Work continues at a furious pace on Casual Collective 2 (our new site) as we work towards our goal of launching our new site with new games. One of the cooler things we did recently is the ability to add your own avatar for use on the site and in multi player games, something which we neglected to do on the current version of the CC.
An avatar is a graphical representation of yourself and has 3 main functions:
- To help you stand out from the crowd.
- To help you quickly spot someone in a list.
- To represent your personality / persona on the site.
And there are 3 main ways people have dealt with how to enable avatars on their sites / forums:
Uploading your own is the most popular option to date and has the advantage of selecting whatever you want, be it a photo of yourself or your pet or an icon of your favourite video game character. Most forums let people do this, and it is the path Kongregate have taken (example of Kongregate avatars). The disadvantage with this system is that all uploads would require moderation and we think the majority of casual gamers would not have an image at hand to use and would have to go hunt one down. For these reasons we will not be going down this path.
Selecting from a list of avatars is very casual, you browse for one you like the look of and select it. This is the system used by xBox 360, Playstation 3 and sites like Armour Games (example of Armour games avatars) and Big Fish Games (example of Big Fish Games avatars). There would be no need for moderation and you would not need to go trawling the web for an image. The big problem with this system is that the same handful of avatars would be used by many members, which is counter to the first 2 reasons for having an avatar. For these reasons we will not be going down this path either.
Building an avatar is also very casual (The Nintendo Wii lets you make a ‘Mii’ character for each player and Gaia Online has even more options) and this has none of the disadvantages and all of the advantages of the above methods.
There is a risk that, if the tool is not flexible enough, avatars could all look similar, also creating an avatar can also take more time than the above options, but how cool is it to make your own avatar?!
So we created our own avatar maker which lets you change everything from the hair style to the shape of your chin and everything in between. Below is a screen shot of the CC avatar maker in action, it lets you select, scale, position and rotate pretty much everything, in this example the eyebrows have been positioned and rotated to make eye-shadow!
Our beta testers have been playing with the avatar maker for just over a week and below are some of their avatars. You can see that they all look distinct from one another and in some cases are quite accurate!
To solve the issue of everyone looking similar we made it possible to position the facial elements (eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth etc) wherever you like… Want to put the eyes under the mouth? Not a problem! As a result there have been some very creative, non-human avatars:
And to solve the issue with the time it takes to build an avatar we added a ‘Scramble’ button which generates a random avatar, hit it a few times and you are sure to find something you like :o) The blue haired girl in the screen shot above was the result of a Scramble.
So that is our avatar creator. It will be available for all members to use and they can change their avatar as often as they like. The avatars will be visible on members profiles, on their forum posts, next to their shouts and in peoples friends lists, infact, wherever you see members you will see their avatar :o)
October 6th, 2008 at 2:13 am
It’s nice that the people that can not access this can get to see what is happening!
I see my avatar in there!
October 6th, 2008 at 3:03 am
To be honest, I’m not completely happy about not being able to upload your own avatar, but I suppose that creating your own avatar would be a wise option, with everyone having the same style in there avatar, thereby keeping a steady style.
October 6th, 2008 at 7:21 am
Mine is first row, 5th one to right. On first image
Love feature to make, hate feature to upload your own.
October 6th, 2008 at 9:38 am
I believe the avatars are:
Image 1: (Row|Column - Name)
1|1 - Critters
1|2 - caipirossi
1|3 - ryecroft
1|4 - Grrr
1|5 - iBotPeaches
1|6 - ABRT
1|7 - turniphead
1|8 - Manders
1|9 - MrsCritters
2|1 - Hoazl
2|2 - Alchemist
2|3 - Pino
2|4 - omegabobo
2|5 - crazzzyme
2|6 - Coho
2|7 - Noobleton
2|8 - Saab92x
2|9 - WormyRocks
3|1 - t2t2
3|2 - alycia
3|3 - scott
3|4 - Shark
3|5 - carpenterdon
3|6 - link123123
3|7 - Hondarebel
3|8 - Dingolicious
3|9 - TheHunter1337
4|1 - Theory
4|2 - VKuuumar
4|3 - WalesAlex
4|4 - alunakariss
4|5 - Beatingsoul
4|6 - Dedesuke
4|7 - Carbonsixty
4|8 - Elzeothis
4|9 - eNola
Image 2:
1|1 - kiko (a bit changed by now)
1|2 - DraganBlack
1|3 - Fredward
1|4 - eagames
1|5 - Infinitude
1|6 - MrsGrrr
1|7 - Guen
1|8 - masonga95
1|9 - Zodiac
2|1 - CountryRoads
2|2 - Ca1mdown
2|3 - RyanRitten
2|4 - Nicknam4
2|5 - GermanShepherd
2|6 - WishBear
2|7 - HeyLuke
2|8 - southpark
2|9 - SencerdTest
Yeah, I was bored…
(Fact: Finding Grrr was the hardest, even through I saw him on friends list the whole time)
October 6th, 2008 at 10:37 am
ya go me right
October 6th, 2008 at 10:47 am
t2t2…. get a life dude!
October 6th, 2008 at 10:57 am
I see me
October 6th, 2008 at 11:34 am
I have to say that is a cool feature that I have not tried yet… will have to try soon…
October 6th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
No uploading? Come on, that just tells people that you either a) are understaffed and haven’t done anything about it, or b) you don’t have enough time to look at avatars (in which case you should have someone do that for you). On Kongregate moderators can remove avatars, and there’s a system for reporting users so that people can send in inappropriate avatar reports. That’s really sad, and if you can’t even be bothered to do that then I’m quite simply going to have a blank avatar.
October 6th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Thanks for expressing your thoughts, my response is that the moderation of avatars is not the reason we did not select it. In fact we embrace community moderation on the new site, we have enabled group owners to appoint mods to do everything from manage the shouts and forum posts to even re-design the group layout, more powers to the users!
The other reasons for not allowing uploads include:
1. It can look messy with mixed media avatars, especially as in the friends list they are very close to each other.
2. Not everyone has an image on their PC that they could use for our site (they may have a photo of themselves but may not want to post that on a gaming site)
3. We looked at other sites and most people pick cartoons or whatever is popular, it says very little about the person.
4. Making an avatar is just fun
October 6th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Making an avatar is even more fun if you do it yourself in a graphics app like Photoshop, Pixelmator, VectorDesigner, etc. I have yet to see a site where you can upload a vector avatar and allow the site to scale it to fit different purposes… *hint hint*
October 7th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Creating vector graphics in photoshop is the polar opposite of casual.
October 7th, 2008 at 1:18 am
How did T2T2 even find mine? I’m not friends with him…
David, I’d also like to point out something you might not have realized. The avatars allow for a level of continuity through the site that you wouldn’t have otherwise. With the same set of parts to work with, everyone’s avatars will have some similarities (if only color of skin or hair), but they’ll look different. I guess what I’m saying is- if you picked any avatar at random, and stuck it on another forum, you should be able to tell easily that it came from the collective.
October 7th, 2008 at 1:22 am
Nice idea B3llit0, but that’s very niche and as Alex says it is not ‘Casual’. We will be adding a photo album to all profiles which you could use to show off your custom avatar and photoshop skills
And that is spot on Hunter, we mocked up how it would look with avatars that are currently in use on other sites and we even made a test webcam snapshot tool to let people take photos.. but it just looks sooooo good when they all have the same background colour and graphical style. The new site has a much more polished design and we didn’t want to spoil it with randomness.
October 7th, 2008 at 8:16 am
woot mine!
just want opinions, do you guys think mine looks like simple eyes or nostrils with no eyes (at first glance)
My avatard isn’t on there…
October 7th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
mines 2l5 =)
October 7th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
The best thing about making your own avatar is that if you are feeling bad one day you can just quickly reslant the mouth and turn the eyebrows… You can quickly change the mood to anything you can imagine. Try doing THAT with an uploaded image.
It’s almost twitter-esque.
October 8th, 2008 at 2:53 am
I did want to make it save out happy/sad/angry versions which you could switch too quickly, but as people are using noses as mouths and other such things it would not be something I could automate.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:44 am
What about you create 3 different versions of your avatar and label them what you like? (Angry/Sad/Pleased etc.)
October 8th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
nooo you snapshotted my avatar when i was moving it around to show the whole thing - it makes no sense as shown. haha thats what i get…
i do like the idea to save a library of avatars to choose from, as it is i have to keep my favorites stored on my comp so i dont lose them!
October 8th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
by the way critters i’m with you all the way, building your own avatar on the site is much preferable to the same old avatars people pick (if they choose one). personally i have an avatar that is personal and would fit well, but i prefer the system you have created, its fun, creative and anonymous.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
OK, the photo gallery thing makes me happy.
——Throwing random ideas at you——
• I still want to upload avatars
• Multilingual stuff– Unicode support throughout for international players, forums and games for other languages. I’m sure there are plenty of users (myself included) who would be more than willing to assist.
• Games with user-created content are always win
• Pie
October 10th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
B3 - I have seen japanese and other characters on CC1, I am not sure if CC2 is still unicode but I believe it is…..
If you don’t get the reasoning behind creating avatars and having a anythingoes photo gallery, you won’t be convinced otherwise and I think they’re just going to ignore your uploadable avatar request.
October 24th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Should have went the upload route. Why would it require moderation? Every other site that I’m a member of allows image uploading and posting without moderation. If someone posts porn or something they are banned. These avatars make the site look like its designed for little kids, and we all know - most members are adults.
December 25th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
I really agree with one thing B3llit0 said, and that is the matter of user created content. Always win.
Will you be putting togethet a game where users can use level editors or the like anytime soon? It would be great to browse random levels, and then click the creators name if i found something i’d fancy, so i could see what else he/she had built
Great site, by the way.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:19 pm
does this strategy work?
July 5th, 2009 at 6:58 am
hello im wondering if there is a way to look at all the icons and still find out how to get them like wen u put the mouse on one it will show how u get it is there a way to see all of them at the same time
thank you,
cal(silentkiller)
July 21st, 2009 at 4:56 pm
hi