Tahu, The Tamer Of Wild Rahi/ducks!!!

Tahu, the tamer of wild rahi/ducks!!!

I read this in the middle of the night, and had to go to sleep because I didn't even know what to think.... Damn, this sounds like hell

For people who decided to work on a game about a bunch of heroes who will protect those weaker than them, they surely don't know how to act decently... Do they even know what Bionicle was about???

Why do people choose to be like this when they get the slightest taste of fame? Well, they are indie devs, so I guess a little disorganization would be alright, but they never stopped to think what other people are feeling???

Well, I was excited for the game, but now I won't play it...

What is it with everyone turning out to be horrible these days???

I'm sorry for you, hope you will be able to work on what you love and not be treated like this...

"One Sec Lol"

I worked on the fan game Bionicle Masks of Power for nearly 2 years. I worked really hard on it, learned many things, used a lot of programs I'd never done before, actually worked up the nerve to use a mic for the first time, etc. Over time I got promoted to the head of two departments, 3d art and level design, basically because I was around a lot and kept things organised.

Then one day, with a "One sec lol" I was completely demoted, in a dehumanising, buzzword filled message. It called working on the game a "Journey". Now the reason I was demoted I won't really dispute, I was under a lot of stress, and sometimes I'd get upset, but these things don't happen in a vacuum, I don't get stressed for no reason.

The team was for the most part a bunch of really good, talented people that I enjoyed working with immensely, but there were some who were more focused on the glory (of making a free fan game for a 20 year old dead toy line... look, getting 200k views on the teaser went to their heads) so there was this constant push to get things...not done, because that wasn't really their concern, it was get things in a state where they could be shown off. And not a "here's a work in progress asset" sort of shown off, a "2 Paragraphs of fluff about the game, talking like it's already done, not actually mentioning the assets we're meant to be showing off" sort of thing.

The image in this tweet was meant to show off the newly (semi) completed UI, you know, that thing on the edge you can't see?

The 80/20 rule seemed foreign to them, where 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and the final 20% of the work takes 80%, so someone would get a quick rough draft of an asset done in like a day, and they'd start pushing us to get it complete so we could show off, even though it would normally be months for something to get there.

This image here, of Pohatu in the desert. Do you know what it was supposed to show off? If you guessed the desert, no! That whole scene was thrown together by one person in like a day, it's completely fake, no work had been done on the desert at all. It was supposed to show off the Toa, as we'd just reached a pretty big milestone of completing and texturing all the parts and most importantly the masks. You know, that tiny thing that's facing away from the screen?

Originally the idea was to just show off the Toa in all their glory in their biome, but it mutated in to that...thing. There was work on a second one, but everyone finally realised that it was just looking bad so it was cancelled, thankfully.

This constant push to get things done to show off was so pervasive, and always seemed to fall on my shoulders, being the 3d art and level design lead, even though the real bottle neck was programming. We only had 3-4 programmers of very limited availability. When I first joined the team as a 3d artist I was basically given makework tasks to do, things of no real consequence, most of which got thrown out. (why make random set dressing objects for Ta-Koro, a place that hasn't even been roughly sketched out yet, for example)

This only got worse when I was put in charge of level design. The levels themselves are the prime thing to show off things in, so there was this constant push to get the levels finished, which I always pushed back against because, and I need to really stress this, the game was in a suuuper early state, and still is. If you've played the stand alone game Trials of the Great Spirit, that area was initially supposed to be the intro to BMOP proper, but the gameplay evolved so much that it became unplayable. At one point there was even the suggestion of keeping the TOGS area with the old player movement. As this was supposed to be the player movement tutorial this was dire and shows the danger of putting work in to making a level look nice too early, you run in to the sunk cost fallacy. Making a level look nice takes a lot of work, it's very fiddly, moving around little decorative objects and getting textures right, and you don't want to have to redo it a lot, which is why most games are blocked out first, meaning that the basic level geometry is created with basic shapes, and once everything is refined then they move on to actually making it look nice. As level design lead I insisted that we do this, because most previous attempts at making levels had spent way too much time worrying about the looks.

One of the first things I was tasked with as a 3d artist was to make a series of modular tree bits:

I was given nothing but a pair of images as guides of what they wanted.

So I worked really hard to try and make a modular system that would allow some interesting level layouts. Once I made the rough version pictured do you know what I was asked to do? Texture it. Make them in to final assets. No testing at all, no time to see if they'd work for the levels they wanted, nothing. Just rough>final for platforming assets immediately.

Well I knew that if I did that it would just end up getting tossed out eventually so I refused, and guess what? These were made before the movement refactoring so they're completely useless now!

So now you see why making sure everything was finalized before doing final art was so important, which is why I would always fight against moving on to set dressing in the demo, because the demo wasn't and still isn't done, not even close. Having been put in that situation where I was told to work on something that would inevitably be tossed out later, I didn't want to put anyone in the teams I was responsible for in that situation, it's not like there wasn't a shortage of things to work on anyway.

Basically I was put in the situation where I had to constantly say no to all these, I'll call them what they were, marketing ideas, due to the game not actually being in the state it was being presented as. The video released on 8/10 this year was cobbled together from a bunch of unfished assets, barely functioning in an area that was designed just as a goal for set dressing to reach in a real level. It took the poor dev who had a computer good enough to run it hundreds of playthroughs until they got one good enough to show off, avoiding most of the bugs. And now seeing all this, know that I had to spend literal DAYS trying to convince everyone we should have that tiny disclaimer on the screen (every one else was worried about the aesthetics).

So this was the source of most of my stress, trying to focus on making a game while fighting against those that wanted instead to act like we had made a game. That's what lead to my stress and occasional outbursts, and me just in general getting fed up with working on the game.

After I was demoted, for the next week or so I was miserable. The way it was done just completely destroyed any sort of comfort I had in the team. I'm very shy and introverted, it takes me a long time to warm up to people or a place, and when something like that happens, it's all gone in an instant.

I didn't feel comfortable in the chats anymore so I left, I tried to explain myself to the person who demoted me and they just ignored me for several days at a time, leaving it to all spiral out of control in my head, another person said conflicting things that just made it worse. "It's not a punitive measure" "We appreciate your work" "You should be thanking me you didn't just get kicked off entirely" forcing me to grovel at their feet etc. It was all so much.

The final straw, and what got me kicked off, was do do with a document I had spent 9 months creating, that outlined a possible way of structuring the whole game. Before I started trying to get some structure in to it, the game design just seemed to be a big question mark. 6 playable characters needing to collect 11 upgrades, it's quite a complex thing that doesn't really track to any other game I've seen. The first version, Legacy, was simply a fully open map with the masks scattered about, but that wouldn't do with the level of detail and gameplay complexity we were aiming for. I eventually worked out something I thought would work, using a system of context sensitive gates, and I wrote and did many diagrams on the subject.

After I was kicked out of the leads, not a week later they announced big sweeping changes that were basically what I had been pushing for for months. There was something I was unclear on, a sort of gate for Kopaka involving wind, and I asked what it was. The new level design lead, the person who I had explained the concept of gates too, then proceeded to tell me what a gate was.

This was it. I was done. A week after I get kicked off the lead team and I'm treated like I didn't do anything. Then later I was confronted by another lead, and forced to post PROOF that I'd actually posted this document I'd spent 9 months publicly working on, that we'd had a whole meeting about with the story team, the document that got me promoted to level design lead.

This was too much for me, with everything going on with the game project and stuff in my personal life being stressful at the time, I genuinely didn't want to be around anymore, it was too much for me, I wanted to disappear. I tried to tell one of the leads this, and was ignored, I tried to speak openly to the team about it, I was censored, probated, then the next day, before I'd even woke up, kicked off the team. For being "negative". I was then told that if I didn't want things I'd made to be used I could ask them, but the only things they listed were the makuta totems and some jungle assets which I didn't even know what they meant.

So 2 years of work, and all I'd done for them by their account was a noodle and some wood.

Just keep working like a good little drone, no matter how much disrespect we throw at you. This is Team Kanohi.

I wanted to put this all behind me, but someone on the team had the gall to request the very document I was accused of pretending to have made (I mean who ever asked for it on the team, not who asked me personally, just to be clear) , so I'm just so fed up with them. I was paying to host the bulk of the parts and 3d assets out of my own pocket, and it took them like a month to bother moving things, by which time I got charged.

Here's a quick overview of some of the things I worked on, it's not comprehensive at all, it barely mentions the atlas system, but I'm so emotionally drained that I don't really want to bother with all that. It's also not just a noodle and some bits of wood though.

I want to reiterate that I genuinely enjoyed working with most of the people on the team, and I wish them well.

I love this thread! I was thinking about disabled Bionicles a few days ago, because I wanted to create a Toa who uses a wheelchair.

Actually, when I first joined the Bionicle fandom a few years ago, I had an oc who couldn't form any memories, so I was happy to see that here! Her name was Nikimaru, and she had to write everything down, because she would forget everything the next day, even her own name sometimes. Maybe I should actually write about her...

These headcanons are very cool, and can be useful. They can add more diversity to the Bionicle world! I love them <3

some disabilities that I think could exist in the Bionicle universe for character and world-building reasons:

under-active cooling systems that lead to fatigue and illness. these beings have to limit their physical activity or they will overheat and could cause serious damage to their other internal systems. some of them may go live in Ko-Matoran districts or other cold areas even if they wouldn't live there traditionally. Matoran with this condition may be more likely to use crabs or small personal vehicles to get around

since I headcanon that most beings are mass-printed or otherwise mass-produced, you can occasionally find someone who was simply printed wrong in some way, a production line error causing a deformity. some of these deformities would have been weeded out by quality control before everyone gained sentience, but not all

memory loss seems to be a built-in feature for many beings in the MU. some beings have this to an even greater degree than others, however, and they might lose their memories very frequently or even lack the ability to form memories

if a Toa is interrupted while in the middle of passing his power on to another Toa and becoming a Turaga, the new Toa can become trapped halfway between Matoran and Toa, sometimes not reaching the typical height or physical power of an average Toa, and possibly having limited control of their elemental powers

the different culture of the MU would create different possible mental illnesses. for instance, some Matoran could become overly-obsessed with the ideals of duty to the point that they almost seem at times to have lost their sentience again and only be capable of work. the existence of physic powers also means that there are a lot of ways in which someone's mind could be damaged by psionic powers like repeated hypnotism, confusion, or memory tampering

not to mention all the different ways mutation could cause disabilities and chronic pain

disabilities related to control over powers: these could be particularly common in Skakdi, who are given unprecedented and experimental powers by Spiriah. many Skakdi are permanently damaged by his experiments and may have extremely faulty control of their abilities

if the glass or plastic that makes up the eyepiece is damaged, that can be replaced, but if the wiring that connects the eyes to the brain is damaged, someone could have blindness or vision loss. the same goes for a lot of parts - maybe an audio receptor can be removed and replaced, but if the internal systems are damaged, it might not be possible to replace or repair those parts. it's similar to humans in that way

there could also be intellectual or cognitive disabilities similar to those of humans

damaged joints that have to be permanently locked or braced so they will not break... looking at you, lime-greens

I also think that there are already disabilities in the text! We know there's a concept of muteness because the Makuta wonder if Vamprah has mutism or if he chooses not to speak, there's the concept of being "cross-wired," and the Rahaga, Zaktan, and Nidhiki's mutations alter their powers and change their physical abilities in ways meant to be debilitating and horrifying. we have references to insanity, broken arms, amnesia, amputees, and more.

feel free to add on!

Eyo, listen! So... I often create fake scenarios in my head. And the one I like the most is ''a human gets teleported to a different world (often from some series), what do they do?'' And like, there are millions of variations of this scenario. And I do this with Bionicle too. I have a version where a human just wakes up in Bionicle world totally unchanged, a version where they are reincarnated as a Glatorian or a Toa, or even Matoran or Agori... In some versions they understand language spoken, but the versions where they don't get really interesting lol But in all those scenarios the human keeps all the knowledge about Bionicle that they remembered from our world.

(Wow, the amount of fanfiction I could have written basing them on this concept alone is astronomical)

And recently, I found a new scenario to run. What if you were reincarnated into Bionicle world... As a Rahi! While a humanoid has pretty clear options: stay hidden, don't interfere, just live your life until someone reads your mind and finds out all the knowledge you possess about our world and Bionicle history, or actively try to change things with either keeping the knowledge to yourself (until someone reads your mind, this is pretty inevitable at some point) or telling everyone the truth. Unless you just wake up as a normal human there. Then you have a lot of explaining to do either way.

But as a Rahi? What would you do? Only a certain few could understand you, and even then, would they believe an animal? What could you even change? There are very intelligent Rahi like Keetongu, but I would imagine a human would be reincarnated as some wolf or cat Rahi in this scenario, and not a legendary being.

Normally I don't talk about the scenarios I create in my head, but I'm really curious, what would you do if you suddenly woke up in Bionicle world, with all the knowledge you possess about it, but as a Rahi?

(By the way: I wrote it at 1AM, so if what I wrote sounds weird [or like I'm a lunatic lol] that's why. In the morning I would have only check the grammar mistakes and sent it as it is Xd)

✨🍈Melon Boy🍈✨

Here's my new OC! He was commissioned from and designed by @theghostshost The art on the third picture was also made by her <3

Alright, so a little sneak peek at his story: Mel used to be a regular old monkey, living on the Flower Fruit Mountain. That is, until one day he ate a magic melon fruit. He was instantly transformed into a monkey demon after consuming it. After some adjusting to his new form, Mel was assigned by Wukong to supervise MK as he learns to control his powers. Wukong partially genuinely thought that now that he's more human like, he could use spending more time with humans, but he also didn't really know what else to do with him :/ I mean, he has MK to worry about already, and what was he supposed to do when one of his monkey subjects suddenly turned into a demon? Xdd

Anyway, I want to make a comic about his adventures. We'll see how it will go :)

Also, there's this weird file that keeps attaching itself to my post, and I can't delete it.... It's only static, but I can't delete it. ... 🤔 Oh well, it's probably fine....

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Drawing of @chuitu 's oc Yeva~ She is beauty, she is grace! 🥹

Art trading with you was a wonderful experience! 💕✨