physical world from being invaded by the Dark World is already thin. There are accounts of creatures from the Other-Side being summoned. But now the two realms are going to collide!
The reunion of all Keys and the power from all @☠️ Death Incarnate, @🧟♀️ Zombie Maker and @👻 Cthulhu Lover is going to rip apart the barrier and all sort of demons will be among us.All Voodies are going to be POSSESSED in this event. And they will change into grotesque and bloody things:
Neverborn: first tier of possession. Minor changes to their bodies. Multiple eyes on its legs; maybe a hand popping out of their mouths.
Diabolus: second tier of possession. Things are messy here. Hold your stomach.
Kaos: third tier of possession. Don’t even try to run away, it’s useless now.When?
Production starts as soon as we mint 100%.
We want to have more people in the art team, we are already aiming for some prop makers to help us bring these nightmares to life. We also want quality material for their creations. If an artist asks for a rotten denture to stitch on the doll’s belly, we will deliver it!
I do some polymer clay stuff and I was super excited to bring it to the mix. I would still just run things from behind the curtains as the creative director and get real pros to do the art. The idea was to transform our real Voodies assets into those gore monsters hahaha
But things have changed, the project matured and we decided to wipe it out from our goals.
First thing, we are building a brand to be accessible for all ages. Believe me, what I had in mind would scare even grown ups.
And on top of that, we don’t want to grow our supply with another collection. We love what Doodles did with their non-dilutive drop and we have our own plans to evolve that notion, so one NFT will be your key to multiple metaverses services. More on that in the future.
See images below of some inspirations for Phase 2. And let that rest in peace.
Buy Back Furnace
There were some projects sweeping their own floor back then. For a moment, it worked and their communities were happy. So, it sounded like a solid idea.
Well, turns out you can’t buy your own floor forever. It’s just a way to artificially raise the prices. If there’s no real project being developed, there will be no demand. At some point all these projects collapsed. Lesson learned.
Also, there’s another gold nugget here: don’t ever be obsessed about floor prices. Keep pushing, building and believing in your plan; you can’t control the market, but you can keep working and delivering.
What I bought
This was just a little section about my degen plays, but I grew tired of it fast and never missed discontinuing it.
Team in the same city
At the time, I thought about bringing only Brazilians to the Core Team. We have so few opportunities here related to the web3 space, I thought it would be possible to do this.
But we couldn’t find the exact profile necessary: trustworthy, skillful, English speaker and immersed in this culture.
So we had to look for foreigners to complete the team.
I’m very happy with our staff, we accomplished part of my initial plan, as the majority of the team is still Brazilian, and the gringos have all the qualities we were looking for.
Holders as customers
Web2 mentality. It changed as I was diving and researching more about web3. And to be totally honest, I think it was just a typo and I didn’t expand on that as I should.
And that’s it. Our first review of cringe and bad ideas.
As I said, some of them I wish to just delete and forget about.
But these logs are for oversharing. So let’s stick to it.
Hope you guys go easy on us 😄
🖤
