How to write an Origin Story: Web3 style.

A big part of the Nuclear Nerds project revolves around the creation of a community co-authored Origin Story that can be be leveraged in different mediums like film, television, gaming and more.

There are a lot of reasons we think this is an exciting idea and a viable model for the future IP franchise development, but we’ll save a deep dive on that for another time — today we’re here to walk you through a simple, visual progression of how our Origin Story development works.

Writing Prompts & Votes

The Nuclear Nerd Origin Story consists of 13 chapters that will be first brought to life as Comic Issues (before the mediums mentioned above) so we thought it would be fun to show people how we as a community first get to the finished Comic Book stage of an individual issue.

To begin at the beginning, as co-creators we started with an outline of the basic story that consisted of 12 chapters/sequences, along with a prologue, for a grand total of 13. That outline is best represented by the visual story map below.

Leveraging this outline as a starting point, for each Comic Issue we created a series of writing prompts to put in front of the community at nuclearnerds.io. Every Nerd Holder is then given the opportunity to respond to those prompts however they like. Then we, as the co-creators of the project, select the best ideas and put them in front of the community for a vote.

An example of a Story Prompt and the community’s favorite answer.

Written Narrative

Holders then pick their favorite answers and they are then woven into a narrative, which looks a lot like this …

Everything starts out as a written narrative without any specific formatting.

Comic Script

That narrative is then fashioned into a comic script.

In the next stage, we bring in a comic writer to format the story in a “drawable” way.

Pencils

That script is then sketched first as pencils…

Pencils are where we make the most changes & tweaks.

Inks

…then inks…

By the time we get to inks, we’re hopeful we’ve got all the details nailed down.

Colors & Letters

…then colors & letters…

Color is so important for setting the mood of the story world.

The Finished Product

…and finally, some finishing work with a little Magic Fairy Dust™.

Like we always say, the devils’ in the details, so we always look to add little surprises.

A Wasteland Story Universe

We then rinse & repeat for each chapter, slowly but surely building out our full blown Wasteland story universe.

After only a few issues, we can really see the world coming to life.

Rinse & Repeat

Prompts become ideas. Ideas get voted on. Winners get incorporated (as do some ideas that didn’t win.) The incorporated material get’s drawn and brought to life. And pretty soon, an entire story universe is built out before our eyes. Kudos to every member of the community — no matter how much or how little you contribute, the important thing is you are here supporting an entirely new model for bringing story worlds to life.

Onwards!