AdWorld: Dress Up Game

I am the Writer, Narrative Designer, and Lead Game Designer for AdWorld, a massive mixed-media narrative created in collaboration with multidisciplinary artists Santangelo Williams, Francis Brady, Pedro TQM, and Anthony Salazar.

A story about an MMORPG built with an ancient, supernatural coding language, experienced through multiple creative mediums. AdWorld unfolds through animated shorts, live in-person events, social media scavenger hunts (ARGs), art books, a music album, and a collection of video games.

Our first game was a highly customizable Dress Up Game (character creator), empowering our community to craft their own canon within the larger unfolding narrative.

Currently in development: A unique adventure game where the player uses rhythm mechanics to execute a series of high-octane heists. Devlog launching soon!

My Role:

Writing:

• Worldbuilding: Crafting lore, a branching narrative, and mapping points of community interaction.

• Conceptualizing and crafting the main-game campaign story, characters, and dialogue.

• Organically capturing and expressing the humor of the project’s creators, core team, and community.

• Establishing a cadence in which our community actively shapes and influences their storylines within AdWorld’s broader narrative and themes, maintaining story cohesiveness.

• Leading Writers’ Room table-reads and providing art direction as it pertains to the written content.

Design:

• Top-level game design, mechanics, and systems design.

• Creating design documents, schematics, and reference imagery.

• Developing gameplay that honors storytelling intentions, ensuring narrative-mechanic harmony.

Setting:

"AdWorld has evolved into the largest social hub and marketplace in existence. Players create an account, known as an AdCitizen, and step into humanity's new reality—"the next-gen destroyer” and magnum opus conceived by tech icon Walter Senior, the visionary founder of WIDE Zaibatsu."

The story is set in a dystopian, brutally glitchy, consumerist hellscape dominated by absurdist advertising, flex culture, and corporate warfare. This virtual world is built on an ancient coding language, which reveals itself to have dark, supernatural powers.

Tags:

Futurist, Cyberpunk, Techno-Mysticism, Glitchcore, Post-Apocalyptic

Story:

The story of AdWorld follows the journey of 0Sentinel, a legendary crew of digital outlaws forced to rebuild their reputation after a monumentally disastrous heist gone wrong. As they pull off adrenaline-fueled heists and battle rival factions beyond the borders of ‘AdWorld,’ they uncover an evil plot that threatens the very fabric of their digital world. Corporate espionage collides with supernatural AI, and 0Sentinel must rise from heisters to heroes in order to save both players and sentient AI alike.

Tone:

A special blend of sincerity and satire. We’re aiming for an honest, loving artistic homage to the comps mentioned below and the community we formed within, while also taking jabs at “tech-bro” culture and marketing inundation.

AdWorld is irreverent, darkly comedic, a little horny, and wholesome—like a group hug after a near-death experience.

Comps:

AdWorld draws inspiration from Digimon (classic Isekai), Summer Wars, Yu-Gi-Oh, Akira, Codename: Kids Next Door, the 3D Sonic games era, Resident Evil, Tekken, Bionicle, early 2000s Adult Swim, Gorillaz, and obscure MMOs like Dream of Mirror Online.

Lore Drops:

While players believe AdWorld to be a product of WIDE Zaibatsu, created by its founder Walter Senior and iconic pop star-turned-archaeologist GammaRhythm, the truth is far darker and more complex.

GammaRhythm discovered an ancient coding language at a lab ruin in Sédha Point, South Africa, and named it 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. There, Gamma works alongside the Head of Defense, Noptez Atomic, and WIDE Zaibatsu’s Walter Senior. Their task is to learn how to program in SpiritTxt using a military-seized item—another 'dark technology' they call the 'SpiritPanel...'

• Chunks of AdWorld's true inception are revealed through a collection of notes inspired by survival horror games, presented from the perspectives of the Hattori Bunker characters working on the SpiritPanel.

• Players acquire these notes by participating in ARG scavenger hunts through Discord and social media, as well as exploring the code and files behind AdWorld's character creator.

• Our community shares the bits of lore they unlock, and together, they begin to piece together AdWorld's history leading up to the upcoming rhythm game.

Process:

• The initial writing process for our "notes" was traditional: we’d generate ideas and beats as a group.

• I would jot down the events of AdWorld, from "Gamma’s SpiritTxt discovery" to "AdWorld’s launch," in a bullet-point list or story skeleton.

• Then, I’d identify the characters best suited to communicate each event on the list.

• Each event would be told from the perspective of its assigned character through classic game notes.

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

  • Noptez's notes were stylized as succinct military reports, providing readers with more insight into Global Military operations.

  • GammaRhythm’s notes were stream-of-consciousness diary entries.

  • Walter Senior’s notes were company email correspondence, offering readers visibility into WIDE Zaibatsu.

• I ensured that every note expanded the world, introduced characters, and set up unresolved plot points (unclosed loops) for narrative payoff in the main story.

• I was responsible for creating an initial schedule and timeline for our lore drops, optimizing excitement around animation releases, events, and physical product drops.

New Lore Unlocked!

During the research program, Walter Senior discovers SpiritTxt’s magical ability: this mysterious 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 that helps other creators realize their visions to the fullest extent—aptly naming it “AddWorld.”

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

Flash forward to the first working build of AddWorld, and it already generates life on its own: sentient beings called AdCitizens who desire sovereignty from the human world and refuse 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 digital realm, 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 to be heard from again...

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

Post-Titanomach, it’s discovered that the new consumer version of AdWorld contains a SpiritTxt script titled 'Genesis Fluid,' with a note explaining: Genesis Fluid is a finite in-game resource that births AdCitizens.

Curiously, Genesis Fluid seems to be one of the only instances where SpiritTxt is capped, refusing to build itself out endlessly...

The chain medallions, 'Samskara' (same word for singular and plural), are equipped by all AdCitizens, containing their soul or spirit. Samskara magnetize to their AdCitizens, making the device almost impossible to separate from the AdCitizen body.

Samskara also serve as the 'patch' that finally allows ‘¿humane?’ (humans) to log in to AdWorld.

I chose the name Samskara as a tribute to and celebration of the Hindu philosophy I grew up with, which relates to character traits and the conscious shaping of one's identity. It’s a perfectly ironic fit for a story item that grants players access to AdCitizens, i.e., their vessels for identity in the digital world.

As we delve deeper into the sinister implications of humans “logging into” sentient AI life (AdCitizens)—a population with a birth cap—the concept of Samskara, with its connection to identity and autonomy, emerges as one of the fundamental story themes.

AdWorld’s naming conventions draw heavily from the Hindu mythology and philosophy that shaped my upbringing. This is my way of sharing how these epics and their lessons have guided me in navigating the digital world. As I prepare for the challenges ahead—balancing art with consumerism, and spirituality with technology —I find myself reconnecting with my inner child more than ever.

There is a ton of love for online Dress Up Games. Bringing deep lore, narrative content, and a community canon to the genre has been a tremendously rewarding experience. It never gets old seeing people create bizarre and beautiful AdCitizen combinations while feeling empowered as storytellers.

Our community received their character files—fully rigged 3D models they could drop into Blender or Unreal Engine to create their characters' own unique adventures and scenes within AdWorld's larger narrative.

Below are examples of our community using their AdCitizens to create memes, web comics, TikToks, VTubers, and participate in our live fashion show:

New Character Unlocked!

ArtifaxMukash is one of AdWorld's boogeymen, offering risky heists to up-and-coming crews with the promise of big paydays and major infamy.

For our first update to the Dress Up Game, we brought in a main story character, ArtifaxMukash, to deliver the tutorial and immerse players further into the world. I was tasked with writing dialogue that both educated our community on how to use the creator and purchase new items, and provided more worldbuilding leading into our upcoming rhythm game.

Our storefronts were set in 'Sunfort Marketplace,' AdWorld's major trading 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.

AdWorld IRL

Physical elements of our mixed-media project have included a zine, clothing line, and ARG parties

WIDE Party was the first major expansion, bringing our community offline and into a real space to engage with our world. The venue was decked out with large AdCitizen projections.

We packed in over 500 people, with some of our favorite artists in attendance (spot them in Quiet Luke’s video!)

Family Fun!

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