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Before I continue, I want to preface that I *love* gacha games. I play Arknights every day and I’ve bought a few crates in TF2 and Overwatch before. I think they can be incredibly fun and can be responsible entertainment, for adults, that is. Unfortunately a lot of these games are accessible to children and companies need to take responsibility for that.

Loot crates / mystery boxes / etc have a lot of names, but they aren’t really called by what they are, which is gambling. I don’t really have much experience with gambling addictions and child psychology, but I’m not the only one with this opinion, either. With headlines like “Number of child gamblers quadruples in just two years” it’s pretty alarming to see the problem they create for families across the world.

I am not talking about the free loot boxes, just to say. My problem lies with the ones that use real currency (translated to in-game currency) to unlock mystery items.

Any gamer you would talk to, would also agree that gaming is just better off without real currency surprise loot elements. In general, games that are very ‘pay to win’ create a large divide in the community of free2players and paywhales. I don’t have a problem with games that include such things, but I think they can be very dangerous in children who already have struggles coping to feel like they fit in IRL and now online, too.

Just because it is difficult to prevent kids from playing gambling games doesn’t mean you shouldn’t at least try. Parents are pretty knowledgeable about the ESRB and ratings, and if a game gets an AO / adult only rating, it’s essentially considered very hard to get sales. This is very clear if you look at the controversy around GTA V and the AO rating they fought very hard to avoid.

I personally feel like that legal pressure ALONE would force the hands of many game development studios to consider more ‘creative’ alternatives than tricking people out of their hard earned money in order to unlock virtual content they’ve technically already paid for and have downloaded in their game files.

Dear video game companies: please stop marketing loot systems with real currency to children. If in-game loot purchases need to be made by an adult in the child’s life, the game shouldn’t be aimed at a child to begin with. It’s predatory and it needs to stop.

I’d love to hear any supporting / disagreeing opinions below if you feel like it! Thanks for reading.

Hey everyone! Sorry that this will be a little bit of a read, I’ll include a tl;dr at the bottom for easy recap 👌

I’ve been struggling with finding free time to work on the project for a few months, and my personal life has taken quite a hit with the pandemic situation (including sick family members and a possible layoff situation). It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to work on the project, and with the current situation I still wanted to do something so I will be releasing all the game files free for download.

Feel free to take any of the character sprites, writing, backgrounds, etc and use it for your own projects while you’re stuck at home! If you wanted to create a fan-made finished version of the story you can, or you can read the rest of the planned story via the writing Kata has kindly created. All I ask is that if you upload any of your creations, please use this for attribution:

For the artwork and story:

Source: https://cakecatboy.art/
Artist: cakecatboy

For the video animation, include above and this:

Source: https://www.deviantart.com/dr-black-jack
Artist: Dr-Black-Jack

PLEASE READ: There is guest art included created by Just-a-Little-Vore and FishFlavoured, I haven’t reached out to them so please do not use their work for anything without asking them first!

I’ll make sure that when kata’s work is posted, he can also create an attribution for himself.

here is where you can download everything in one package

TL;DR: Project expansion cancelled, ALL files released for FREE creative commons attribution use.

I’ll be eternally grateful all the support and love on this project and I’ll be around for any questions and help you will need! I’m deeply sorry for making plans I couldn’t keep.

testing the rss bot in my server

I hope you feel the love this year!!!

Below I will outline a few things to keep in mind when creating an original character for the first time. These are all my opinion and none of these things are ‘rules’, just things to keep in mind while creating characters you want to be aesthetically pleasing.

Simplicity

An over-complicated design can lead to an OC that is difficult to draw and write and ends up not getting used, or rejected for commissions / art trades. Keeping things simple has several benefits with very little drawbacks. For example, if your character has an eye-patch, you will need to remember that daily things like driving, or depth perception, will be difficult for them with the eye-patch on. They will bump into things, or accidentally bump/hit people on their blind side. If you have to keep track of several things like this, (such as cat ears + extra hearing, night vision, special powers, etc) you are more likely to forget details when drawing or writing about them later. This leads into my second point, keeping practicality in mind.

Practicality

Characters with a lot of piercings + metal tend to not fare well in cold environments. On the same token, very long hair is also cumbersome for movement and getting wet. Consider your character’s daily routine and ask yourself if that character trait ‘fits’ with that person’s lifestyle. Sporty characters often wear their hair up if it’s long, or keep it short on purpose and for easy maintenance. The same goes with coloured hair, if your character doesn’t live in a fantasy environment with everyone having strange natural hair colours, it’s worth considering the cost of maintaining hair streaks and dyed hair.

It might be the case that you love to see characters with eyepatches, tattoos, piercings, funky hair, bandanas, etc. It’s totally fine to love and to use these traits, but it doesn’t work for every OC. If you tried to wear a bandana every day, you might find it hot and uncomfortable. Characters may wear bandanas regardless of the discomfort for several reasons, like working in a dusty/dirty environment, or they live in an area where anonymity and privacy is a concern for them. But generally, people don’t wear bandanas for just ‘looking cool’. (it’s a fine and valid reason if you want it to be, but consider the character’s personality as well.)

Symmetry

As a part of keeping things simple, try to keep things symmetrical as well. This is less about a character’s hairstyle and more about clothing choices and other details. (I’m guilty of having done this myself.) In general, people’s socks are the same colour, any arm bands / wrist bands are usually the same style and pattern, it can bring a sense of completeness to a character and keeps images from appearing too ‘busy’. It also is easy to draw your character from different angles without struggling to remember which side each detail is on. Just like anything, a LITTLE asymmetry goes a LONG WAY.

Uniqueness

A unique hairstyle is a great way to have your character stand out without having too many details. Above I’ve shown a few different examples of bangs / fringe / back as well as eyebrow thickness and shape. There are several ways you can mix and match different combinations of these 3 to create your own original and unique hairstyle and have your OC stand out without a lot of unnecessary details.

Other things to consider when creating your OC include:

• age
• height
• weight
• education level
• universe
• interests / hobbies
• style

Final Thoughts

If you are not an artist, or have trouble putting your thoughts into words, I recommend using one of several online character creators to help bring your character visually to life. You can also consider making a collage of different things you’d like to see on your oc and consider asking an artist or a friend for advice.

This is not a comprehensive list and I expect it to change over time, but experiment and find things you like! If there’s something you absolutely love in an OC, ‘steal’ it for yourself and make something unique out of it! The best OCs are the ones that you can tell the creator loves immensely.

YES it’s finally all uploaded! What a relief, ahaha

god if it didn’t take forever to do, but it looks awesome all sorted and tidy. there might be a few things left out, (like furry art or personal gifts, but this is very easily 95% of everything I’ve drawn) and I’m glad I have my own little domain name and everything too. Special thanks to grotlover99 for the help (he did all the hard stuff to make the site exist)

https://forum.weightgaming.com/

check out his site above! and check out my art too :3

I think it’s about finished now! I might try to sneak in some more retrowave elements and make the 18+ warning page a bit more creative, with splash of pixel here and there, but for now I’m really super happy with it!

tomorrow’s schedule: years 2015-2019!

the site should have everything I’d like up by the end of this week.

just testing out the post settings! by default, the site’s text is white, which makes things a little hard because the post background is white also. So I need to temp-change it in order to write or I need to hope I don’t make any typos. been having a lot of fun, and grotlover2 is helpin me lots, so it’s a journey and a headache (for him) :>

that’s all. just wanted to test this feature out! I am thinking about making the site have a black sidebar and white content, but it’s gonna take some testing to see if it looks any good. mobile is also important to look good since I am a narcissist apparently and wanna check it on my phone all the time cause I’m proud of the site!

I also reaaaaaalllyyyy dislike how the wordpress post font is serif and I CAN’T CHANGE IT IDK HOW AAAA

something for the future…

I wonder if I can add pics while rambling too…?