Dastardly Ducks Recipe
More steps went into making our NFTs than many seem to realize — even those coming to us in search of advice.
Since the breakthrough success of the Dastardly Ducks NFTs, an enormous number of people have come to me asking questions about how we did it. I’ve written about what factors contributed to its success, but I have not explained the end-to-end process of doing something like what we did in one place.
We worked on this as a pair, often jumping around and finishing what parts we could when we could, so this is not meant to be a rigid set of instructions that must be completed one step at a time.
Art Assets
You need great-looking art assets that offer you the ability to have a wide variety of traits. For the ducks, Fumeiji used Procreate on an iPad Pro to generate all the possible layers, trying them out in various combinations to ensure that they all worked. This then let us export the file as a folder of PNGs.
Rarity Table
While you can mix and match traits entirely randomly, the most successful collections, like ours, make some traits more rare than others. For every “slot” on the NFT where there is variation — which for the ducks included everything from background colors to the type of tuft on the duck’s head — a distribution needs to be crafted adding up to 100%
Generator
Though some of the most advanced projects are generated entirely on the blockchain, like many projects, the ducks were pre-generated. This requires being a script that can take both your rarity table and folder of layers and output the necessary data used by your NFTs. This should include both the JSON file with the token’s metadata and the image itself. We have open sourced the generator for the ducks, which is unpolished JavaScript. Apologies in advance.
IPFS Preload
All of the token and image data should be preloaded to IPFS, ideally with a service like Piñata that allows you to ensure the files are properly seeded. This will require two folders on IPFS for a project like Dastardly Ducks: images and token metadata. With our generator, we had to find and replace the {IPFS_PATH} in every token metadata file with the IPFS folder to which the images were uploaded before uploading the token metadata too.
Smart Contract
In order to enable buyers to mint new NFTs, we deployed a custom smart contract that was programmed to only ever allow 10,000 NFTs to be minted, to allow bulk discounts, and to leverage Azuki’s ERC721A to get gas costs down rather significantly. The contract, visible on both Etherscan and GitHub, creates new DASDUK non-fungible tokens on Ethereum that are then linked to the IPFS data from the previous steps through the use of overriding the _baseURI() function.
We published the Dastardly Ducks smart contract on ETH mainnet, which cost about $1,000 even when gas was low. The exact same code would work on chains like Polygon, though Ethereum, at least as of now, tends to attract the most eager buyers with a lot to spend.
Website
All 10,000 primary duck sales were done through our website. This website uses React, a popular frontend JavaScript library, to send requests to the smart contract signed by the user’s wallet. This then collected the initial sale revenue at the same time the NFT itself was minted on the blockchain from the same function call.
While we have had a number of resales on OpenSea and LooksRare since launch, they were never a part of our strategy for raising enough money through this project fast enough to save our farm.
Conclusion
There are a lot of different ways to do an NFT project, but those trying to release a generative collection like Dastardly Ducks often take shortcuts that, while they will not prevent success, are less likely to attract the serious players in this space. Simply putting your art directly up on a site like OpenSea is a perfectly fine strategy, but it is less likely to be a runaway success.
As I have expressed before, we are extremely lucky this succeeded so well for an unknown, independent project with no real marketing behind it. I cannot promise you will experience the same success. It took a lot of parts working together to craft these cute creatures, but my professional background as a software engineer helped enormously. You must decide what approach is right for you.
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