pixlmaxi

Bought my first ever @sappyseals!! Arf arf!?

Over the years, we’ve made a lot of changes to the brand, the logo, the characters, the art style, and everything in between, but never really formalised any of it until now. That was because I was never fully 100% happy with what Sappy was at any given moment; there was a massive divergence between what Sappy was, and what *I* knew Sappy could be, and commiting to those earlier versions felt extremely premature. Ossifying these things didn't feel like the correct thing to do, especially when I knew deep down that they would have to be aggressively scrubbed away or retconned (which gets really hard to do once a brand starts to genuinely penetrate and build momentum). There was also a divergence between what Sappy started as, what other people wanted it to become, and what I wanted it to be. Early on, I did see Sappy as more of an art project than a traditional "brand", which is why I leaned so heavily into memetics at a time when practically nobody else was doing it, and why I treated the character more like something alive and culturally reactive--much closer to how people think about memecoins nowadays and not too dissimilar to performance art. I also hated the word “brand” and the corporate aura it brought to the community & surrounding subculture. Being honest, I still think there’s something correct in that instinct. NFTs derive most of their speculative value (aside from the occasional airdrop narrative) from the community and the interconnected social clusters around them, not from “IP growth” in the classical sense. At the same time, it felt like there was enormous pressure (especially in comparison with other PFP projects) from speculators to turn the Thing into something bigger and larger scale than it is right now, because in startup [& crypto] culture, growth is treated as the ultimate metric, and it was applied directly to NFTs despite mostly being antithetical to the IP business. Internally I wanted to avoid this, slow down and take time to figure out what the brand should be, which sounds like total crazy talk in the crypto world because there's a lot of pressure (rightfully so) to grow grow grow, at all costs. We still did it of course, because I'm way too competitive of a person not to, but I think it was very evident from the outside that my heart really wasn't in it (at that point in time, chasing those specific reasons). My dopamine receptors might be fried, but I still find directing/creating a meme that people genuinely find funny more rewarding than watching a random reel of ours get 40M views or having billions of GIPHY views or whatever other metric sounds good to say out loud. What makes this all so strange is that NFTs are hyperspeculative assets that need constant cultural fuel to keep the surrounding network expanding faster than the floor price alone would justify. That model is in many ways at odds with how truly loved brands are formed. Real brands are much more malleable, they take time, they evolve; they’re not meant to be frozen in place on day one, and they're not meant to be subject to a quorum when more drastic changes that disturb the status quo are made. Some of the most adored brands globally took years, or even decades for the artist/creatives to actually hone in on their essence that was then expanded upon and delivered to the world. And I think to some degree, crypto and NFTs create such insane mental dissonance for builders. They train you to focus on things that aren’t actually important, usually through confirmation bias or false signals--of course it would; when you look around and see some random builder making some logically illogical absurd Thing that somehow (unsustainably) prints tens of millions overnight, it becomes very easy to convince yourself that the weird Thing is the thing that works. That's the thing that finally cracked the crypto formula, that's the model that works, that's what with a little iteration could lead to the golden goose that every retail investor, VC investor, and every crypto founder has been chasing since the first smart contract was created. It's somewhat embarassing to admit, but I spent years of my life believing that "tokenomics" was a real thing or that /if you just tweaked [insert random weird crypto-native variable] just slightly enough it could work/. It's different now that most of the speculative juice has left the industry and everything has deflated, clarity is much more abundant now. Another embarassing thing to admit is that a lot of the things we are doing for Sappy now are things I would have done years ago...if the brand was founded outside of crypto, and if I listened to my gut earlier. There really is no excuse for that, other than psyopping myself into believing that there was some special "model that can work for NFTs", or that building a crypto-founded character had to take a non-traditional route, or that what peers were (also) currently doing was the correct way to build, and not just appeasing a shrinking echochamber whilst playing the ponzi token fugazzi game. I wish I could have learned these things a little faster, but I also did start out as a tech bro undergrad that knew next to nothing about brands or art or IP outside of random video games I grinded. I didn't participate in consumer culture or fashion or anything similar at all, I knew next to nothing about business outside of briefly being into crypto/blockchains, and was purely operating off of my gut feelings and what seemed correct to me. Arguably that gut instinct was pretty precise, but the inexperience & uncomfortability is what led to not being able to pull the trigger on certain things or execute in the sharpest way possible. In truth, there is no other way it could have gone because most of those things had to be experienced and there is no real way for it to be crash coursed. This post was supposed to be a two-liner about how I'm redoing the brand properly from the ground up, with unique aesthetics, a cohesive universe with real character development, comics, longer form content (thanks to AI), sharpening every touchpoint, creating proper funnels to guide normies to our products and become buyers/users, but it ended up becoming this long-winded explainer of how we even got here in the first place. Which is a little poetic, because the path to the end is never straightforward. [Also sorry to rug you but this logo isn't actually a final logo I just like many aspects of it and what it represents]

@wabdoteth @dim8765 @JoelSappySeal Can we sign up for testing?

@dim8765 @JoelSappySeal pretty much done now will be launching soon for a small group to iron out any bugs, and then will be live on the app store

Spent the past few months upskilling our artists with AI and automating everything. All of our reels & gifs (below) are fully AI at this point, and our content production is around 10x the scale now. Couldn't get consistent motion a year+ ago, now you can't tell the difference.

@wabdoteth That being said, I wouldn’t say I have experimented enough with codex, so I rest my case in that regard

@wabdoteth Claude is definitely on top of the game and consistently reaches great results in benchmarks. Weird statement that because of inconsistensies or it being expensive it suddenly makes it a ”normie opinion” to prefer it. I use all models at work and definitely prefer claude

you can instantly decipher if someone is goycattle based on one simple question: "do you prefer claude over openai?" it instantly exposes whether someone is resistant to elaborate marketing psyops, has capacity for delayed gratification, and conveys their overall sentience

Omnia's slay the spire inspired game mode surprisingly brings a lot of fun additions to the format, but also pets and the flexibility of the combat really shines here Being able to design a boss as a Deity battle with some of our pets is super fun given how epic they are(biased)

Starting to release some vibecoded Roblox games. The first one we're trialing is Puzzles with Friends which I believe is the only co-op puzzle game on the platform (no idea why nobody has done this yet). Have some other tycoon games in the works next.

Excited for the latest @ExploreOmnia update (March 13, 2026)! December: Massive QoL polish since Dec playtest — faster loading, UI revamps, custom pet/loadout builders with stat editing & 3D previews. Leaderboards live for 1v1/2v2. Jan/Feb: Avatars, searchable moves, Unity upgrade. March: Bug fixes, open world social hub prep for queuing PvE/PvP.Coming: Roguelite PvE mode, progression to unlock pets/moves, full economy later. Core modules almost ready — PvE + PvP + Open World = Omnia magic! Stay sappy! #OmniaGame #PetBattler #Gacha #Anime #Brawler #RPG #OpenWorld

@wabdoteth @llamaonthebrink Additive -> core = launching/trading?

@pixlmaxi @llamaonthebrink there is a defi angle for consumer apps but it’s more of an additive one than the core business model

The resiliency of pumpfun’s revenue is honestly impressive Who would have thought that peer-to-peer rugs are a $500M/year business model

@wabdoteth @llamaonthebrink So is sappy’s core launching or trading?

@wabdoteth @llamaonthebrink Hey uh… which one are we

@llamaonthebrink there are two business models in crypto: - facilitating the launching of p2p rugs - facilitating the trading of p2p rugs

@primay_eth @VitaDiLuca It’s ironic, because your and others negative attitude most likely caused their mood change. It’s mentally draining to just check telegram as a holder, I can’t even imagine how it is as a founder

their mood just seems faded, you can feel it too i think, we don’t see the same motivation/energy from the past after all these years, even if it’s a playtest, hype the thing a bit, show your product with love, instead of just tweeting the link maybe they care, but seems like they lost motivation only my feeling

and i thought we could send $pixl to $100m guess i was wrong, send it to 0

sappy seals looking good here

@primay_eth @VitaDiLuca it’s literally the earliest public alpha. Would be stupid to go hard on marketing at that stage Your logic: They care = doing what you want They don’t care = they maybe considered other factors and it wasnt the right move

@primay_eth @VitaDiLuca Just because you wanted them to tweet that doesn’t make it the obvious move. Have you considered they actively didn’t do it because it wasnt the right move (which I fully agree on btw). It would be unneccessary to do it at this stage of the game.

@primay_eth @VitaDiLuca Aren’t you a SWE yourself? You should know I’m sure they genuinely thought they will make it on time, but then a bug appeared or something broke. It’s just exactly what every other company goes through Being hopeful of shipping something you are passionate about isn’t a shocker

@pixlmaxi @VitaDiLuca Then why did they hype us like that during the years? I mean if you are not sure to deliver, just build in silence instead of selling the “omnia is the next pokemon” thesis Of course a team of 3 devs cant deliver like rockstar.

@primay_eth @VitaDiLuca Are you illiterate?

@pixlmaxi @VitaDiLuca You started the comparison of rockstar/sappy labs

@primay_eth @VitaDiLuca Of course not, but try to see the point I’m trying to make. Even a company as massive as Rockstar has delays. You’re framing the Omnia delay like it’s the biggest letdown in history. If Rockstar can’t deliver on time, why expect an indie company to do so?

yeah but my point was rockstar proved themselves in the past with all their games. They can delay the latest game how much they want. sappy labs doesnt have a past at all, they didnt prove themselves at all. They made a lot of broken promises, they delaying omnia since 2 years Not the same case.

@primay_eth @VitaDiLuca You’re also obviously missing my point. I mentioned Rockstar in the comparison that they also ”lie” per your definition because they have delayed their game

@pixlmaxi @VitaDiLuca “not able to draw parallels and think critically” bro you compared rockstar, a company that proved itself releasing multiple successful games since years, with the sappy labs, a company that still did not release 1 single game in 5 years of existence