My Hat in the Game

Well, how do I start. Normally I'd be honoured and proud to see my design in the game, as people should normally feel when they win a contest. But personally, I'm extremely disappointed with how this all panned out.

First is the sheer amount of time it took to release these. As of writing this blog, the hat and animal from the Savannah Design Contest have not yet been released for Apple. And I posted these on KTplay on the 26th of June 2020; the Fourth Anniversary Event also finished on the 17th of July 2020. Yet here we are, almost 2 months later, with me feeling a sense of bewilderment now that I've seen what "my design" looks like.

Here's my design to the right. While I was not as proud of this compared to my Energy Elephant design (I've attached this below), I still think it was pretty good. And the world seemed to agree, I managed to see off strong competition from the Necromancer to win. I'm sure that most people who voted for my design voted for what was actually added to the game instead.

You see, I did write in my entry, several things. Firstly, I had male and female variants. This appears to have been mixed up by the devs; they used the female one as the template, and so consequently, the actual hat has a larger chest. Secondly, they made the character have dark skin; while a lot of people thought that was an intentional choice by me to reference Mace Windu, I actually intended the character to be the same skin colour as your normal avatar. It just so happened to be that my character has dark skin anyway. Yet somehow, the devs locked the Space Explorer to have dark skin. Third, the purple glasses they added, they're just insulting to me as a designer.

There's other things in the hat that I'm annoyed about: I didn't add purple in the shoes, the point at the back of the hood is missing, etc. But the thing that annoys me the most is that the light sabre has magically been changed into a torch. If there was any question of copyright claims from Disney, think again. Because the Snow Queen has actually been changed to look more like Elsa.

I'm annoyed that they were able to change my original concept, and change it into something completely different. It's sad that if you played a game of 'spot the difference' between my "The Force" design and the "Space Explorer", you would actually struggle to find 5 similarities instead. There is so little that is based on my original design: not the concept, not the name, not the actual design itself. And so while I'm proud I was able to get my design into the game, I'm disappointed that in fact, my design isn't in the game at all. I feel like my original design concepts and choices were not just forgotten, not even ignored. I feel they were disrespected. And so it's not my design, it's Yodo1's: another statement of their control over supposedly player-focussed events.