[warning, Blood In The Drawings]

[warning, blood in the drawings]

I have many interests, and they tend to cycle around from every few months, to every few weeks. And well, lately I got really into Vampire the Masquerade. So I made a vampire oc, since I have no one to play the actual RPG with, and I have to make do with just that.

So, a few words about this oc: Annabeth was a struggling college student when they were turned into a vampire. She didn't have much problem adjusting to the vampire lifestyle. She was considered missing by all those who were close to them, because she just got up and abandoned her old life. Now she's mostly focused on climbing the vampire hierarchy, and she earns money by doing freelance on the internet, be it drawing or programming. Also, for some reason, she loves to pick fights with other vampires...

Yeah, I guess that's all. Enjoy the drawing :)

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)

The wheelchair user toa sounds really cool! Maybe it can function like a battering ram, or have extra storage for alternate toa tools, masks, or other medical stuff!

I'm so, so sorry that I'm responding to this after so long, but I swear, I have a memory span of like 5 minutes...

But yeah, your ideas sound really cool, and would fit really well for the character I imagined! Just imagine fighting a Toa team and then suddenly you see their portable arsenal friend rolling in! They might not be able to fight that well in close combat, but would certainly try to recompensate that by being prepared for every occasion. Maybe their wheelchair could also work like a miniature Suva? So that they didn't have to reach for their masks, since that might not be comfortable...

I wasn't sure how I could incorporate the battering ram idea into the design of the wheelchair, but then I thought that maybe it could look similar to how Tarakava arms function? Like, maybe it's folded and extends with a push of a button? We'll see what I can come up with...

But since we're already talking about alternative masks and tools, why don't I tell you what I imagined their primary ones would be?

So for the mask I was thinking Kakama. If we went the rout of the wheelchair not being mechanical and driving on its own, then traversing around might be slower than just walking, and that's not good in combat. ... Unless that wheelchair would be constructed like a racing wheelchair, but you can't exactly wheel that thing around and fight off enemies at the same time... Might also catch enemies off guard if they see a Toa in a wheelchair and think the fight will be easy, just for them to zoom around and destroy them all haha

For a weapon, I was thinking hooks on chains that could be used to first catch the enemy, and then trap them by going in circles to tie them up. Or just to catch them and drag around while driving at high speed, that might work I guess.

A hook like that may also be helpful to catch a fellow Toa and stop them from falling off of a cliff from a distance 🤷🏼

But again, your suggestions are amazing. You gave me a few more ideas for that character!

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.

LMK OC <3

// Name: Sky // Pronouns: any // Age: around 18-20 //

She used to believe they were a normal human, but in reality they were adopted. Macaque found them one day and thought they were hiding their true nature to get something, and boy, was he surprised that Sky really was just that clueless, even with all the signs that they are a demon. But Macaque, seeing an opportunity to one up Wukong in being a mentor took Sky in, and helped them get a hold of their powers, that they repressed for all those years. 

Sky is a shape-shifter demon. They can change their appearance, but can't change into animals completely, so if Sky wanted to change into them, he would still have to learn the 72 transformations. They can however change into an animal-like demon forms, and that gives them perks of said species. She likes the lynx and monkey forms the best, because they give more agility. Shape-shifting wings is possible, but harder than changing hair colour, or even a tail, since humans have a tail bone, and so do demons since some of them do have actual tails. Sky likes having a tail, and will sometimes forget to shape-shift it out. And her tail actually gets broken and doesn't heal properly (that's why it's bent) in season 3, making them unable to shape-shift it out completely any more. They can only make it change shape, and become shorter or longer. 

And yeah, Sky gets possessed in season 3, and Lady Bone Demon uses them to blackmail Macaque 💅 Sky does try to fight her control, and it does throw LBD off at first, but ultimately, Sky is a pretty weak demon, who's only now getting the hang of their powers, and even shadow magic Macaque taught him wasn't much help...

So yeah, Sky's power being lower than that of most of Monkie Kid crew makes them kinda self-conscious, and things don't get better when she tries to fight Azure Lion (since she actually read the whole journey to the west and knew not to trust him) in season 4 and gets trapped in the scroll. After all that Macaque tries to keep her out of the final fight, and they get into an argument, and Macaque calls him useless by accident, and welp, Sky enters their villain era. She already wasn't in the best place, even before she meet Macaque or even MK, and well, her monkey father figure's words were the last nail in the coffin basically. I take the Lego Monkey Kid's writers lead, and give my OCs all the trauma >:)

Anyway! Hope you like my oc! U wU

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