There's Only One Way to the Top of the Mountain (featuring Chef Goose)

(Any views expressed in the below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.)

Gm gm gm. Hope everyone is having a good week so far. I've decided to take refuge in a local mountain village for a few days and get some sun for the first time in what feels like months.

I'm 2/2 on avoiding severe injuries so far - I only denote that as I'm entirely a mediocre skier, and I'm pleased to report that I will continue to buy AVAX NFTs for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, every time I refresh the AVAX chart, I forget what it feels like to see green.

Mood:

I'll keep this week's update brief, as we have an amazing guest post further down that I don't want to dilute with my drivel. Keep on scrolling.

Market Update

On the back of what appears to be UpOnlySzn in the world of fungible tokens, we're continuing to see good volume in AVAX NFTs. Historically, big run-ups in an underlying token usually gives way to a pullback in NFT floors. I don't think we've seen that yet on Avalanche, which I think is partly good market sentiment and partly unabated degenerate behavior. Both are welcome.

Overlaying the AVAX/USD chart vs. NFT volume over the last month would indicate that this trend of equivalent exchange is moot (in this instance). Maybe this is a more prominent theme on ETH where gas spend and underlying token value is significantly higher, but something to keep tabs on. I'd be interested to see how high market cap projects have tracked in USD terms, may be something I incorporate in the near future.

Project Update

Top projects have done decently well this week. The whales are starting to encircle Chad Doge Supers (read: RockDog is accumulating) and popped from a 3 AVAX low last weekend. Stupifff continues to tease alfafa if you're looking in the right places, and I love a good egg hunt. Hobo Cats was a new mint earlier in the week, and the art is surprisingly good. 3D projects tend to not do well (only success story I can recall is Clone-X), but I'll probably dig in more on this project to cure my very evident ignorance.

Peons has also done pretty well, with a recent announcement indicating that they'll be moving forward with an art update. These did look pretty gross at .1 AVAX mint price, but their ~60x floor from mint does really enhance the art!

And now for APA and Golden Tokens... I'll let my friend Chef Goose do the honors.

Guest Post: Chef Goose from Party Mansion Studios

Hi, this is Chef Goose. I play a few roles at PM Studios - Project Management, Business Development, Marketing. As the mint for OOPA approaches, I wanted to take the time to go over who we are, how the collection came about, and what our vision is.

We are set to become the first major collection on Avalanche to heavily integrate the concept of Dynamic NFTs, with fashion at the forefront of our vision, and I want to talk about why I am genuinely excited about what’s to come.

What is PM Studios?

What started as The Party Mansion has been rebranded as PM Studios, which is now the organization overseeing Smol’s Landing and OOPA. Most people on the team will end up working on both.

Our vision for PM Studios is to be an organization that oversees quality products, as well as being the organization that will seek more revenue-generating activities in the future. We want to create a structure where we can be self-sustaining without always having to rely on new mints. In fact, after OOPA, we have absolutely no plans for another paid mint for a long time - We want to focus on building value for holders of Smol’s Landing and OOPA.

Internally, we make sure to distinguish Smol’s Landing and OOPA as different projects, different brands with different values. They attract different audiences, and that needs to be taken into account.

Why the transition to OOPA?

Ever since the mint of the original collection, there was an issue glooming over Avalanche Party Animals (APA) - The character was heavily based on an existing character, by the artist Matt Furie. Because of this, we wanted to move to another character that still kept the essence of the old APAs. Another reason for the transition is that, despite the first collection being well-liked, we were not satisfied with the quality of the art. We felt like it was limiting our ability to properly expand our brand. We still very much appreciate the experience with the original collection, and it remains a great, historically significant collection for Avalanche, but we wanted to move on to what we believe will allow us to be more than just a group of people convincing other people to buy a JPEG.

What work goes behind a collection of this magnitude?

I’ve learned a lot from being part of such a large project - Most people don’t realize how many people work with PM Studios. Here’s a quick overview of the team:

• Project founder, who does a little of everything (PartyChad)

• Back-End Lead (Kontrol)

• Front-End Lead (Ubeybi)

• Art Lead (Designooz)

• Community Manager (Giraffe)

• Marketing/BD/PM (Chef Goose)

• UI/UX dev (Ranom)

• Front-end dev (Roger)

• Content creator (Rex)

• A team of dedicated and talented mods

• 5 other artists

  • Pixel artist

  • Concept artist

  • Traits artist

  • Coloring artist

  • Animations artist

Plus, we sometimes contract people for specific, specialized jobs.

Seems like a lot, right? Now, let's go over what creating a collection like OOPA involves.

Art

First, obviously, is art creation. It started as early as August, and it has just been an onslaught of iterations. For the past 6 months, the art team has been going through trial-and-error. At first, it was about finding the right base character - That alone took a few months. Then, once we settled on the right base character, it was about identifying each problem with that base character and addressing them one-by-one. We reworked the ears, the eyes, the mouth, and let's not talk about the amount of traits we’ve created and thrown out.

To this day, we are still reworking some stuff, but we’re getting pretty close to a final result that we are satisfied with:

Website and Smart Contracts

We pride ourselves on high-quality work, and that’s shown in the delivery of our website, Oopa.io.

At the moment, three pages have been pushed live - Landing page, Marina Harbour, and Gallery. Each page comes with an immense amount of work.

Landing Page

• Required DAY and NIGHT version of the detailed island art

• UI/UX work

• Animations

Marina Harbour

• Required a few large pieces of art

• Section allowing people to exchange their APAs for OOPA tokens

• Involves developing smart contracts

• UI/UX work

Gallery

• Involved a lot of UI/UX work to make each page user-friendly

• The Podium required a lot of attention to make smooth

As also, as a bonus, added a media player recently which contains music that we own. We’re still working on it, but it is fully functional and we have more coming up regarding the music.

On top of those pages, we are currently working on:

• Mint page

• Reveal page

• Staking platform

• Explorer page

• Page for the Wardrobe/Dynamic NFT feature

• And other pages we can’t yet announce!

One of the things that most excites me about this collection is that, usually, once a collection mints, you have to wait several months for utility to be ready. It can be anti-climactic. In our case, most of the utility will be ready within the first month, with some ready at launch - We’ll be hitting the ground running with features that are either not yet available on Avalanche, or that push existing features to another level! We’ll then get to work on adding on top of that utility!

Marketing, Business Development and Community

Website is built - what’s next? Well, we can have the best produc, but we need to get that product known to the public. So, community, marketing and business development.

This involves:

• Preparing a marketing plan that goes over the message we want to communicate, and how we plan on communicating it

• Collecting data about our holders and trying to adapt our approach consequently

• Preparing content for key announcements

  • We have recently hired a content creator who is behind our most recent videos. These videos also are not as simple as 1-2-3 VOILA. They require coming up with an idea, finding the assets (images and sound), putting it all together, gathering feedback after the first iteration, changing it to produce a final version that we are satisfied with. And this is for each video. Here are a few examples of this work:

• Getting into contact with as many projects as possible to see what kinds of partnerships we can make happen

  • In our case, we tried not to focus too much on WL giveaway partnerships - They’re too simple. Yes, we’ll have some, but we were trying to get something more significant. We managed to get a few that stand out, most of which haven’t happened yet.

    • Ripperz, TurdDAO, and more to come

• Regular interactions with the community to keep them up-to-date

• Organizing community events

• Creating memes to help motivate the community to be involved

  • Of course, we also use a lot of community-created memes which are often even better than ours, and Ripperz created some for us as well

And all of that is without the dozens of hours that were put into creating documents to outline our research on:

• General research on as many NFT projects as possible, to learn what is being done in the space

• How other project integrated dynamic NFTs

• How other projects do marketing and community management

• Different types of fashion

• How is fashion marketed

While also doing all of this for OOPA, we are going through similar processes with Smol’s Landing in parallel.

What’s the vision for OOPA?

As we are getting close to mint, we are already planning for the months to come after. Our vision is for OOPA to be a collection that keeps adding to its dynamic NFTs in various ways, the most obvious one being with new traits which will keep our high quality standards.

We intend on pushing the fashion-side heavily, and hope to partner with real brands. Imagine, adding existing clothing from real brands as traits for your OOPAs. We want to keep feeding the collection with trait drops, as well as finding other ways to reward holders and trait-collectors.

See you on mint that, and keep up-to-date with news on Twitter; The month of February is going to be loaded with updates.

Conclusion

Thanks again to Chef Goose for an amazingly great overview of OOPA and the Party Mansion team. Give those fellows a follow if you're interested in what's to come (or keep on reading Mint Avalanche). Ideally - both.

Back to the slopes, I'll catch you guys next week.

Cheers,

Chuck