Dragon Days

A branching manga with on-chain collectibles

Sector: Gaming & interactive media · Year: 2026 · dragondays.ink

Summary

An interactive manga where reader choices fork the story and persist, published in seven languages, with Solana NFTs carrying mutable game statistics.

Challenge

A serialised visual story with real branching is a content problem disguised as an engineering problem. Every fork multiplies the art required, continuity has to hold across branches a given reader will never see, and the whole thing has to be readable on a phone in seven languages without shipping seven builds.

Approach

Built a narrative engine with persistent reader state, so a choice made in one chapter changes what a later chapter shows rather than merely branching once and reconverging.
Constrained the generative art pipeline in code — character sheets, continuity rules and identity constraints enforced at generation time, not caught in review.
Localised into French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Arabic through a runtime overlay keyed on the source string, so a copy change propagates to every language in the same deploy.
Minted collectibles on Solana with authority-mutable metadata, so an asset’s in-game statistics can change without reissuing the token.
Content-hashed every published page asset after discovering the CDN was serving month-old art from an immutable cache long after the origin was correct.

Outcome

A live serialised property with a reader-facing app, a localisation pipeline covering six translated languages, and a repeatable daily mint process.

Stack

React, TypeScript, Node, MongoDB, Solana, Metaplex