Biography
While most projects use the NFT's description field as a more detailed explanation for their collection, we decided to take a more personalized approach. Every ronin has a unique background story made for them. Perhaps a tale about past trials, struggles they endured, how their upbringing was, what their strengths and weaknesses are or stories of how dorky, loving, mysterious or hateful they can be.
We tried to diversify as much as we could, but understood that at some point we were bound to become repetitive. Even letting AI generate random story lines didn't really work in that aspect, since it was very quick to re-use previously told storylines and the stories in itself weren't really fitting, innovative or compelling as we hoped it would be.
The conjuring
The best approach turned out to be a mixture of the two (human labor and AI):
We write in as much detail as possible who the character is and what the description should include by having a lengthy staredown with the ronin (we don't like to look at them anymore because of the months we've spend doing this).
Prompt AI with our detailed description to generate a well-constructed storyline.
Rewrite the result since these tools still have quite a noticeable robotic feel to their writing.
A never-ending story
A fun (not so fun) fact is that the creation of these biographies took us the longest to fix, since it required so much effort out of us to try and remain creative and imaginative for such long periods of time.
The shapeshift
As we worked through the collection we started to give thought to the possibility for holders to change their character's storylines. And it kind of makes sense to allow this, since it's not always about how we as the creators perceive things. Even more so about how the holder envisions the character to be. It reminded us of the times where people started to buy NFTs simply because they felt connected with their avatar on a personal level.
Making this process completely automatic, which is possible using Base64 metadata (see Dynamic), did give us slight concerns. Especially if we made this a free thing to do:
The descriptions would likely become incoherent if you looked at the collection as a whole.
There wouldn't be any prevention of badly-written, NSFW, too explicit, foul or unrelated content.
Thus we decided that at first this mechanism will be categorized as a manual labor performed by us, while the holder is able to describe in detail what the character is like or what the biography should incorporate. This will be made available through a dashboard on our website. We receive this request for a change and execute it using the same approach explained in The conjuring. Once we deliver the result the holder will have the option to either accept or decline the change, where declining would automatically refund the paid amount, completely on-chain.
When automation of metadata changes becomes possible (see Dynamic, especially the sub-chapter URI) we'll introduce more automated features. Hinting towards the possibility to make this more streamlined and let the owners have more control over the way the stories are written. And if the community isn't bothered by the two concerns above and wants full-control over the biographies without our interference, then we shall give this to them.
Connection "Most don't value art for what it is, but for what it tells them."
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