Winter Sale & 2024 Recap

by ePic Character GeneratorMonthly Wrap-upSaleTechnical

As the end of 2024 is approaching, it’s been a tradition to write a short wrap-up of what has happened in Overhead Games.

But first thing first, I want to say thank you to all of you who have been part of ePic Character Generator’s journey in 2024, marking 10 years of generating awesome character images together. We wouldn’t be anywhere without you. To celebrate this year’s holiday season, we are offering all packs and bundles at 50% off between 19 December and 2 January, so make sure to take advantage of this deal while it lasts!
ePic Character Generator Season 2 Fantasy Starter Bundle Box

Temporal Shore progress

 
This year started strongly with lots of work put into Temporal Shore. While we had most design decisions figured out by the end of last year, we still had a good amount of discussion going on. By spring, we managed to implement a new layout and reshoot the trailer & screenshots so we could update the store page of the game, to better reflect the directions we were heading. To do this, we chose to create a story trailer with a voiceover, that helps to better understand the context of what’s visible on the screen.
 
You can check the current store page and wishlist the game here:
 
Some prominent improvements in design were:
 
– While characters have already been personalities with names and specific abilities, we took this one step further, and introduced a “performing system”. This means that each character has a set number of action points each turn, and whenever an action card is played, some or all of the characters who have available action points will perform this action. This brings the mechanics of playing cards even closer to survival games, where you have to perform various actions with your characters. The character you choose to act has a major effect on how some actions play out. In some cases, there can be a bonus on production, in other times, you can discover cards only available when playing certain cards with certain characters, etc. If the cards have some negative consequences, like characters losing morale, it’s also important to use the ones you are happy taking a hit.
 
– Characters also have different gear slots where they can equip various items, and receive permanent changes to their stats and abilities.
 
– We wanted to make buildings more than just plain resource productions, so we introduced chain reactions. This mechanic allows us to build long sequences that can be triggered by playing a single action, and have different buildings, characters, or monsters react to it, transforming the gained resources into new ones, or triggering new effects on the playfield.
 
– While the game is, at its core, focused on managing resources, we wanted to make this resource gathering and production as exciting as possible, while also keeping the simplicity of card games. To achieve this, we came up with the idea of using resource subtypes, meaning you can produce either lumber or stone, for example, but they will be stored and can be used under the collective name of materials. This simplifies the amount of resource types you need to keep track of, while at the same type, also allowing us to create unique characteristics to each different resource type, making them different to play, and profit from different play styles and synergies. At this time, I won’t go into too much depth, but as we progress, I’ll be explaining more of this system in a later post, because I believe this will be very exciting to interact with.
 

Building an engine

 
While making Temporal Shore, I’m not just making a game. I’m trying to separate game-specific & universal code as much as possible, essentially creating a card engine, that can be used later for any other games that resemble cards & decks. While not strictly limited to card games (meaning it can be used for anything that relies on entities and containers), different types of deck builders are in the focus right now. Because I need to engineer this framework carefully and can’t just throw everything into a giant bowl of code spaghetti (the way most games are made), it takes some extra time and planning to organize and implement everything in its place so most of the stuff will be reusable later, however, this extra effort start paying off because it’s now super quick to put together complex ideas in a short time.
 

GMTK Game Jam

 
The first big test of the engine was in August when the yearly GMTK Game Jam happened. While we missed it last year, we wanted to participate this year and planned on making a card game in the short, 2-day period. However, when the theme “Built to scale” was revealed, we knew we didn’t have an easy task, as it heavily favored games that played with funky physics or resizing objects – something we couldn’t really do in a card game. While we kept bouncing ideas, essentially we settled on taking the theme literally and decided to make a deckbuilder about balancing a Scale.
 

Balanced

 
So we made the first version of Balanced in 2 days. The idea was to create a cozy math game where you place number cards on either side of the scale and keep it balanced for as long as you can. In the jam version, points were awarded at the end of each turn, depending on the imbalance between the two sides, as well as how many cards players had in their hands.
 
You can check out the jam version here:
 
As the initial reception during the jam wasn’t bad at all, we decided to take it a step further and spend 3 more weeks polishing the idea, fixing up design issues, implementing missing menu screens, and then releasing a demo on Steam. At this point, it was meant to be a short, experimental project, and we learned a lot from the process, while also finding some players who enjoyed the game as it is. While it’s far from its final form, it’s still great to have something playable out there after a few years of not releasing new games.
 
You can play the demo and wishlist Balanced here:
 
 

Temporal Shore’s new art style

 
After taking a short break with Balanced, we returned to working on Temporal Shore and finally pot together all the pieces to update the visual style of the game. As you know, the initial concept was visualized with AI, but we are firm believers that games are better when they are hand-crafted, so we took a lot of time to find a suitable art style that both works well with the idea and overall direction of the game, as well as being efficient to make in the scale we need to make it. Now that we got the style figured out, and all the cards and elements were drawn that we wanted to showcase at first, we were able to create a new logo, recapture the retailer, and take the new screenshots currently visible on the store page. We hope you like it!
 
 
Currently, we are in the process of implementing and testing all the card ideas we’ve previously collected (400+ cards so far), and then it comes to testing various interactions, mechanics, and systems, so they aren’t just a bunch of cards next to each other, but together, create a fun and exciting experience.
 
If you made it this far you are a true champion! I appreciate taking the time to read this year’s wrap-up.
 
We wish you a very happy holiday season, with many joyful gaming hours next year!

Summer Sale 2024

by ePic Character GeneratorInfoNewsSale

The Summer has finally arrived, and so has our Summer Sale! With the heat, comes the desire to either chill outside under the cozy shadows or to spend some more time inside, enjoying the cooler temperature. Either way, the time is still the best, to team with friends & family on epic role-playing nights!

To help engage in your adventures, we are hosting a Summer Sale between 27 June and 11 July, offering our BIGGEST discount to date, a whopping 50% off on most of our packs and bundles. Buy one, get one free!

ePic Character Generator Season 2 Fantasy Starter Bundle Box

The work on Temporal Shore is still going strong. We have finalized a good bunch of cards (around 400 so far, but still growing) that we intend to feature in our initial release, and are doing our best to enhance the current visuals to better match the intended feel of the game. We expect to showcase this with new screenshots, a trailer, and a public demo very soon!

If you haven’t already, you can watch our latest trailer below, as well as add the game to your Steam wishlist to support us!

Spring Sale 2024

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsSale

Spring is finally around for us who live in the northern hemisphere! This means the weather is starting to warm up, and after many dark months spent inside, we can finally go out to touch some grass!

However, staying inside still has its benefits, as we can still role-play, write, or create our own games. In all of which ePic Character Generator can be a great aid! So dusting off your wishlists and snagging a few of our packages that hang in there at a 35% discount sounds like the best deal you will get in March!

ePic Character Generator Season 2 Fantasy Starter Bundle Box

On a slightly related note, it’s been a year since we announced our new game, Temporal Shore (we know, time flies!). After hitting this milestone we felt it was needed to polish up our Steam page a bit and showcase all the new systems and mechanics we’ve added to the game during this period. So if you like roguelike deckbuiling and survival strategy, head over to the store page, check out the new trailer, and hit the Wishlist button! That’d make our hearts filled with joy.

What do you think of the new trailer? Do you like it? Do you have questions or comments? Drop us a line either by e-mail or join our discord below and let us know! We’d love to hear your feedback.

Summer Sale 2023

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsSale

The Summer has finally arrived, and so has our Summer Sale! With the heat, comes the desire to either chill outside under the cozy shadows or to spend some more time inside, enjoying the cooler temperature. Either way, the time is still the best, to team with friends & family on epic role-playing nights!

To help engage in your adventures, we are hosting a Summer Sale between 29 June and 13 July, offering our BIGGEST discount to date, a whopping 35% off on most of our packs and bundles. Taking advantage of any of the Season Bundle offers meaning most contained packs can now be snagged at almost half price! A bargain if you’ve been waiting to get them for a while.

ePic Character Generator Season 2 Fantasy Starter Bundle Box

In the background, we’ve also been hard at work to bring Temporal Shore to life as a unique and exciting experience. A 3D artist also joined our team to realize a fully interactive map where you can explore the island, place buildings, and encounter unique events & challenges! We do expect to have a closed alpha test during the summer, so if you’d like to get invited, please add the game to your Steam wishlist, as well as keep your eyes on emails from us!

store capsule main

Spring Sale 2023

by ePic Character GeneratorInfoNewsSale

Today we are starting our first-ever Spring Sale, which will run until the 23rd of March. As usual, most of our packs and bundles for ePic Character Generator are offered at a 25% discount. If you only recently discovered the software coming from one of our new platforms, this is the perfect opportunity to expand your collection!

ePic Character Generator Season 2 Fantasy Starter Bundle Box

Melissa K. Vassar-Belloso has been an active member of our community for a long-time, especially since we launched our discord server. Recently she published an excellent guide on how to do postwork on the characters to make the most of what they offer! If you are interested in taking your avatars to the next level, make sure to check out her guide!

epic flame

It’s been a week since we announced Temporal Shore, a unique blend of roguelike deckbuilding and survival strategy where you lead a team on a mysterious island trapped in a time loop. This is a new game we’ve been working on recently, and the response we got was pretty overwhelming! Many of you added the game to your Steam wishlists, for which we are tremendously grateful. If you haven’t already, you can watch the early trailer below.

Winter Sale + 2022 Recap

by ePic Character GeneratorInfoMonthly Wrap-upSale

As the holiday season approaches and the end of the year draws near, we at Overhead Games are excited to announce our Winter Sale! From 22 December to 5 January, most of our packs and bundles will be available at a whopping 25% discount. This is the perfect opportunity to stock up on all the character creation resources you need to bring your storytelling to life.

This year has been a busy one for us, finally marking the release of our software on all major platforms and operating systems, including the App Store for both Mac OS and iOS. The process of porting our software to the App Store was no small feat, but we were determined to make it happen. We worked tirelessly to ensure that everything was up to Apple’s strict standards and that the user experience was seamless. It was a lot of hard work, but we’re confident that it will be worth it for our users.

ePic Character Generator Season 2 Fantasy Starter Bundle Box

We’re also excited to announce that we are working on a new project that we think fans of roguelike action games will love! If you are one, keep an eye on your inbox in Q1 2023 for your invite to our closed alpha testing.

We know that this year has been tough for many, with the ongoing recession affecting us all. That’s why we want to offer you a chance to save on your purchases and get some extra value for your money. Whether you’re looking to create characters for your next roleplaying campaign or need some inspiration for your next creative project, ePic Character Generator has you covered.

So don’t wait – head on over to our shop and take advantage of our Winter Sale while you can. Happy holidays from all of us at Overhead Games, and we look forward to bringing you even more exciting updates in the year to come!

iOS version now available + Autumn Sale kick off

by ePic Character GeneratorInfoNewsReleaseSale

We are super happy to announce that after more than a year of development, ePic Character Generator is finally available in the App Store, both for Mac and iOS devices! If you’ve been waiting for support for iPhones and iPads, now the wait is finally over and you can get to enjoy generating characters on your Apple devices!

While we expect most of the functionalities to work correctly, you might encounter bugs or crashes that we would love to fix. So if this is the case, please let us know, so we can look into the issue and fix it ASAP!

ePic Character Generator Season 2 Fantasy Starter Bundle Box

Also, starting today, we are holding our annual Autumn Sale lasting until 29 November. If you missed out on our Halloween Sale, you can now grab most of our packs and bundles for a 25% discount!

We have also recently celebrated crossing 1000 reviews on Steam, with an 83% Positive rating! We are very pleased to see so many people enjoying our tool. 

Halloween Sale starts today!

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsSale

It’s that time of the year again, spookiness revolves around every corner! By taking part in our Halloween Sale, starting from today until the 1 of November, you will automatically get a 25% discount on most packages and bundles on all platforms!

As a gift of our gratitude for the long time support, we’ll add the Season #2: Female Halloween pack to each account that holds at least one pack at the end of the sale. So if you don’t already have the Halloween pack and been waiting for an opportunity to purchase your very first pack, now would be the best time to do so! All packs will be credited to accounts after the sale is finished.

ePic Character Generator Season 2 Female Halloween Box

Summer Sale 2022

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsSale

The Summer has finally arrived, and with the heat, comes the desire to either chill outside under the cozy shadows or to spend some more time inside, enjoying the cooler temperature. Either way, the time is still the best, as always, to team with friends & family on epic role-playing nights!

To help engage in your adventures, we are hosting a Summer Sale between 23 June and 7 July, offering a whopping 25% discount on most of our packs and bundles. Taking advantage of any of the Season Bundle offers meaning most contained packs can now be snagged at almost half price! A bargain if you’ve been waiting to get them for a while.

In other news, I’ve personally been mad busy in the past few months, even to an extent where I was unable to host our yearly Birthday celebration! To make up for this unfortunate event, a free pack has just been sent out to all newsletter subscribers! So head into your mailbox, look up our last e-mail, and click the link in there to get your hands on one of your future-favorite packs at completely no charge!

Since the release of the Mac build earlier this year we’ve kept on working to implement the required functionalities for the iOS version. We have to tick a lot of boxes to be compliant with AppStore’s requirements, but we are grinding our way towards success slowly. If you are in our Early Access program, you will receive invitations to have access to these new builds once we are at a stage to start testing them with a small, closed group.

Mac Version is now available!

by ePic Character GeneratorInfoNewsReleaseSale

We are happy to announce that after several months of hard work, we’ve finally reached a state where we can release the Mac version of ePic Character Generator! We’ve been getting messages about a Mac version for years, but we never were at a stage where we could’ve considered porting it, so being able to roll it out now makes me really happy!

A huge thanks to arby for doing the heavy-lifting of porting the software and David for providing us constant feedback on the builds so we could fix issues early and hopefully provide a smooth experience! We don’t expect the port to be perfect, so if you face any issues, make sure to let us know so we can look into it!

If you’ve been waiting for the Mac version for a while, you can now get your hands on the software below:

ePic Character Generator Season 2 Fantasy Starter Bundle Box

Starting today, we are also celebrating the Lunar New Year with a Sale lasting until 3 February. If you missed out on our Winter sale, you can now grab most of our packs and bundles for a 25% discount!

Winter Sale + 2021 Overview

by ePic Character GeneratorInfoNews

Christmas is approaching fast this year, so as usual, we are hosting a Winter Sale during the next two weeks, where most of our packs and bundles are available at a 25% discount. This is the first time the Female Rider is available on sale, so if you wanted to create your very own riders for a while, now could be the time to do it!

As the year-end is also approaching, I’ll be taking some time to recap what has happened at Overhead Games this year, and a small glimpse on what’s coming in 2022.
 
Discord: It’s been exactly a year ago when we launched our official discord server! Right now we have a bit over 600 members on the server, and it is a great honor to have all who are around there! While the public rooms are mostly quiet, we have a lot of chatter in our team areas where we work on our new project, as well as having some convos in our early access channel. I believe once we can share more information on our upcoming title, the server will be much more alive! Until then, there are still fun games to be played for real rewards in the form of digital Steam keys.
 
ePic Character Generator: This was a relatively quiet year on this end. We released a new package, the Female Rider in March, and also shipped a patch with various fixes and improvements. We also launched the Season #3 Bundle, where all packages of that season can be purchased at a discount, similar to how it’s been for a while in the other Seasons.
 
ePic Character Generator Season 3 Female Rider Box
ePic Character Generator Season 3 Pro Bundle Box
In August, we started working on porting the software to Mac OS, and once we are done with that, we will also port it to iOS. Over the past years, I often got asked if we are planning on porting, but since the software is built using a framework that’s not trivial to port, we estimated the work to be much more than what we can account for at that time. When I was meeting a friend during summer he asked me if I wanted to port the software to Mac and iOS because if I do, he would be interested in doing it, and I thought this could be a great opportunity for both of us to work together again, and of course to finally deliver the long-awaited port of the software. Shout out to @arby who’s been working on these versions since! We’ve made good progress and also shared our first builds with a few users who signed up for early access. Huge thank you for your time, your feedback helps us a lot so we can deliver a polished experience to the public! Your efforts will be rewarded. 😉 If all goes well, we are planning on releasing the Mac version of ePic Character Generator in Q1, 2022, and then start working on the iOS port, which we hope to be able to deliver by summer.
 
GMTK Game Jam: In June, the Game Jam came around, and while I didn’t plan on joining this year, the theme inspired me to create a small game regardless. I had a single day to do it, so I reached out to a former colleague and a long-time friend of mine (with whom we are enjoying our time playing IdleRPG in the #adventure channel on discord – cheers @suszterpatt!) and asked if he wanted to chip in by creating the core gameplay code while I design levels, GUI and wrap it all up. He didn’t think long before joining, so that’s how Re-Joined was made. You can read more of it in my previous blog post here.
re joined screenshot

NFTs: This year was crazy in different ways, and one phenomenon a lot of us don’t understand is the insane booming of the NFT market. I got approached on multiple occasions asking if our characters can be used and sold as NFTs, and even though the general use-case is covered in our EULA, there is no specific clause for NFTs (yet). In short, you can use characters in any commercial project, but you need to make sure the characters are not the focus of such a project. So for instance, creating character images and then selling them as NFTs or stock assets isn’t allowed as per the EULA. On the other hand, if you create a game where the characters are the avatars, and you are selling the game as the product and the characters are only there to enhance the experience by visualization, then it’s completely fine, and is actually a use-case the software is designed for.

Speaking of NFTs, while I was at it, I also thought having a collection would be cool, so in September I created the ePic Characters collection on Ethereum and made it available on OpenSea. The collection is made of the original Trading Cards we created for Steam when we released the software there back in 2015. If you aren’t familiar with that system, games on Steam can give specific trading cards to that title after a specific amount of time spent in-game. Since our software is free, users were only able to get these cards by purchasing DLCs initially, however, Steam moved away from distributing trading cards for DLCs, and now the only way to get these are via in-app-purchases – a system we haven’t integrated. Once all cards have been collected, they can be used to craft badges, and subsequent crafting will increase the level of the badge. Today, the only way to acquire ePic Character Generator trading cards is by buying them on the community markets, but as there are no new drops, the number of cards on the market is constantly decreasing, and at one point they will probably be all gone! So I thought preserving these cards in a form of persistent digital collectibles could be a good idea. If you are into these, and also enjoy using the software, owning a unique, one and only copy of the 13 available cards can be tempting! Check out the collection here, and bid on the ones you like the most.

Our new project: Besides the above, most of the year was spent on us working on our new game, as we were experimenting with art styles, animations, and different game mechanics. We also spent a lot of time discussing the world, narrative, overarching story as well as the characters and the way we present dialogues. One area where I was looking to innovate is the presentation of dialogue trees and give more freedom to players to interact with NPCs and explore all the chats they offer, so a lot of time was spent on prototyping different ways to put my ideas into practice. We are at a very good place with the game right now, have the first few characters, locations, plots, and all fleshed out, so what we aim to do as a next step is create a vertical slice, where we can present a fully working, but smaller section of the game. Once we get to a certain point, we will also be looking for people who are into detective games to help us shape the game so it can become a very enjoyable experience by taking their feedback and suggestions, and we will be using our discord server for that, as constant communication will be key in this stage. We don’t have our roadmap set in stone, but we expect to reach this stage probably by the end of Q2, 2022.

I think that’s it for now! I’m really looking forward to seeing what the next year will bring us all. Until then, wishing you a very happy celebration of the upcoming holidays, if you happen to live in an area where they are celebrated!

Autumn Sale 2021

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsSale

As autumn has returned, so is the time to start staying more inside and dust down our favorite games again. Not much has changed since last year though, as we are still mostly enjoy playing digitally, instead of taking part in big gatherings around huge tables. To spice up any role-playing games with exciting characters, we’re hosting our Autumn Sale between 24 November and 1 December. During this period, most of our packs and bundles will be at a 25% discount. Combining this offer with any of the Pro bundles will reduce the overall price of the packages a lot, so if you’ve been on the fence about letting your creativity flow, this might be the perfect opportunity to unlock endless character streams in your games or projects!

We are also hard at work on porting ePic Character Generator to MacOS and iOS! We’ve been making great progress lately, and we are about to share an early build for MacOS in the next few days. If you are interested in giving it a spin and providing feedback, make sure to jump into our Discord and click that computer emoji in the #choose-your-role channel! We appreciate everyone who takes the time to help us deliver a polished experience for these platforms!

Halloween Sale returns

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsSale

It’s that time of the year again, spookiness revolves around every corner! By taking part in our Halloween Sale, starting from today until the 1 of November, you will automatically get a 25% discount on most packages and bundles on all platforms!

As a gift of our gratitude for the long time support, we’ll add the Season #2: Female Halloween pack to each account that holds at least one pack at the end of the sale. So if you don’t already have the Halloween pack and been waiting for an opportunity to purchase your very first pack, now would be the best time to do so! All packs will be credited to accounts after the sale is finished.

ePic Character Generator Season 2 Female Halloween Box

Digital Tabletop Festival returns + Season #3 Pro Bundle is released

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsReleaseSale

We are super happy to announce that the Digital Tabletop Festival returns this year! Spice up your games and stories with avatars created with ePic Character Generator! Between 21 and 25 October, most of our packs and bundles are available at a 25% discount!

We always found it important to make it as easy as possible to both new users as well as veterans to get the most out of our software. Since we kicked off Season #3, we managed to collaborate with several artists to create packs in various styles and themes, and we felt it’s now time to also combine them in a Bundle! So in case, you were still on the sidelines of getting any of the newer packages, grabbing them at a discount could be a good idea right now!

ePic Character Generator Season 3 Pro Bundle Box

When ePic Character Generator originally launched in 2013, it was only available as a Standalone build for Windows. We since made the software available on both Steam and itch.io, as well as ported it to Android, and it’s available on Google Play since 2018. We received a lot of requests for Mac and iPhone builds, but since the software is built using a custom framework, porting isn’t an easy task. However, we are happy to announce that porting is in the works, and we would like to ask for some volunteers who would like to receive updates on this first, and would also like to participate in early testing of the first versions! So if you have a Mac or an iPhone, make sure to jump into our Discord and let us know you are happy to give it a go once we reach that point by taking on the “ePic Early Access” role!

Summer Sale 2021

by ePic Character GeneratorInfoNewsSale

The summer has returned, so did our Summer Sale! During the next two weeks, between 24 June and 8 July, most of our packs and bundles are on a 25% discount. This is the first time that the PSD Exporter is included in a sale, so if you’ve been on the sidelines waiting to unlock this really cool feature, this could be the perfect opportunity to grab it!

ePic Character Generator Psd Exporter

If you are on our discord, you already knew about the fundraiser held by The Games Tavern last month, which resulted in collecting $8.215, which translates into 80.000 meals for hungry kids! They did a stellar job in delivering 15 different shows, each lasting for at least 3 hours.

Now as you can imagine, running these shows requires a good amount of planning, and of course, the whole thing is built around the people, and without them, it wouldn’t be possible to create entertainment for others. TGT is dedicated to delivering quality content and is now on the lookout to expand the existing cast & crew with individuals who are into roleplaying and streaming. Check out their call for action below, and get in touch if you are interested!

The Games Tavern Looking For Talent

And last, but not least, I teamed up with a friend of mine and we took part in the GMTK Game Jam this year too, which happened over the past weekend. If you are interested in what game we created in only a span of 8 hours, and also to learn more about the creation process, check out the most recent blog post.

https://overheadgames.com/gmtk-game-jam-2021-re-joined/

re joined screenshot

Female Rider is here! 7th Birthday Sale started!

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsReleaseSale

In March 2014, ePic Character Generator has been released, and since that time, it helped thousands of users creating their characters to visualize their role-playing sessions, illustrate their worlds and stories, and provide assets for their adventure, card, and board games.

To celebrate the 7th birthday of the software, we’re offering a 25% discount on all our packages for the next 7 days. What’s more, we wanted to thank everyone for showing support in the past years, and prepared a gift! We sent out a unique link in our Newsletter to everyone, which can be used to claim any of our packs for free! If you haven’t received your link, make sure to check your Spam folder, look at your Subscriptions panel in your Account details and make sure you are opted-in to receive news from us, and if all else fails, reach out by e-mail so we can see what might went wrong!

We are also happy to introduce the latest addition to our Season #3 collection. The Female Rider is the perfect character to display characters on mounts! Be it a horse, a snake, or a dino, we got you covered! We also shared some sneak-peeks on Discord in the last couple of weeks, so if you aren’t there already, make sure to jump in, and keep an eye on what’s coming. 😉

Check out the new pack in our store:

ePic Character Generator Season 3 Female Rider Box

There have also been several fixes in the software recently. Thanks to everyone who kept on reporting issues, so eventually they could get fixed!

– The messages for Tutorial and Discord Achievements are now fixed
– Icon paging now works on sets
– Fixed button overlay that made parts of the General categories unclickable
– Fixed exporting colors on multi-select items
– Fixed an issue when loading characters with repositioned bases will incorrectly set the positions of items not being active in the save file
– Fixed background icons in the Season #3 Throne packages

We hope you like the new packs and join in our celebration by taking advantage of your free pack or jumping on the discounts to grab some of the packs you’ve been waiting for!

Lunar New Year Sale

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsSale

We are excited to announce that between 11 – 15 February, we are celebrating the Lunar New Year, and hosting a sale where most of our packs and bundles are available for a 25% discount! This time of the year isn’t the most exciting part for most of us, so passing time by some character creation could always be a refreshing alternative.

We also added a new Achievement in the Profile section. Anyone who joins our Discord server can claim an additional pack of their choice for free! We already crossed 100 members since we launched our server right before Christmas, and we had some good chatter with a few active participants. You can also interact with us directly, talk about anything you’d want, or we can play some games together. The free packs are just a bonus. 😉 We hope to meet you there too!

Winter Sale + 2020 Overview

by ePic Character GeneratorMonthly Wrap-upNewsSaleTechnical
Christmas is around the corner, and as usual, we’ll be holding our Winter Sale between 22 December and 5 January. During this period most of our packs and bundles will be available at a 25% discount. As you probably know, the autumn period has frequent sales, but once the new year begins, there usually isn’t anything for a while. So if you’ve been tempted to bag a few packs to play with later, maybe thinking ahead and grabbing them now on a discount would be the best choice for a while.
 

This year was quite extraordinary for all of us, so I wanted to look back and take some time to walk through what happened in the past 12 months at Overhead Games.

January has been kicked off with the creation of a new website. The other site was built using older technology and our needs eventually grow over its limitations. A lot of time was spent on building the current, since everything was needed to be recreated, mostly from scratch. This took quite some time and taking all the optimization that went into account probably filled a good part of February too.
 
With the new site, I took the opportunity to start writing News in a blogpost fashion so that anyone interested could keep track of what’s happened, even if they aren’t subscribers to our Newsletters. I started creating monthly Wrap-ups so we can still post an update on what’s been in the oven even though nothing major happened worth sending a newsletter for. You can find these Wrap-ups in the News section: 
 
 
In March, Throne Lady #2 was released, and we also held our 6th Birthday, where we sent out a free pack to all subscribers in our Newsletters.
 
In May, after long years of waiting, we finally released the option to export the characters as layered PSD files. We wanted to make sure we are providing this option the most optimal way possible for our users, so we had a detailed questionnaire prior to the release, where we asked our Pro users to discuss potential pricing and the form of release. We were really happy to see so many replies and we were confident we’ll provide the exporter in a way that most of our users will be happy with.
ePic Character Generator Season 3 Throne Lady 2 Box
ePic Character Generator Season 3 Throne Savage Box
ePic Character Generator Psd Exporter
We also released ePic Character Generator on itch.io at the same time. While I wanted to provide the best, integrated experience for users checking out the software there, I failed to get the attention of the support team, so I was unable to properly configure the options for users to purchase packs on itch.io directly. As a result, all transactions will still go through our website similar to how it’s done in the standalone client.
 
In June, the male pair of the Throne Lady, the Throne Savage was released. It was interesting since this was the first package where we provide full coloring options for the skin, and as a result, even with a single base character, lots of exciting personalities can be created.
 
In August we took a little side-trip, and since I’ve been working with new people on my next project, we decided it’d be a good experience to participate in the GMTK Game Jam, and make a game in under 48 hours around a theme specified by the organizer. While the originality of the game ended up in the top 10%, our overall score only put us in the first 20% of the participants. Nonetheless, we were happy with these results. If you are interested, you can read a more detailed post on how we approached the jam here: https://overheadgames.com/gmtk-game-jam-2020-waste-waster/
Waste Waster Gameplay
At the end of August, I took a look at RPG Scenery, an exciting way to visualize scenes during role-playing. You can read my experience, as well as try the software for yourself following the links here: https://overheadgames.com/rpgscenery-a-quick-way-to-illustrate-scenes-and-battle-maps/
 
Since September, only a small amount of time was spent working on ePic Character Generator. I fixed a few issues that were reported earlier both in the client and on the website, while also participating in various sale events on Steam.
 
In November, the Fantasy Starter Bundle debuted in the Humble Store, which is a huge milestone for us! Getting into the Humble Store is not easy, since they are very selective on what they allow into their storefront. Thanks to all the users that were using the Steam version over the past years, and especially those who decided to write reviews on the store page, we were able to demonstrate that people are happy with the software, and eventually get listed.
 
I also got into my first sponsoring deal with The Games Tavern, as I offered a few keys for lucky viewers of their streams. I also got interviewed by Reid, and we talked about how I became a programmer, why we decided to create ePic Character Generator in the first place, and what’s coming next.

In December, the official Overhead Games discord server has finally been launched. It’s brand new, but there are lots of things to do already. First, you can hang out and chat with us, enjoying our company. While we can discuss any topic on your mind, or play games together, we’ll also share updates and sneak-peeks there first.

You can also play various games, like russian roulette, blackjack, participate in cute animal-races or simply bet on a coin flip, just to name a few. With all these games, you can collect Gold, a digital currency on the server, that you can later exchange for various goodies. As of now, there are already several Steam keys for various games, as well as ePic Character Generator packages available. You can also offer your own digital items on the marketplace, and obtain more Gold in the process. Both the list of available goodies as well as the games will be extended later on. In the past two years, I wrote numerous games for discord on a friend’s server, and we’ve had extreme fun playing these over the months. Since the architecture of the bots is a bit different, it’ll take some time for me to port these, but they are coming!

But that’s not all! You can also participate in a fully-fledged, text-driven idle RPG, where you can go on adventures, obtain loot and money, level up, upgrade items, form or join guilds, battle others for fame and glory, and many many more activities await you! So come, join us: https://discord.gg/ntG95jFV79

But this is not the end of the story yet. As I mentioned, since September most of my time was not spent with ePic Character Generator, as I’ve been working on a new game for quite some time now. The original idea came in April 2019, and ever since I’ve been on and off the project whenever I found the time. I started working on it more seriously this January, and since it’ll be a game with lots of text in it, I hired a writer to create these parts, as I’m not a good writer myself. During Autumn, I also came to a point where the high-level vision was already refined enough so I could start looking at different art directions. I looked around on various platforms to find the perfect match for my vision, and in the end, I got over 50 applications as potential artists for the game. I took several iterations with them, and in the end, I got the perfect style that’ll go really well with the setting and the mood of the world. I hope you enjoy the sneak-peek below:

Overhead Games Unannounced Game

In the meantime, I also started looking for a second designer/writer. We were able to create most of the buzz of the new world ourselves, but I felt that there’s still a missing component I wanted to put more focus on. At the time of writing, the game, from a technological point of view, is in a very advanced stage. All that is left to do now is fill it up with all the content we want to add, make the game interesting and exciting, and do lots of iterations to make it a very enjoyable experience. We plan to do a closed alpha and beta testing at some point early next year, so keep an eye on your e-mails, or join our discord server, if you like detective games, and would be interested to sign up!

As for the future, Elena, the artist of the Throne packs is working on a new package for ePic Character Generator. Once again, it’ll be a completely unique take you never saw before, but there are quite a few technical quirks we need to overcome before we can release it for you.

I hope you liked this recap of the year, and are as excited for next year as I am. I hope to be able to share some more with all of you very soon. If you want to have a more detailed overview of what has been happening, check out our News section!

Have a nice Christmas, and let’s hope together that 2021 will be a better New Year!

Autumn Sale + first-ever video interview

by ePic Character GeneratorInfoNewsSaleTechnical

Autumn is in full swing around here, and this gives us a perfect time to start staying more inside and dust down our favorite games again. This time, however, we can only do so much in a digital space. To spice up any role-playing games with exciting characters, we’re hosting our Autumn Sale between 25 November and 1 December. During this period, most of our packs and bundles will be at a 25% discount. Combining this offer with any of the Pro bundles will reduce the overall price of the packages a lot, so if you’ve been on the fence about letting your creativity flow, this might be the perfect opportunity to unlock endless character streams in your games or projects!

During November, we teamed up with The Games Tavern for a month of giving back. They focused on raising money to help Operation Supply Drop, and we were happy to provide some character packs they could give away during streams or on Twitter when specific targets were reached.

Since we were already in contact, we also organized a short video-interview, so viewers can get to know me, and the project a bit better. This was the very first time I took part in such an interview, so if you are interested in the story behind ePic Character Generator, check out the following video. I hope you’ll like it.

Join our Halloween Sale, and unlock the Halloween pack for free!

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsSale

It’s that time of the year again, spookiness revolves around every corner! By taking part in our Halloween Sale, starting from today until the 2 of November, you will automatically get a 25% discount on most packages and bundles on all platforms!

As a gift of our gratitude for the long time support, we’ll add the Season #2: Female Halloween pack to each account that holds at least one pack at the end of the sale. So if you don’t already have the Halloween pack and been waiting for an opportunity to purchase your very first pack, now would be the best time to do so! All packs will be credited to accounts after the sale is finished.

ePic Character Generator Season 2 Female Halloween Box

Digital Tabletop Festival & PSD Exporter changes

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsSale

While being locked away from big gatherings and never-ending board game nights, you can still enjoy the thrill of many games by playing their digital counterparts! Spice up your games and stories with avatars created with ePic Character Generator! Between 21 and 26 October, most of our packs and bundles are available at a 25% discount!

We always value your feedback and try to accommodate every input we get into the software, so the following changes are requests coming from the members of the community:
– PSD exports are tuned down to 8-bits from 16-bits, to increase compatibility with image editor tools
– Exported PSDs now include the colors set in the software instead of exporting items in their original colors
– We also fixed a crash during Tutorial for PSD Exporter owners

ePic Character Generator Psd Exporter

Throne Savage is released + Summer Sale kicks off!

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsReleaseSale

To celebrate summer we are running a Summer Sale during the next two weeks! Between 25 June and 9 July, most of our packs and bundles are on a 25% discount. This is the first time that the Comic Monster and the Throne Lady are included in a discount, so if they’ve been on your wishlist for a while, this could be the perfect opportunity to grab them on the cheap!

ePic Character Generator Season 3 Comic Monster Box
ePic Character Generator Season 3 Throne Lady Box

Due to popular demand, we also got a partner for the Throne Lady! Check out our brand new pack in the store:

ePic Character Generator Season 3 Throne Savage Box

Full nudity of the models has been something that was asked a lot in the past, and we gradually added options to support this request. At a first step, we made the default bras on Female models removable for Pro members to increase the usability of the packs. Now after releasing the PSD Exporter, we are essentially giving you the ability to modify or entirely disable any layers you want, so it made sense to also make this change in the software. From now on, owners of the PSD Exporter can also remove the default panties inside the software, available for characters in Season #2. This feature will incrementally roll out to other Seasons too, but as it involves updating each package one by one, it’ll take some time.

In the past month we also got an awesome review written by Timothy S. Brannan. If you aren’t familiar with his site, go check it out, as it has tons of interesting stuff! Read the full review here: http://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2020/05/review-epic-character-generator.html

We hope you’ll like the new pack, and enjoy the summer!

PSD Exporter is out + Double Deal event details

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsReleaseTechnical

Exporting layered PSD files has been a feature on our todo list for a long time. We finally managed to get everything together and we are happy to announce that it’s now available in the program.

Once we realized we should be doing it we weren’t sure what would be the best way to release it. So we asked our Pro members, the veteran users of our software, to help us find the best way to make it available.

We received lots of feedback both on the distribution method and on the price (a huge thank you to everyone who participated in the survey), which we all took into account. We both wanted to keep it accessible to anyone who wants this feature at a reasonable price, and also reward users who’ve been long-time supporters. Taking every opinion into account, the Psd Exporter is going to be an addon on top of the Pro version.

ePic Character Generator Psd Exporter
ePic Character Generator Pro Box

To show our gratitude to our veteran members, anyone who already had the Pro version, have been gifted the Psd Exporter for free.

It would be unfair to anyone who wanted to buy the Pro version tomorrow to miss out on such a deal, so between 22 May and 7 June, we’ll be hosting a Psd Double Deal event! Buying the Pro version will automatically grant you the Psd Exporter for free! After this period expires, it’ll be available for purchase for $29.99, so if you ever wanted to do post-work on your characters, don’t miss this chance to unlock the true potential of the software! This is a one-time event we won’t be repeating in the future.

As an added bonus, we also created an Achievement for acquiring the Psd Exporter, which awards a free pack, as usual.

We hope you are as excited about the layered export as we are. We can’t wait to see all the creative ideas that you’ll come up with using the new options! If you happen to create a really cool character, post it on our forums so we can have a look!

Monthly Wrap-up: April

by ePic Character GeneratorInfoMonthly Wrap-upTechnical

April has gone by and we’ve been busy building things we hope you will all enjoy. We hope you and your families and safe and healthy amidst the current situation.

Thankfully in the games and software industry, things didn’t change much. First, we kicked off the month with our 6th Birthday Sale, in which many of you participated. We also sent out a free pack to all our newsletter subscribers as a thank you for all the support we got since we launched. We also got a new logo, which we hope you like too. 🙂

We published two updates to ePic Character Generator during the month, where we fixed various issues. We focused a bit more on the Android version this month. After the introduction of Android 10, we noticed that saving files to arbitrary locations (for example the Documents folder) is no longer supported. Since they completely reworked how file access can be done, we spent over 20 hours trying to get this single feature alone right. But we couldn’t. Since the software is written in c++, and applications for Android are run in a Java environment, there are certain layers that are needed to enable communication between these two languages. Unfortunately, the way the new Storage Access Framework works on Android 10 and above is meant to be used by Java applications only, and passing a filehandle back to the native application to read and write the files is something that can’t be properly done without implementing extreme workaround which will also stop working once Android 11 is released. So after wasting so many hours on this, we decided to revert to restricting users to only be able to save and load to the app’s internal directory. We understand that this solution is not ideal, but it’s still a better way than disabling saving on mobiles completely.

Apart from that, we also started working on a very exciting and very frequently asked feature under the hood. To have a better understanding of what would be the best way to bring this new feature to you, we sent out a survey to our Pro members. Since they already have access to way more features than non-Pro users, and also they are our most dedicated supporters, we felt that they’d know best how to move forward with our idea. We received lots of great feedback and ideas which we’ll be able to use to launch this new feature. If you are a Pro member, we seriously suggest registering an account on our site to be able to receive specific communication from us, hear about new features we are working, and be able to communicate your needs and ideas so we can better steer the development of the software in a direction that would be the best for everyone. If you are a Pro member and haven’t yet completed our short survey, just launch the software and a message box would pop up offering the option to do so. We are working hard to take all your feedback in, and we hope to be able to launch the new feature by the end of the month.

We also received some questions asking what’s the best way to keep informed of all the stuff we are working on. The best way to keep updated is to be a subscriber of our newsletter, which we usually send once every 2-3 months. We also post monthly updates to our blog, share it on the project’s page, and on our developer hub. If you use Steam, make sure to follow us there too:
https://store.steampowered.com/developer/OverheadGames

You can also follow us on your favorite social media channel and keep in touch:
https://www.facebook.com/overheadgames/
https://www.twitter.com/overheadgames/

We are excited to see how you’ll like all the things we’ve been working on once they are rolled out.

Stay tuned!

6th Birthday Sale + Throne Lady #2 release

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsReleaseSale

In March 2014, ePic Character Generator has been released, and since that time, it helped thousands of users creating their characters to visualize their role-playing sessions, illustrate their worlds and stories, and provide assets for their adventure, card and board games.

To celebrate the 6th birthday of the software, we’re offering a 25% discount on all our packages for the next 7 days. What’s more, we wanted to thank everyone for showing support in the past years, and prepared a gift!

We received feedback from some of our users who’ve been our long time followers that they haven’t received our last update when we set our website live back in January. To help avoid similar cases in the future, we recently spent a lot of time on increasing the reachability of our newsletter, so hopefully, everyone is going to get notified this time around.

So we also prepared something special this time! We sent out a unique link in our Newsletter to everyone, which can be used to claim any of our packs for free! If you haven’t received your link, make sure to check your Spam folder, look at your Subscriptions panel in your Account details and make sure you are opted-in to receive news from us, and if all else fails, reach out by e-mail to so we can see what might went wrong!

In December we released 2 brand new packages. The Comic Monster pack featured a whole new art style and allowed users looking to create comic styled beast, rapture, bird and dragon monsters, just to name a few, while the Throne Lady pack introduced a more gritty style and allowed users to experiment with different hand positions in the pack.

The Throne Lady pack was a great success, so today we’re releasing an expansion pack for it, which contains more items and several supernatural elements to further extend on the available arsenal of character creation. As in Season #2, both packs can be used together, to increase the available items in each category!

Check out these packages in our shop:

ePic Character Generator Season 3 Throne Lady 2 Box
ePic Character Generator Season 3 Throne Lady Box
ePic Character Generator Season 3 Comic Monster Box

Since we shared our Questionnaire in our latest post at the beginning of March, we continued to receive lots of submissions, which are very helpful in guiding us in the direction which most of you are asking for. We can’t stress enough how valuable your constant feedback is to us, so we decided to keep the survey open! If you haven’t already, you can fill out our quick Questionnaire to help us better understand your needs!

And last, but not least, if you’ve been using the software in the past 6 years, and have been happy with it, please consider showing your support by providing a helpful review on either the Steam or the Google Play version. Writing a review is free and only takes a few minutes, but it helps us tremendously in reaching new users, which is important in order to constantly improve the features and content of our software. Once again, if you aren’t happy with what we have now, don’t hesitate to either visit our Forums and share your suggestions publicly, or send us an e-mail and tell us what you want to see improved! 🙂

We already have some pretty interesting things coming in the following months, which we can’t wait to share with you. Stay tuned for more!

Monthly Wrap-up: February

by ePic Character GeneratorMonthly Wrap-upNews

February flown by quite quick, and we were quite busy with plenty of things on our hands regardless.

After booting up the new site, we spent some more time on fine tuning several areas of it which we didn’t feel comfortable with. Right now most the functionalities are ready and while we do have several improvements in mind, most of those are going to happen under the hood.

We published an update to ePic Character Generator, as there were some issues when Saving the different hand positions in the Throne Lady pack, thanks to everyone who pointed out the problems in our Forums! We also got notified of another issue in the Supernatural packs, that sometimes the body parts were not correctly hidden when a supernatural part was selected. Back in Autumn, 2019 we spent a lot of time rewriting the config file structure to accommodate the needs of both the Comic Monster and the Throne Lady packages, and while doing so we left a few bugs in there. A related issue was recently found, when multiple items (like the Pirate pegleg and the Supernatural lower body parts) were activated at the same time, they not always reverted back to their correct states after several changes. These issues also got ironed out, but the update hasn’t been published yet.

In the second part of February, we spent some more time working on our upcoming game. We fleshed out the most important mechanics in a playable build, and everything started to work together nicely. We also further expanded on the world we created and answered a lot of questions we asked internally. We also started working on the graphics for this title, so we expect to start sharing some more info on this project with you soon.

We also started to wrap up our social presence a bit more. We started creating a “Character of the Week”, and share it on our social platforms. We’ll also be sharing news, sneak peeks and other exciting stuff there soon too, so if you are interested, make sure to follow us on your favorite social platform:
https://www.facebook.com/OverheadGames
https://www.instagram.com/OverheadGames
https://twitter.com/OverheadGames

As you know, we started a Questionnaire in December, 2019 to get a better understanding of how ePic Character Generator is being used. We received lots of useful feedback so far, so we decided to share some of the statistics we got:

Do you agree or disagree with the results? Make sure your opinion also get to us by filling in the short Questionnaire here: https://forms.gle/baTMzcTA5VDbmK1ZA

We also promised 50 packs for free to anyone taking part in the survey! We decided to do an incremental draw, and while keeping the poll open, we’ll start distributing the free packs! We selected 10 participants randomly, and will reach out to them shortly to confirm their winnings. The sooner you fill out the Questionnaire, the more chance you’ll have in further draws!

Monthly Wrap-up: January

by ePic Character GeneratorInfoMonthly Wrap-upNewsTechnical

Among many other changes, we decided to start writing monthly wrap-ups, to look back on what has happened in the past month and summarize the most important bits of it. This is also exciting for us so we can actually see how many things we were able to achieve compared to what we planned, but hopefully it’d also provide some more insights on how we do things and what we are working on currently.

January has mostly been consumed by the process of transitioning to the new website. Our old one was created in 2013 at around the same time we launched our Indiegogo compaign for ePic Character Generator, mainly to provide a place to connect with people interested in what we were doing. The Forums were a good place to engage in conversation with us and the others, and it proved to be a very valuable tool for us, as we often got feedback which we were able to take into consideration when we needed to decide what to do next. Oftentimes we get bug reports which also help us tremendously in figuring out what’s working as intended and what’s not. A huge thanks to everyone who’s keeping a constant eye on the health of the software and letting us know whenever something bad happens!

After the release of the software the website operated as a shop, as it was the only place the generator was available. As we ported the software to Steam in 2015 we needed to add many extra functionalities to the site which helped new users get started quickly, like the FAQ page. We also created a Showcase section and started developing a Profile page, so users can easily manage their collections and exchange free packs to the ones they are interested in using the most.

The site worked okay for several years, but last year we started focusing on moving forward, and examined several factors in how we are presenting ourselves to the market. Our old site was based on Joomla, which was a quite popular CMS back in the days, but it grew old over the years, and we had a very hard time getting it to do what we wanted to do with it. We spent months on trying to get everything right on that, but in December, 2019 we realized we can no longer stick to keeping it, so we decided to transition to a new site based on WordPress, which is one of the most popular CMS today, with tons of plugins and addons available on the market.

We knew that migrating the site would not be an easy task, as this essentially meant that we’ll need to rebuild everything from scratch. Luckily we found plugins to be able to put together the existing functionality, as we needed to provide a way for users to register and log in, to be able to purchase packs, and to have a forum where discussions can carry on. As of now, we are quite happy with the results, but we also know that the site is far from finished. We still have plenty of areas we need to improve both visually and functionally. We also spent a significant amount of time on optimizing and caching, so load speeds would be more ideal, but this topic is also something that can continue on forever.

Although most of the time in January was spent on the website, we were also able to focus on the software a bit. We faced an issue on Google Play with devices using Android 10, as they are no longer able to download expansion files. We filed a bug report with Google and they are investigating the issue. We also received several feedback mostly from mobile users that linking accounts are rather difficult, so we improved how the linking flow works and today account linking both on Steam and Google Play are 95% automatic.

We were also able to spend some time on our next project. We know that finding the right setting for it was a crucial first step, so we did some research on what settings are trending, but the market is still not yet overwhelmed with different titles. We are pretty happy with the results, and we now have a basic introduction to the world it’s going to be placed in. We know this sounds exciting, but we can only reveal more details on it just a bit later.

In February we expect to flesh out most of the remaining issues with our website, as well as to deliver an update to ePic Character Generator and fix some of the known bugs.

Website Launched + Lunar New Year Sale

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsSale

We are happy to let you know that our new website is now live! We loved our old one at epicgenerator.net, but over the past couple of years we faced several issues and limitations while we implemented various new features in the software, which we could no longer overcome. All major features of our site is now available on the new one. You are welcome to join our Forums, browse topics and participate in discussions which interest you the most. You can also visit our renewed Shop section, have a look at our packages and take advantage of discounts. You can find your usual place of Profile management where you can unlock Achievements and exchange your free packs to the ones of your choice. Furthermore we also added a new section under News, where we’ll keep all our news for further reading, as well as from time to time, we’ll publish interesting reads which are more related to technical developments and other events which we think could be interesting, but wouldn’t want to send it out in a Newsletter.

Please be advised though that our website is still in development, which means we’ll make changes to colors and images, add new functions, and improve user experience over time. In case you run into any issues please do let us know by either e-mailing us, or posting in our Forums, so we can be aware of the issue, and fix it as soon as possible.

Furthermore we’re also hosting a Lunar New Year Sale until the 27th of January! To celebrate this event, we’re offering a 25% discount on most of our packs and bundles. As usual, the Starter Bundles are excluded, along with our most recent packages, so the Season #3 Throne Lady and Comic Monster packs can only be bought for full price. We know we’ve been packed with sales in the last few months, but since we usually follow the pattern of Steam sales, we expect not to have any more discounts until mid-summer. So if you have plans of creating awesome characters until then and still missing a few packs from your collection, now could be a good time to stock up!

 In case you missed it, we are still running our Questionnaire and we are looking to get more feedback from you regarding ePic Character Generator. We got many responses so far, but since we got some really good insight we decided to keep the form open for a while. If you can spare 5 minutes to fill it out too, you’d be entered into a raffle where we also give away 50 packs for free! Please do help us to be able to give you the content you want to use: https://forms.gle/8TFLHLYqwwcCh8nu7
  
2020 looks to be a solid year for us, with new and exciting packs, as well as other projects being on the horizon. We also hope you’ll like all the new stuff we are preparing for your. Stay tuned for more in the next few months!

Winter sale details

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsReleaseSale

We hope you are enjoying christmas and the holiday season as much as we do. Winter Sale is already rocking with a 25% discount on most of our packs until the 2nd of January, but there’s more in the update we recently published for our software.

As we already mentioned in the last update, we’ve been working hard to create new packs with external artists, and as a result, we also put a lot of effort to make pack creation as easy as possible. We already added lots of new information to our Developer Program page with a lengthy video explaining all the details from downloading the template psd, to getting the character available in the software. We’re still working on making this flow more friendly, so several improvements will come in the near future.

In case you missed it, there was a discussion on our Forums lately, where Payne asked if there is an easy way to create Kitsune characters in the program. Two of our veteran users quickly responded, and after some discussion Ashesnei actually created a small pack, which adds new items in the Horn and Tail categories for the Season #2 Female characters, which can be used to easily represent Kitsune characters. She made this pack available to everyone for free, so today is the release of the first Community Pack too. If you are also interested in creating additions to either the existing packages, or making brand new designs, check out the Developer Program with plenty of information to help you get started!

We are always looking to improve the software based on feedback from you, our users. We changed how new users get into the program in the future, and made the Tutorial an optional choice. To incentivize doing it, we also made it an Achievement, so more free packs can be earned from now on. If you’ve been using the software for a while don’t worry, simply log in again, and you’ll be granted a free pack immediately.

As we mentioned in the last update, we’d also like to see what YOU want the most. We put together a Questionnaire to get a better understanding of your needs and also to be able to improve communication with you. We received lots of responses already, so if you can spare 5 minutes to fill it out too, you’d be entered into a raffle where we also give away 50 packs for free! Please do help us to be able to give you the content you want to use! Here’s the direct link: https://forms.gle/8TFLHLYqwwcCh8nu7

We hope you have a nice end of the year, see you in 2020!

New release: Season #3 – Comic Monster & Throne Lady

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsRelease

We are happy to let you know that we’ve just released an update to our software which contains plenty of exciting changes as well as two brand new packages!

This year, we started to focus on increasing the diversity of the packs and styles in the generator, and as a result, started collaboration with various external artists. From today, we already have 4 available packages created by other artists, and we felt it’d be better to mark these packs clearly something different, so we kicked off Season #3. Under Season #3, you’ll find the hand drawn Portrait packs, which have been out for a while, as well as the two brand new packs, which has just been released.

Out first new pack is the Throne Lady, which was created by Elena Ivanina. She was born in Russia, but she’s been living in Greece for many years now. Drawing is second nature to her, and everything she knows is self-thought. Her favorite styles are fantasy, sci-fi and steampunk. 

This pack is unique not only in it’s art style, but because it’s portraying a woman in a partially sitting position. Elena had some great ideas which surpassed the available features in the software, so we also needed to add various new things into it to fit her needs. She wanted to create different hand positions, and the options to put bracers and tattoos to the hand in these positions. To support this, we created the option to create multi-position characters, which was the most commonly asked feature of the software in the past years. She also wanted to give more freedom to the users when composing the images, so we made the Items category multi-selectable, meaning that more than one item can be active in the same category, and they can also be moved around separately from each other. 

As usual, you can find more details and screenshots of the new pack in our Store.
You can see more work from Elena by visiting her portfolio and social media pages:
https://www.instagram.com/art_zdesiseitsas
https://www.facebook.com/digitalartistandillustrator
https://www.artstation.com/alenakalinina

Our second new pack is the Comic Monster, created by Laszlo Nemeth. He was an avid comic fan ever since he was a kid, which also served as an inspiration to his drawing techniques. His main profile is 2D character art and animation, and his works are available in several games by now. His main influencers are Todd McFarlane, Stanley Lau, James Raiz and Scott Campbell. 

The pack is a very exciting one, as this is the first which focuses entirely on monsters. This was also one of the most asked topics in the past years, since we already had quite a few different humanoid-types available, but creating monsters was only achievable by using the Supernatural packages, so we felt extending these options could be a good idea. Drawing beasts was a natural fit for Laszlo, and his comic style was also a good match for this theme. A few technical developments were needed for his pack too, as he focuses heavily on the coloring feature. We needed to add support for multi-coloring, which is now used to change the color of several different categories at once. He also made creating dark creatures possible, and added various extra layers on top of each category, which remain visible even when very dark colors are selected, so the contour of the character can be seen. We also added changing colors to each layer when pressing Random, so finding new inspiration is really just a click of a button. 

To see more details about the pack visit our Store page.
And to find more art from Laszlo, take a look at his portfolio at the following pages:
https://www.instagram.com/nlaszlo0411
https://www.facebook.com/raven04113
https://www.artstation.com/nlaszlo

Please note that the new packs and updates are only available in the PC Standalone and Steam versions. An update to mobile versions will come in the following days.

As we already mentioned, we’ve been working hard to create new packs with external artists, and as a result, we also put a lot of effort to make pack creation as easy as possible. We already added lots of new information to our Developer Program page, with a lengthy video explaining all the details from downloading the template psd, to getting the character available in the software. We’re still working on making this flow more friendly, so several improvements will come in the near future.

Moving forward, we’d also like to see what YOU want the most. We’re in the progress of creating new characters with different artists too, but wanted to make sure we are actually working on characters you would be interested in using. We put together a Questionnaire to get a better understanding of your needs and also to be able to improve communication with you. If you can spare 5 minutes to fill it out, you’d be entered into a raffle where we also give away 50 packs for free! Please do help us to be able to give you the content you want to use! Here’s the direct link: https://forms.gle/8TFLHLYqwwcCh8nu7

We hope you like the new packs, and we look forward to hear from you in our Questionnaire.

New release: Female Portrait pack

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsRelease

We are happy to announce that the long awaited Female Portrait pack is now available for purchase in our store! The Male pack was kind of an experiment for us, but the responses were very positive, so we listened to your feedback and created the Female version of it. From now on you can represent both your male and female characters in a hand-draw fashion. To celebrate this event, we’ll offer 20% discount on the Male Portrait pack during the next week, ending on 11th March!

These Portrait packs were special to us in other ways too, as they were created in collaboration with an external artist, Peter Temesi. As you know we launched our Developer Program a while back giving everyone the opportunity to add new content to the software easily, and the created packages can be shared with other users as both free or paid content too, in which case we offer revenue share to the artist. If you are, or know someone who could be interested in creating packs make sure to let us know! We are in talks with several external artists at the moment, so once you get an idea make sure to tell us so we can coordinate with the others.

 We had a good amount of new users picking up the software in past couple of months, and we received several feedback regarding the difficulty of selecting packs to buy when someone first wants to dip their toes into creating characters. We came up with a solution just for those who want to start creating, but are not sure what packs to get at the beginning. We created the Fantasy Starter and the Modern Starter bundles, where we selected 4-4 of our best selling packages from each theme, which can be used to kick start creativity. As a bonus, we introduced a massive discount on these two bundles, as they can both be purchased for only $9.99, providing a 45-67% discount compared to the original price of the packs! These bundles are available for veteran users too, who, for some reason missed out on the packs contained in these bundles, so make sure to check them out to see if these can be something for you too!

Have you been using the software for quite some time now and want to give something back? Are you happy with our program and would recommend it to others? Write a Positive review on Steam, or leave a 5* rating on Google Play. Are you unhappy with some things and rather not recommend it? Tell us about it! We might be able to fix what you’re missing. 

Why developing tools for small projects worth it?

by ePic Character GeneratorNewsTechnical

 

ePic Character Generator has been out of the door for a while and a heavily reworked version has seen sunlight in November, 2015. We’ve had quite a few improvements on the program and lots of new content is now available, but I would like to take the time to talk a bit about how the actual packs are being put together in the background. If you don’t know this program yet, it’s a character generator software where anyone can create high quality images without any artistic skills, export the pictures on transparent or static backgrounds, save them as tokens or character cards, and use them freely for role playing, illustrating stories, prototyping ideas or releasing actual games with the images. Now let’s get a bit into how this works behind the scenes…

The way the program works is fairly simple. It parses a config file, which defines what layers the currently active package has and then renders the items from each layer on top of each other in the given order. There are plenty of parameters to specify for each layer:

[
Name = “pants”
Subcategory = “Outfit”
IgnoreItem = “fullset fullset2 suit suit2 extreme”
Colorable = “1”
SkipIgnoredRandom = “1”
ItemCount = “34”
]

– This is how the pants category is defined in the pack’s config file. It tells what the name of the category is, which is useful to display the button for it.
– It tells what Main category it goes, which is the Outfit. Every category is grouped in Main categories thematically (the Outfit has most of the stuff which just goes on the character, but doesn’t change it, like eyes, hair, tatoo, etc…).
– The IgnoreItem is an array itself, it lists all other categories which should be turned off when this category has an active item.
– The Colorable means you can change the color of that item.
– ItemCount represents the number of items in this category.

It’s quite straight-forward, although there are a lot more parameters in the config which we should also keep track of. In Season #1 each pack provided everything it needed, and every pack was different. Changing to Season #2 we’ve changed the fundamental approach of how we use packs. Now we have base packages (currently three) which doesn’t have any content besides of a base body image. All other packages are extensions of this base package, adding more items in each category, which results that the user can mix and match the content of every pack released to that base package. This approach gives the users a lot more flexibility over their characters, but also forces us to produce more in numbers and smaller in size thematically focused packages.
We’ve also introduced a couple of new ways to improve overall quality in the characters. For example, we’ve split most of the categories to two, one for the front of the item, and one for the back. We can then easily define which parts of the item should go to the back of the character, and what should be visible in the front. We’ve also added the toggle feature, which enables the users to swap the location of items, companions, effects in front of, or behind the characters, which are also defined by adding new categories marking alternative positions in the rendering order.

In Season #1 the workflow looked like this:
1: Our artist exported all the images to folders and notified me that they were done.
2: I opened every folder and manually entered the number of items in them.
3: I’ve started the icon creator mini app I wrote, which opened each image one by one, where I was able to mark the rectangle I would like to save as an icon for each item.
4: We’ve then tested the content, iterated over it, and when we were happy…
5: I run the data file maker to produce the final pack file, which holds all of the assets in a single file.

This is how the icons looked in Season #1:

s1_icons

Most of the Season #1 packages contained between 12-15 categories, so it was a bit of a pain and a bigger time investment to get the content from being exported to actually testable in the program. In Season #2 we’ve grown a lot bigger. We’ve had between 24-38 categories per pack. That would be a lot of counting! So I figured I would be better off creating a small tool that can generate the package from the exported images. It started out slowly, but grown steadily as we progressed over the course of development.

This is how the workflow looks now:
1: Our artist exports all the images.
2: She can run the package generator program with a command line argument specifying what pack she would like to process, what is the base package for the given pack, and in which theme it should belong. The program then creates the folders and configs, copies the images, makes the necessary optimizations and creates the icons.
3: The new package is usable in the program.

I don’t really want to talk about most of what the package generator does, but I would like to spend some time to explain the icon generator, as I think this is the most exciting bit. As we are facing the challenge of being able to figure out what is the most interesting part of every item simply by looking at it, what should be taken out and represented on a 148×124 pixels square so the user can easily recognise the item and decide on whether they want that item on the character or not, without clicking it first and seeing it equipped.

The icons are made by looking at the image and finding the smallest rectangle the item can fit into. Then some logic is applied over it to decide how big the item can be on the icon, or how far should it be zoomed out. Some extra parameters were added in each config template to make it clear for the program what to do:

IconAlignment = “Center”
IconMinIterations = “2”
IconMaxIterations = “3”
IconSize = “Full”

– IconAlignment will define the alignment of the item relative to the middle of the icon.
– IconMinIterations will specify how many times the algorithm should zoom in/out at least on the image before finding the right spot.
– IconMinIterations will specify how many times the algorithm is allowed to zoom in/out on the image before finding the right spot.
– IconSize sets what should be visible on the icon from the item. Full means the item should be visible as a whole.

I’ve also figured that adding the base body to the icons would make them appear in context, but this raised some other issues, as the generator now should have an understanding of the relation of the categories with each other. Should the item be in front, or in the back of the body? Does it have a back part which should also be visible on the icon? Does it applies some transparency over the body at some point, like peg legs or minotaur bottoms?

This is how the icons look in Season #2:

s2_icons

The above got most of the items right, but the most interesting part was to identify what the icon should display for a background, as it fills the whole image there was no way to crop it easily. I went with a very simple approach. I divided the image to equal cells and calculated the variety in each of the cells individually. The variety has been produced by calculating an average for each pixel in the given cell, then comparing each pixel with the calculated average resulting in either a positive or negative change in the score. The cell with the highest variety got selected as the most interesting part of the image. I then extended it to treat neighbouring cells as one and compare the overall scores with the others, providing higher resolution to be displayed on the icons.

background_icons

Overall creating this tool has been a bit time consuming, but it works out very well, and with every new pack the time not spent on fully automatable tasks pays off greatly. It might seemed like a small win compared to how much time would it require to create an initially working tool, but as we moved forward it turned out to be really handy, especially when we’ve started iterations on multiple packs and ended up moving items between them. We could’ve kept track of the moved items manually and change the counts, copy the images and the icons, but it was so much faster running a .bat file which did everything for us. We’re currently focusing on delivering the Android port of ePic Character Generator, as well as adding new packages to the store.

If you are interested check out the program:
https://epicgenerator.net/

Thanks for reading!