Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 1

After my recent "success" with Runescape, I thought I doomed to be honest. But thankfully, one of my friends recommended a couple of other online games to look at, and one of them turned out to be my saviour! The first game was called VSide, and it mostly centered around forming and joining parties, socialising, partying etc. I didn;t really get much of a grasp on it, but I thought I'd try it anyways. The character creation system at the beginning is pretty simplistic like Runescape's, because you only get a few hairstyles, tops and such to wear from the off.

Upon downloading the game and getting ready to play, I loaded it up only to be faced with a scary looking menu with several options all the place in different categories. There were venues I could visit, existing parties that could join which were set up by other members and so on. But whenever I tried to visit a venue or a party, I kept getting the same weird error message which just frustrated me as I didn't know what to do at all. Seeing as the game was centered around partying, I figured it wasn't for me anyways, and I decided to leave it and look at Twinity instead.

At first glance of Twinity, I was already impressed especially with the level of character detail, as it seems to be on the same level as Second Life by the looks of it. I had a look around the homepage for the game and I was generally impressed with it, especially seeing as it seemed a lot like Second Life, but I COULD RUN IT. Thus I immediately signed up for this one and got decided to start playing straight away upon installing it.

This screenshot is what I saw when I first loaded up the game anyways. I chose to go to the Welcome Area and I immediately spotted people buzzing around talking to each other, even though it is a bit empty. As you can see though, the character customisation options are definitely more advanced and specific than the other games I mentioned, which pleased me a lot, as I can now create a much more detailed avatar of my inner personality woot :P. There are a couple of options that have intriguied me a fair bit, there's an option to create yoru avatar's face using a photo, which I will test in a minute and report on it. Also in the bottom middle of the screen, there isa silver toolbar with an "animations" option in it. Upon reading the user guide, I found that you can make your character perform a series of preset animations such as dancing and cheering, which is something I usually like in a game with 3D avatars in :P.

In this second screenshot above, I've managed to create the look of my ideal persona. Unfortunately, the range of hairstyles in this game is also fairly limited but it's the best I have seen so far despite that. I really wanted to have a spikey hairstyle for my avatar, but it wasn't available so I chose my next favourite style, the dreadlocks. As I mentioned in the Runescape blog, blue hair is a must for me, hence the blueness of my dreads. I really wanted a fire coloured theme for my character's clothes, and this shirt was the closest I found to it, but I am really fond of the design and colours of it. I thought I'd add fingerless gloves for the fun of it, as I've always imagined my ideal persona to be wearing them, and I added headphones in too, to reflect my deep passion for music and the importance of it in my daily life. The shoes were a brilliant find though, I found some black boots with flames on the side of them, which just screamed out to me to get them. I also put in a random sword because I'm a big fan of sword games, so that's a good way of summarising me I suppose. I am really happy with the appearance of my character despite the lack of a spikey hairstyle, because I feel that my personality truly has been projected onto this chaarcter via his image.

I didn't bother with the feature that lets you put a photo of yourself as your avatar's face because I didn't have a photo that met their requirements, and also I realised more importantly, that this character is supposed to be a self expression of who we are on the inside, so there's no point basing the character's appearance around mine, as I didn't choose how I would look on the outside when I was born, but I chose who I was on the inside when I grew up instead, and that is what is important after all for this module (I have to say though, I think I was starting to sound a little poetic just there!).