As you can see from my games of each year list I don’t play many games with character creators and when I do I generally don’t get particularly attached to the characters I make in them. I couldn’t really tell you anything much about the characters I made for Dark Souls and even when I went through the character creator in Baldur’s Gate III recently¹ I made a dark elf woman without any particular thought to backstory or much else. I honestly don’t even remember what I named her². I do not have the making OCs bone I think. But I do have two old custom skins and a custom character that I have lying around on my computer I’d like to share.

Minecraft

Back seven billion years ago when I was in university and Minecraft was this weird, new thing I wanted to make my own custom skin for it. Being mostly into first person shooters and real time strategy games at the time my first thought about making a skin for a character in a game where you mine was to try and recreate the mining suit from Red Faction:

Pokémon Crystal Clear

I haven’t played a new Pokémon game since I was a child, but during covid lockdowns (before, y’know, every government just dropped all health measures for a debilitating disease that is still rampant) I tried to revisit the series via a hack called Pokémon Crystal Clear³. Crystal Clear adds a lot to Pokémon Crystal. You can choose your starting town (in either Kanto or Johto), play gyms in any order (they scale based on the number of badges you have), it fixes various bugs in the original games, allows you to set any pokémon as an overworld follower with every species having unique follower sprites, adds new areas and battles, new music, a lot of customisation options, and has ways to obtain all 251 pokémon without trading or events.

Sadly all of that was not enough for me to get over the simple fact that these games are too repetitive for me to want to bother with any more. I do not want to do dozens and dozens of nigh-identical battles over and over again. I never got very far in the game but I did make use make use of another feature: The ability to inject custom player sprites and custom starters (I started with a sandshrew). I actually posted one of the player sprites on here before when talking about drawing it in Wplace.

Sonic Forces

The last one is the closest thing that I have to a Sonic the Hedgehog OC: My avatar from Sonic Forces who I decided to call Blitz the Cat, both because she ended up being a little lightning-themed (and I used the lightning whip as my main weapon for a lot of that game) and to keep the alteration going with Blaze the Cat and Big the Cat⁴. I do not have any backstory for her but I like how she turned out.

I have some more Wplace art in a new post.

I’ve been spending a bit too much time fucking around on Wplace but it’s been nice to flex my pixel art muscles a tiny bit again. One of the first things I added to the map was a dusted-off pokémon trainer sprite I made a few years ago when playing the ROM hack Pokémon Crystal Clear.

I used the Crystal player sprite as a base for this with the arm of the youngster sprite from the first generation games. I put this down near where I grew up, a pretty rural place. It can be quite isolating to grow up weird or queer in a place like that and it warmed my heart to see someone else had already drawn a few pride flags there including a trans one. I don’t know who drew that but I hope they are doing okay.

I also saw a few local GAA club flags and didn’t think much of it but checking back over a few days it quickly became apparent that some cunt was drawing these to cover over pride flags. This put me in a foul mood but over the next few days the ever-growing retaliatory pride flags made them give up and there is a big, unmolested rainbow heart in the middle of the village now.

After that I set my sights on a few landmarks. These took a few revisions but I’m really happy with how they turned out.

Large collaborative art projects Wplace are cool but it can be frustrating when they do them right on top of cities that are already crowded for space. Still, with a bit of silent negotiation I was able to put these down close to where they are on the map.

I do have one other gripe with Wplace: The gamified system and slow drip of pixels back is unfortunately very effective and leading me back into bad habits of sitting at my desk refreshing webpages that I have been trying to break. At least the ability to get larger charges over time, as much as it plays into those systems designed to be addictive, does give you more room over time to step away from it and not feel like you are wasting your chances to draw something.

The other little unique doodle I’ve done is one of Sadako Yamamura, which I wasn’t entirely happy with but a friend said was really good so I will take that compliment.

I have been dotting some variously-sized Eggbugs and some other small things around as well as contributing to a few larger pieces of art and fixing vandalism here and there. It’s been a fun little time waster.

I was going to sign off saying that I didn’t yet have another project I planned on drawing but while writing this I had a brainwave.

I’ll be filling this in as my paint refreshes.