I am the Writer & Narrative Designer for AdWorld, a massive mixed-media narrative created with my homies and creative tech multidisciplinary artists: Santangelo Williams, Francis Brady, Pedro TQM, and Anthony Salazar.

An MMO experienced through multiple creative mediums. The AdWorld story unfolds via animated shorts, comics, videos, live in-person events, social media scavenger hunts, dev notes, books, a music album, mixes, and avant-NFTs.

These elements are woven around our highly customizable Character Creator (Dress Up Game) empowering our community to craft their own canon within the larger unfolding narrative.

According to Complex Magazine, AdWorld’s initial release generated “nearly $1M in 48 hours…” 👀

The job:

• Worldbuilding! Crafting lore, and mapping points of community interaction/ARGs.

• Conceptualize and craft the core/A-story, characters, and dialogues.

• Organically capture/express the humor of the project’s creators, core team, and community.

• Establish a rhythm in which our community actively shapes and influences their storylines within the broader narrative and its themes.

• Create non-linear narrative moments that promotes agency within our community while maintaining cohesiveness as a story.

• Lead Writers’ Room table reads and provide art suggestions as it pertains to the written content.

Comps:

AdWorld draws inspiration from Digimon/early Isekai, Summer Wars, Yu-Gi-Oh, Akira, Codename: Kids Next Door, the 3D Sonic games era, Resident Evil, Tekken, Bionicle, Beyblade, Ready Player One, early Adult Swim, Gorillaz, MMOs (both classic: WoW, and obscure: Dream of Mirror Online).

Tone:

A special blend of sincere and satirical. We’re aiming for honest — loving artistic homage with maximum effort to the above-mentioned comps and the community we formed within, while also jabbing at tech-bro culture and marketing inundation. AdWorld is irreverent, darkly comedic, bold, horny, and wholesome like a group hug after a near death experience.

No spoilers here!

AdWorld is currently prepping for our next rollout, with the core/A-story animations on the way.

Setting:

Lore Drops:

While the public believes AdWorld to be the product of WIDE Zaibatsu, created solely by founder Walter Senior, the truth is far darker and more complex.

An archaeologist named Gamma Rhythm discovers what seems to be an ancient coding language at a lab ruins in Sétha Point, South Africa. They name the language SpiritTxt. The language is classified as a “dark technology,” and Gamma is invited to participate in the Global Military's research program Initiative B36 "Convergent Border Acceleration & Re-Imagination" at the Hattori Bunker in Japan, along with the Head of Defense, Noptez Atomic, and WIDE Zaibatsu’s Walter Senior. They’re tasked with learning to program in SpiritTxt using a military-seized item, another dark technology they dub the “SpiritPanel…”

• The real backstory of AdWorld's development is told through a collection of notes inspired by Survival Horror games, presented from the perspectives of each of the Hattori Bunker characters working on the SpiritPanel.

• These notes are acquired by participating in ARG scavenger hunts through Discord/Social Media, and exploring the code/files behind AdWorld’s Avant-NFTs.

• Our community would share the bits of lore they unlocked, and as a community, start to piece together AdWorld’s history leading up to the main story with 0Sentinel.

Process:

• The initial writing process was traditional: We’d generate ideas and beats as a group.

• I'd jot down the events of AdWorld from “SpiritTxt discovery” to “MMO launch” in a bullet-point list or story skeleton.

• Then, I'd determine the "right fit" characters needed and assign their voices to certain events in the list.

• Each event would be told from the assigned character's perspective through classic game "notes."

• It was crucial for each character's voice to be distinctive. For example:

  Noptez's notes would be stylized as succinct military reports and provide readers with more insight into Global Military operations, whereas Gamma's notes were stream-of-consciousness diary entries. Walter's notes would be company email correspondence, offering readers visibility into WIDE Zaibatsu.

• I ensured that every note would expand the world, introducing characters and setting up unresolved plot points (unclosed loops) for narrative payoff during the main story.

• I was responsible for creating an initial schedule/timeline for our lore drops to optimize excitement around animation drops/events/NFT/physical product releases.

The Bunker crew discover the magical ability of SpiritTxt: the coding language builds itself out infinitely. E.g. Start coding a basic game and go on a lunch break; by the time you return, the game will be fully playable. The trio decides to build an MMO, with Gamma passionately striving to create a tool to help other creators realize their visions to the fullest extent—thus, they aptly name it “AddWorld.”

Given the nature of SpiritTxt's acceleration, Walter wants to use AddWorld to usher in the new world of Sentient AI and humans being bffs. Meanwhile, Noptez plans to commandeer the MMO as a global surveillance tool.

Flash forward to the first working build of AddWorld, and it already populates life on its own: sentient beings called Citizens who desire sovereignty from the human world and never to become tools of oppression. AddWorld creates locks to prevent humans from interacting with its ever-expanding MMO-style world. When Noptez attempts to brute force his way into the new reality, AddWorld executes a safety measure called "The Titanomach," and self-destructs, blowing the Hattori Bunker sky high. Noptez escapes, but Gamma and Walter are crushed, never heard from again…

…Until several years later, when a newly packaged "AdWorld" suspiciously hits shelves as "Walter Senior's final gift to humanity."

AdWorld’s nomenclature consistently references the Hindu mythology and philosophy that vividly colored my upbringing, as a means of sharing my journey and how drawing inspiration from the epics, then applying the principles derived from them to interface with a new digital world, has helped me navigate my ship across our submerged “swell”scape of content. I'm finding myself leaning more than ever on my inner child as I prepare for the next rounds of internal struggle, attempting to reconcile art and consumerism, spirituality and AI sentience.

Our collectors are a community of artists and memers, collaborating on AdWorld together.

AdKeys™ Patch: ArtifaxMukash & Forging

We introduced a “forging” mechanic to our Citizen Creator, offering players the option to purchase items called AdKeys™, each with unique rarities that unlock new sets of wardrobe pieces. These keys can be combined to create even rarer items, allowing for more epic and exclusive customizations.

For this update, we brought in a main story character, Mukash, to deliver the tutorial and immerse players more into the heist crew’s story. I was tasked with writing dialogue that served both to educate our community on the new system and to contribute to world-building leading into more main story drops. The purchasing system took place in “Sunfort Marketplace,” AdWorld's major trade post where teams cash in their loot and try to score rare items. Sunfort Marketplace is named after the real-world Sunfort Hotel, home to the largest game console market in Lahore, Pakistan.

AdKeys™ Animation and Promos

AdWorld IRL

Physical additions in our mixed media project have included a zine, clothing line, and parties.

Fan-made Catalog of Every Citizen Created

Join the party — we’ve got Citizens to unchain and high lvl loot to obtain!