Chubby Chicks Art Club

Our mascot
Limited edition Chubby Chick with a Step Finance Shellmet

Inspiration

When we look at the developing nature of the NFT ecosystem, it's clear that the demand for ownership is derived from the values associated with the project itself. As this space continues to evolve, early indications that connection to oneself via an avatar, could be a direction where meaning is not only an extrinsically derived factor, but one of intrinsic connection. Chubby Chicks is a Solana NFT experiment, to explore the use case for an owner's closer connection to an avatar. Chubby Chicks will be one of the pioneering NFTs to generate a fair mint and ensure a more equitable launch for those participating.

What it does

By adopting a Chubby Chick, you're inheriting its traits, its mood, and its whole manifestation. This Chubby Chick can be used to represent an individual's expression to the world, and utilised across social media channels. It is the unspoken 'vibe check'. One would own several Chubby Chicks with different personalities and be able to "change their mood" on social networks such as on Twitter, by switching out avatars.

How we built it

Concept stage: Determined scope of the project, and came up with several ideas for animals that would have relatable personalities and would be inclusively attractive across the board. Determined that 'baby' versions of the animals have less of a life story to them, and would be subconsciously more attractive given hard wiring for humans to be drawn towards infantile living creatures.
Development: An illustrator was brought onto the project to begin storyboarding and sketching early ideas for the collection. CTO algorithmically generated all possible combinations, and categorised into 'general' and 'rare' attributes. Collection is stored on Arweave, and scheduled for launch on Solanart. We are aiming for fair mint, using Metaplex's Candy Machine if feasible.

3: Community: A Discord community was formed, which attracted early adopters and speculators in the NFT community, which organically grew and spilled over to our Twitter account. Various community-building activities were successfully executed to form a self-managing community that requires no centralised management. We partnered with other Solana projects for early attention, including Step Finance and Sollamas.

Challenges we ran into

There were some unique challenges with the art generation given each unique type of element had to be individually classified, which became apparent after the first algorithmic generation event yielded some undesirable results, such as two of the same types of elements overlapping (eg, eyes).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Speed: We were able to go from Concept to Development within 3 days, with development projected to 14 days, during which the community developed and established. All of this while maintaining the quality and integrity of the project's ethos.

Fair Mint: We are evaluating Metaplex CandyMachine to provide a more equitable participation in the Chubby Chicks generation event.

What we learned

It takes many unique skillsets to birth an idea to a reality in such a short amount of time. We relied on the knowledge and skillset of experts in NFTs, the Solana ecosystem, engineers, community members, marketers, designers and others who became interested in the project.