Titans, today is a special day for us. Today, we announce the winners of our first ever costume contest. These contestants were not staff artists or part of the Character Creator development team, who created the results you’ve seen in our Make Anyone series. These Devs, when it came to our Character Creator, were just Titans like you seeing what they could make (and reporting bugs so we could make it ready for all of you). We do still intend to give the first wave of backers access to it before end of year. But in the meantime, the sheer variety and creativity our contestants displayed, with what is still an incomplete selection of costume pieces, shows that we have succeeded at what we’ve struggled five years to do - make a Character Creator more powerful than any MMO has ever done. Some other games might be able to rival one portion or another, but we challenge anyone out there to match the whole of it. So without further ado, behold the winners!

Schwarzschild (Dave "Dvandom" Van Domelen) is an excellent example of simple minimalist design. With only two colors and two materials in use, Schwarzschild presents striking contrast and visual appeal. The ability to assign a color and texture to each part of each costume item is applied here for a monochromatic yet arresting look. Interestingly enough the glow is an illusion created by the choice of materials and the contrast with the deep black of the rest.

Coral Snake (also by Dave "Dvandom" Van Domelen) puts our more exaggerated slider control on display. The choice of beast stance really makes the character design shine. Years ago we showed arms and legs like these in a video, and people couldn’t imagine any use for it except for joke characters, or even for trolling people with disturbing mutations. Well...clearly not. This fellow looks inhumanly lethal.



Quote: Mass was a low level and completely inept criminal until he was exposed to an alien isotope being studied in a lab he had broken into. The isotope transformed Mass into a being capable of manipulating mass at all levels. Mass now fancies himself a supervillain but his ineptness is only amplified by his godlike powers. His dim-wittedness has kept Mass from utilizing his powers to their fullest potential. Mass is regularly defeated by novice heroes instead of being the Alpha level threat he could pose.

Mass was actually made by the writer for our webcomic Hijinx, Tom Stillwell, and appropriately displays both an innovative bio and a wicked sense of humor, much like the webcomic itself. Like Coral Snake, Mass makes good use of our slider controls. Torso and leg length have been individually controlled and combined with the fat slider to give him the air of a squat, inept bumbler that we think clashes hysterically with his choice of the straight backed, clenched fist Robotic pose. Just as his bio describes him, he looks like he thinks he’s the scariest thing around...while actually not having a hope.

We saved the best for last. Nathan Purkiss’s Fire Beetle swept the judgings. Where most other designs had one outstanding feature or another, Fire Beetle was outstanding by virtue of the sum of its parts. In a game that does not yet have any non-humanoid options, he managed to combine several separate features to create a very good impression of a beetle man. Standing straight, you’d think he must have made a mistake, as the slider settings are highly unconventional. The beast stance alone wouldn’t make any character look like a bug. But the combination of the slider settings with the beast stance - with some help from well colored and textured costume items like the Oversized Helmet and the Arm Cannons of course - makes the remarkably convincing Fire Beetle, an effect we would have sworn wasn’t possible yet. The aura finishes it off. We hope you like it, because the prize for the winner was to make their design a Character Creator preset in City of Titans.

For every set of winners in a costume contest, there are a dozen awesome honorable mentions. We’ll be keeping the best of them around to show you at other times. Again, some of the things they managed to do by leveraging material control really are amazing.

On a whim, we did the math. With over 120 materials and two to four different material segments per item, every costume piece in city of titans has between 240 and 480 possible variations, and that’s not even trying to account for colors. We think we can promise that it will be nearly impossible not to create a unique avatar. What our winners achieved here today is only the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks to: Charles Logan and Jamie 'GeeksGoneBad' Cunningham on their insanely hard work bringing the Avatar Builder together, not to mention FleshForge for his hard work on the body - as well as our various clothiers - Kaylynn and Don especially.

Discuss the update here