Hello everyone! It’s been so long since I rolled out a live update I’m not used to posting news on the website. If you have been checking the website for updates and want to stay up to date with progress the best way to follow along right now is by joining the discord server (linked above), the new engine is looking very promising 🙂
Anyway, would you like to see more unlockable appearances in Mirage? Well, here is your chance! This post marks the start of an art competition running through to the end of June where you can design and submit cosmetic appearances you would like to see in the game. Winning entries will be implemented and players will receive 1 month subscriptions for every winning entry. There is no limit on the number of winners or the number of winning entries one person can have, and all of the entries that make it in will be unlockable just by playing the game.
I am very busy with the new engine and Mombi is very busy with RL stuff and I know you guys love customisation so this feels like a good way to get cool appearances into the game and give everyone a chance to see their art live in a real mmo 🙂 We have a strong community of people who all want to see the game succeed and given how hard I am finding the workload I think opening the door to more community collaboration makes a lot of sense! All of the winning cosmetics will be released with the new engine along with a lot more colours to help everyone feel a bit more unique. So, how do you enter?
- Submit entries in the #cosmetics-contest channel on the official Discord
- Submitted entries must be exactly the right size and format
- You must submit your character name along with each entry
- Entries must be drawn by you and not taken from any other game or person
- People found to be submitting unoriginal works will be disqualified from all competitions going forwards
- Entries must be submitted before the 1st of July
To help you along I have bundled all of the game’s current customisation assets in their raw format, you can download them here:
There are a few engine rules for how the sprites work:
- Heads and Outfits are in grayscale, this allows the engine to tint them at runtime. Please use the existing grayscale palette when creating heads or outfits
- Back addons are not in grayscale, so colour these however you would like
- Each “frame” of the sprite must have a 1 pixel empty border around it, this is to avoid something called texture bleed when the graphics are scaled
- If you use the existing assets as a template everything should work out just fine
- Back items are always rendered “behind” the player, unless they are facing north
- Head items are always rendered “in front” of the player, unless they are facing north in which case they are rendered behind the back item
- The sprite frame sizes as provided in the example assets can not be changed. In the future the engine will be expanded to allow bigger outfits and sprites but for now this is how it works
- The sprites must have a transparent background and be submitted in .png format as per the example assets
It is worth mentioning there is absolutely no limits on what you can submit provided it is not sexually explicit or depicting existing copyrighted works. It goes without saying if there is not a banana back addon submitted I will be very disappointed. I also welcome improvements to existing sprites, if you want to rework the mage hood or replace the shaman hat please be my guest – the existing cosmetics are limited simply due to time constraints and lack of attention, a few updates ago the client was upgraded so we can have 4 times the number of sprites the game currently has, so you can really go crazy here.
Lastly, every entrant with a winning entry will receive a Harvey doll. Each admin has their own “doll” to give out as a unique reward for competitions, and competitions will be the only way to receive one. I still have a list of all winners from the previous art competition and they will also receive a Harvey doll as soon as I am able to implement new item types. Unfortunately I hit a hard limit on the number of SQL joins in a statement because of how I store data, again this is essentially an engine limitation (hitting a lot of those lately!) that will be overcome as a priority as soon as the new world engine goes live. If you are a winner of the previous art competition, and you are a winner of this competition also, you will receive 2 dolls 🙂
Good luck everyone, I am quite excited to see what you all come up with. All the best,
Liam, Mombi, Egon, and Harvey