🎨Character Creator

The future crown jewel of Turbo Battle Arena

Early into our development we realized we could make a fun and exciting battling game with interesting characters, but worried about the longevity. Most games launch, make a splash, then fade into memory. We wanted to be sticky. Something you can't help coming back to over and over again.

Incorporating outside content was our solution. NFT projects, partner gaming projects, even corporate IP are all ripe for building 2D battle royale warriors. The ability to keep our characters fresh and at the same time introduce existing communities to our gaming platform could keep us relevant and exciting for years. The same way Roblox and Minecraft have engaged their users with customization and creativity and built multi-million dollar empires.

This meant a great deal of work on our part, however. Drawing things by hand proved cumbersome, to say the least. Most 2D classic games work using sprite sheets with individual frames drawn for every character interaction. It wasn't a reasonable solution to scale TBA to the heights we envisioned.

Given that the TBA will have multiple worlds and themes, and within each world are potentially dozens of characters, we would need hundreds of thousands of frames drawn by hand. A process that could take years and require immense manpower.

We then settled for the next best option: Spine animations and rigging to bring static images into the 21st century. Unfortunately, early versions moved like characters from The Grudge. Too robotic and ultimately didn’t fit our fast paced combat system.

We found the middle ground — create custom 3D models that function and look like 2D characters. This cut our animation and graphical workload, but slightly increased the time it takes to initially create each character. So we took it one step further and asked ourselves, what if our players could create their own characters? Offset our workload and introduce another layer of creativity into the ecosystem.

And thus was born our custom character builder. Players import their own PNG images onto our spine animations for head, torso, arms, legs, hands, and feet. Each piece is animated automatically and ready to incorporate into gameplay. Now introducing new content is faster and built to scale with our user base.

Creators will build their characters and then pay a fee in Eggs through our game shoppe to have them integrated into the game build. Uploaded files will need to adhere to the game specifications and guidelines in order to optimize server usage and to adhere to our terms and conditions.

Future versions of the character builder will allow for easier import of NFT pfp art and we are actively investigating asset verification through the blockchain to ensure proper use. A moderation system will allow users to flag characters that blatantly violate copyright or IP or that feature objectionable content.