There's no denying that creating thousands of digital collectibles by hand is impressive. Some might call that a work of pure genius.
September 27, 2023
From Boogers to Stash: Building A Hand-Generated collection with Bueno
That's why Toy Boogers, a collection of 3,333 handmade digital collectibles, is a masterpiece of a project. It's part of the reason that it has nearly 2,000 collectors, 30+ thousand followers on Twitter, garnered the attention of TIME Studios and put the wheels in motion for an animated series deal.
As impressive as Toy Boogers is, it's not surprising that a project like this is challenging and time-consuming. It's partly why the creator of Toy Boogers decided to take a slightly different direction with Toy Stash, an offshoot collection of the Toy Boogers project. Instead of making each collectible by hand, the Toy Boogers and Toy Stash creators opted to generate the collection using Bueno.
We sat down with one of the team members to learn more about Toy Stash and how Bueno was able to help advance the long-term vision of the entire project.
The story of Toy Stash
So what exactly is Toy Stash, and what is its relationship to Toy Boogers?
In simple terms, Toy Stash is a hand-generated collection based on the beloved hamster character named Stash, who made his first appearance in the original Toy Boogers collection.
But that's the basic details behind the collection because the lore of this cool project goes much deeper. Here's how the team described the backstory:
Stash, the beloved Hamster character, is the mastermind behind what has been happening in the Toy Boogers universe, and his plan continues to unfold! Stash was the one who stuck the booger on the teleportation machine's focusing crystal in the original Toy Boogers' backstory! As you all know, this caused the wild transformations to occur to the Toy Boogers characters, just as Stash had devised.
With an awesome backstory to the collection, it begged the question of why the creators chose to make the original Toy Boogers collection 100% by hand. When we asked the creator, the answer made complete sense:
"When I started making Toy Boogers in early 2021, I could not find any tools or developers that knew how to make generative art, especially with all the layers and toys that I use. Most devs were completely booked at the time, and I couldn't find one to work with, so I just decided that I would start to make them by hand."
This answer was too perfect because it validated the mission behind both the incredible creativity of the original Toy Boogers project and the essential need for tools like Bueno that digital collectible creators desperately needed.
Building Toy Stash with Bueno
While a handmade collection is nothing short of incredible, creating a project like this was a massive challenge for the Toy Booger creators. While many creators today expect to build a collection in days or weeks, building Toy Boogers was a months-long process, "Making a few thousand NFTs by hand is extremely hard and laborious to manage and produce, it took me six months straight to make Toy Boogers."
A few of the hand-generated Toy Stash characters.
There's nothing wrong with taking time to handcraft a collection. Still, when it came down to expanding the project and increasing accessibility to more collectors, the founders knew a switch was necessary:
"We wanted to expand our membership tokens and provide our current holders with a free claim, so a larger number collection was essential. Toy Boogers and Kitbash Boogers combined are only 4,444, so Toy Stash allows more people to enter into the Toy Boogers fam with a membership token and at a reasonable price. So for Toy Stash, generative technology was the only way."
The Toy Boogers team turned to Bueno for this technology, which set the wheels in motion for building the next phase of this project.
Why Toy Stash Chose Bueno
The Toy Boogers team were fans and colleagues of Pablo Stanley long before his journey with digital collectibles. Once they heard about Bueno Generator, they knew it was a tool that could help bring Toy Stash to life.
Another significant factor that played a part in choosing the Bueno Generator was the complexity of building the collection, "My collection had an extremely long list of rules and it got ridiculously complex. This is because I have almost 200 body shapes and other traits that all had at least some limitations of what they could be paired with."
The team needed a tool that would allow them to test designs and pairing quickly. While pairing traits by hand with the previous collection was a weeks-long process, the Toy Stash team found that "With Bueno and generative technology, you see how things match up immediately."
A Hand-Generated Collection
But the creators of Toy Stash used the Bueno Generator in a novel way. Instead of allowing the tools to generate the entire collection, the Toy Stash team took a different approach to building these tokens:
"I manually picked the traits I liked best, and then I did something crazy. I picked and built from scratch all 11,111 of my Toy Stash NFTs. Doing this allowed me to pick the best combinations and colors. So Toy Stash is a 100% "Hand-Generated" collection. Instead of letting the generator do all the work, I used the Bueno tools to curate, customize, and build the entire collection, one Toy Stash at a time!"
This novel method of building the project highlights the Bueno Generator's versatility and the endless creativity artists can unlock with the toolkit. Making a collection of digital collectibles boils down to the artist's and their team'steam's vision.
Of course, everyone will have their own unique experience while building a project, but when asked what they'd do differently, this is what the team had to say:
"I don't think I'd do anything differently; it worked perfectly for me in what I wanted to do and create. I was impressed with Bueno, and I'm proud of the art I made with it. It was so fun to use, and I'm forever grateful to the Bueno team for making these tools and providing them to the community!"
Advice for other creators who want to try Bueno
With hours of experience testing the toolkit, we wanted to see what the Toy Stash team recommended for artists and creatives who are curious about working with Bueno. Once again, they provided a quote that did not disappoint:
"I would say just jump into it! It’s so much fun and it builds up fast! A few traits of each category and you can start generating the collection and start to see what it looks like! It’s so exciting to see your characters coming to life and it’s addicting! You keep adding traits and the collection grows in depth and nuance, it’s an amazing artistic process and endeavor, was so much fun! Do it even if you don’t want to mint them, but just for fun, its an awesome creative tool just to play with as well!"
We couldn't have said it better ourselves.
