Category Archives: Challenges

Character Contest 62 Winners!

The votes are in, the polls are closed, and we have our winners for Character Contest 62! The new Male Fantasy Warrior Template will be by xXBladeXIIXxx, and the new Female Fantasy Warrior Template will be by Sean David Ross! Congratulations to both of them, and further to all of the Finalists. It was a close vote at the end.

I'll need to get the text save strings from both of those chaps; in the event I don't get them in the next two weeks, I'll have to switch to the second-place Finalist.

Full results and images after the jump.

Male Fantasy Warrior Template:


Female Fantasy Warrior Template:


HM3: Cool chapeau

Thanks once again to Zyp, who in a twist of fate sure to see the inversion of the dimensional vortex and the appearance of Evil Spock with a goatee, provided his own prize for winning Character Contest 61:

This stellar addition to the haberdasher's art is now available in the Headgear-Modern set for HeroMachine 3.

Caption Contest 97

Sorry for the delay on this one folks!

With hearty thanks once again to Glenn3's "Say What? Pictures", your challenge this week is to come up with the best replacement dialog for this comics panel:

The best entry (as judged by yours truly) wins the author's choice of either any item they like or any portrait to be included in HeroMachine 3′s final release, or a custom black and white “Sketch of the Day” style illustration (you pick the subject, I draw it however I like).

All entries must be left as a comment (or comments) to this post. Keep ‘em clean (appropriate for a late-night broadcast TV show), but most importantly, keep ‘em funny! That might be a challenge given the nature of this week's panel, but I'm sure you can pull it off.

This week we have a cap of no more than five (5) entries per person, so make 'em your best!

Character Contest 62 – Female Finalists

The response to Character Contest 62, which challenged you to create a template available to everyone who uses HeroMachine 3 for a Fantasy Warrior, was huge. My sincere thanks to everyone who entered, I am once again humbled by your creativity and skill.

I've broken the results into two sections, male and female. I went through and picked out my favorites, limiting it to one entry per person in the interest of fairness even though there were some who had two or more I thought were outstanding. I ended up disqualifying any that had the arms in a non-standard position (that was one of the contest requirements this time around).

But hey, I've done the hard part, now you get to do the even harder part of picking a winner! After I show you all of the Finalists, I'll have a poll where you can vote for up to five (5) entries you think would be great templates to show to new users as a starting point. Polls close at 8 am Mountain Time on Wednesday when the entry with the highest total number of votes will win.

You can use whatever criteria you like for voting, of course, but as for me, here's how I looked at the initial entries:

  1. Is it awesome to look at?
  2. Is it relatively easy to duplicate or pick apart so the newbie can figure out how to do it on their own?
  3. Does it say "Fantasy Warrior" to me when I look at it?

Without further fanfare, I present the many Finalists for the Female Fantasy Warrior template for the first half of Character Contest 62:

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Character Contest 62 – Male Finalists

The response to Character Contest 62, which challenged you to create a template available to everyone who uses HeroMachine 3 for a Fantasy Warrior, was huge. My sincere thanks to everyone who entered, I am once again humbled by your creativity and skill.

I've broken the results into two sections, male and female. I went through and picked out my favorites, limiting it to one entry per person in the interest of fairness even though there were some (Felipe S. Card, Scorpidius, Sutter Kaine, and several others) who had two or more I thought were outstanding. I ended up disqualifying any that had the arms in a non-standard position (that was one of the contest requirements this time around), and although I picked out several Templars initially (PyroDude760, Myro, and a few others), I ended up leaving them off at the end because they were all just too similar.

But hey, I've done the hard part, now you get to do the even harder part of picking a winner! After I show you all of the Finalists, I'll have a poll where you can vote for up to five (5) entries you think would be great templates to show to new users as a starting point. Polls close at 8 am Mountain Time on Wednesday when the entry with the highest total number of votes will win.

You can use whatever criteria you like for voting, of course, but as for me, here's how I looked at the initial entries:

  1. Is it awesome to look at?
  2. Is it relatively easy to duplicate or pick apart so the newbie can figure out how to do it on their own?
  3. Does it say "Fantasy Warrior" to me when I look at it?

Without further fanfare, I present the many Finalists for the Male Fantasy Warrior template for the first half of Character Contest 62:

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META: Delays

I just wanted to give everyone who was waiting on results for Character Contest 62 that I'm going to be later than usual posting results. There were a LOT of excellent entries and a) I'm having a hard time deciding, b) it takes longer to upload the images and format the post when there are lots of good ones, and c) my in-laws' departure has been delayed by weather and illness so that's slowing things down a fair bit as well.

Anyway, the results will go up before the day is done, but it will be later than I'd like. My apologies!

HM3: Long beard and Tapered Tail

I've just uploaded two Contest prize items to HeroMachine 3. First was Jenna's "next prize up on the replacement list" for winning Character Contest 46, which was a "long-ass wizard's beard" like we had in HM2:

And next was a "tapered tail" for PapaKrok's Character Contest 57 win, also a "next item up":

I think it's appropriate PapaKrok ended up with that one, because it turned into something that could be a big tentacle, evil flower frond, wicked tongue, wave form, or some other equally demented thing he would be likely to turn it into. So that's cool.

Be sure to thank both of them if you like the items, for giving up their prizes! And if you had something different in mind for the final shape of these two requests, let me know.

HM3: Stonehenge

As a "thank you" for extraordinary assistance troubleshooting bugs, I offered Panner the equivalent of a contest winning prize, and he chose "Stonehenge". I've just uploaded the following addition to Background-Standard for HeroMachine 3, now available:

Thanks, Panner, it was a great idea! If you want changes to it, let me know.

Character Contest 62: Fantasy Warrior

Normally we'd be having a caption contest this week, but I need to add the HeroMachine 2 list of "sample characters" into the HeroMachine 3 Templates, and I want you all to be the ones to design those instead of me. Here's how the list looks in HM2:

So this week, your challenge is to tackle the first of those categories, the Fantasy Warrior. Here's how the male version looked:

I'll be picking two winners from the submissions, one male and one female. The winners will need to send me the text string for their characters so I can include them in the HM3 Templates, whereupon they'll be available for everyone to load up "live", as it were. So if you're not comfortable having your creation permanently featured in that way, then you should avoid submitting anything this week.

Note that you still own the character concept and copyright, I just have the right to show it within the confines of the HeroMachine.

You don't have to (or even want to, necessarily) recreate this exact look. Your goal is to come up with the coolest, best-looking template that people can use as a starting point for making their own "Fantasy Warrior", something that a beginner could load up and learn from. To that end you're probably going to have to keep these a lot simpler than you're used to, because a new person trying to figure out why and how you've used a head to substitute for a leg isn't going to cut it.

I'll ask that you use only the first, "Standard" male or female body in the default pose. Try to avoid using the "multiples" setting if at all possible (clearly, with things like ears you're not going to be able to do so).

Good luck! You don't have to post your text strings yet, I'll only ask the winners for that.

The rest is the same as usual -- no limit on entries, link directly to your image, contest ends next Monday, etc. etc.

Character Contest 61 Winners?

First, thanks to everyone who entered Character Contest 61. We had some fabulous images, and I sincerely appreciate your willingness to share your creativity with everyone.

Second, I had a very tough time deciding on the final winner this week. I'll go into the reasons at the end of the post, but suffice it to say that literally as I am typing this, I still haven't decided. Before I do, I thought I'd just post all of the Finalists, and then make my decision after seeing them all on the page at the same time.
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