WEFA
Connecting people to nature and community through play, storytelling, and plant care
Water Earth Fire Air
Growing up, I was outside constantly, playing with neighbors and turning whatever environment we had into the game for that day. Gardening and lawn care felt like chores then, but looking back, they were part of the connective tissue of my community. I met one of my closest childhood friends when he offered to help pick up leaves. Now, having a home garden and growing vegetables, herbs, and fruit has given me a deeper appreciation for organic food, local ecology, and the patience plants require. WEFA comes from that reflection: a way for young people to plant deeper roots and for adults to reconnect with nature, community, and the places they live.
What is it?
WEFA turns plant care into a loop between physical plants, digital creatures, and local community action. The app uses augmented reality to make the real environment part of play, blockchain primitives to give people ownership over creatures and progress, and AI to support plant identification, care, and creature generation. The goal is not to make nature feel like a screen. It is to use familiar game patterns from Farmville, Minecraft, Pokemon Go, and MMOs to help people build short and long term habits around health, social connection, and sustainability.
Story
The story world for WEFA is still being shaped alongside the product. The current direction follows four college students in 2042, in a newly industrialized town in Nigeria that is now part of a larger country called Wau. Their university is funded by CoeUp, a multinational corporation built around a rare mineral discovery that has slowly damaged the local land and created an imbalance between two worlds. During a forest exhibition, the group wanders into a cave just as an earthquake opens a hidden passage to underground aquifers. Seeking safety, they follow the water deeper underground, bathe in it, and come out changed, fused with elemental powers they do not yet understand. Coming from different backgrounds, they have to learn trust, community, and stewardship as they work to understand what has been damaged and what restoration could look like.
Learnings
WEFA has helped me see storytelling as product infrastructure. The characters, comic direction, and game mechanics are still developing, but the goal is for the story to give the product emotional weight rather than sit beside it as marketing. As the world takes shape, I’m thinking through how physical and digital collectibles, creature packs, and planting milestones could connect without forcing the product to pretend it is further along than it is. The wider goal is to take what I learn from WEFA and feed it back into the public goods stack we are building through Greenpill, so lessons from one project can carry into the next.