OC Design, Worldbuilding & Storytelling Secrets Unveiled
🎨✨ AI art is dead? Long live human art?
Before we jump in - our friends at Mentium, an AI fintech startup backed by Antler, are seeking remote software engineers to join their team. Interested?
Are you an artist or a storyteller creating original characters (OCs)?
Playful and bubbly, adventurous and debauched, dauntless and melodramatic, you name it! Creating imaginative personas with unique quirks and habits requires skill and imagination.
But managing and sharing your original creations with others may be as challenging as creating them.
If you’re tired of scattered notes and dreams for your characters and worlds, UnVale is here to save the day, a one-stop-platform for creating, managing, and sharing all your original creations, characters, and worlds. From the first spark of inspiration to the next Netflix animated series, UnVale is with you at every step. And guess what? You can start creating for free.
Not sure how to use UnVale effectively? We’ll help you out with that.
Meet UnVale
“To create a work of art is to create the world,” the great Wassily Kandinsky once said. UnVale is a platform where you can not only nurture your characters and worlds but also organize them in the most ingenious of ways. It’s also a leading destination for showcasing your original characters online and sharing them with the world. UnVale is all about building a community, gaining social validation, and growing your audience.
Who knows, your next original character might just become the next great superhero franchise. With UnVale, not only can you bring your characters and worlds to life, but develop long-form content like webcomics or animated series. Yep, that's right – UnVale is your one-stop-shop for all things creative.
All your creations in one place. Imagine managing all your characters, art, and writing on an easy-to-use platform designed with creators like you in mind.
Worlds and Organization. UnVale keeps things organized. Group OCs, artwork, and written content together in a single world. Share maps, lore, and much more as you build your universe from scratch.
Share your creations instantly. Share your creations with friends, chat with other creators, leave comments on their character page. You can also bookmark stuff you love so you can come back to it in the future and follow all the accounts on the platform to stay in the loop on new releases or potential collabs.
UnVale lets you develop entire worlds of content. Whether crafting a story, running a tabletop campaign, or simply letting your imagination run wild, UnVale's got these super detailed character pages giving you all the space and flexibility needed to expand the lore around your characters.
You can upload your stories, artwork, add in backstories, and create these detailed character pages that really bring your narratives to life. And the best part? You can reorganize all this content in different ways as you shape and develop your stories over time.
UnVale’s Backstory
UnVale is powered by a small, diverse team passionate about providing a home for your OCs. They're proudly 100% Never-NFT and Anti-AI art, because they believe in the authenticity and creativity of human expression.
Casey Lawlor, the CEO & Cofounder of UnVale, sees the platform’s backstory as something that evolved organically over time. It all began when a group of like-minded individuals stumbled upon this bustling community of character creators. They realized something pretty cool: Characters are the heart of every epic story. Think about Spiderman. You start with this iconic character, then you build this whole universe around him.
UnVale set out to provide the necessary tools to those with big dreams of creating extensive intellectual properties (IPs) over the long haul. They knew that rushing creativity just wasn’t the way to go, and real masterpieces take time and TLC. That’s when the team started building a platform tailored to these needs.
UnVale was founded in 2021, as a response to the frustrations with the art scene: All those dodgy fees, the NFT craze, and AI art invasion. The team set out to build a fair and user-friendly platform, a safe haven that resonated with creators' principles.
By 2022, they'd connected with artists, writers, and worldbuilders, all the folks super into character creation and imagination. With this in mind, UnVale decided to double down on original characters and character management features.
Fast forward to 2023, UnVale had a community of 1000+ creators eager to dive into their new platform.
And now they’ve hit 65k users, and are opening the doors and inviting everyone to join in on the fun. Together, they “envision something truly remarkable.”
UnVale’s Tech Stack
UnVale’s tech stack is designed to support the dynamic needs of the platform and community.
Built on Kubernetes, its infrastructure is robust and highly scalable, capable of handling increased traffic and growth in the future.
Its front end is powered by React Tail and CSS, providing a responsive and user-friendly interface.
The team prioritizes a component-heavy approach to development, allowing them to quickly implement social functionality across different parts of the site. This means that whether users are interacting with written content, visual content, characters, or pivotal events in the story, they'll have access to the same social features.
On the backend, UnVale utilizes Node.js to support its users, many of whom are early-stage creatives focusing on uploading images and written content rather than video content or animated series. The platform helps creators develop their skills using professional-grade tools and techniques, rather than relying on AI-generated content. This approach aligns with UnVale’s community values of authenticity and originality, and they’re proud that all the content on the platform is created by users themselves.
Integrating User Feedback to Move Forward
UnVale boasts one of the kindest and most inclusive communities you'll ever come across. Creators First is more than just a motto at UnVale, it's a way of life. They're all about putting creators front and center, ensuring that their needs and dreams come first in everything they do.
They chat with users regularly, remain open to feedback, and prioritize a top-notch user experience. When it comes to integrating user feedback, it’s all about setting priorities from the get-go.
The team carefully weighs each suggestion against factors like development time, potential impact, and what the platform and product need at the moment.
Are they looking to make things more shareable and viral-friendly, or do they need features that’ll keep folks coming back daily? These considerations guide them as they pick what to work on next. They have to stay flexible: Things can change fast, so they must switch priorities fast, without getting stuck in those long development cycles.
The UnVale team is all about building for the users who live and breathe UnVale. See, it's easy to get swayed by the loudest voices in the community, but often it's the quiet ones who have the most to say. Take, for instance, the user who spends hours uploading characters without ever making a peep on Discord. Their actions speak louder than words, and UnVale is making sure they have the best experience possible, even if they're not shouting it from the rooftops. After all, building for their most dedicated users means they're creating a platform that really hits home for the people who matter most.
What’s Next
Here's the scoop on what's next for UnVale: they're taking it back to the basics, to the OG forms of storytelling, words and images. These have been the foundation of storytelling since forever, right? So, UnVale is giving users the tools they need to craft their narratives in the most interactive and engaging ways possible.
Picture this: you're developing the next Lord of the Rings epic. You slap down a map of Middle Earth, zoom in on Mordor, and start plotting out all the juicy details – battles, events, character arcs, etc.
And the best part? It's all interactive. People can swoop in, leave comments, share fanart – it's like building a story universe together, one epic moment at a time.
They're also developing something special for those who prefer a more visual storytelling experience. Imagine posting your images, tweaking the viewing options, adding captions or even audio. It's like creating your own interactive webcomic or storyboard. And the beauty of it is that it’s still just words and images, but it packs the punch of a full-on movie experience.
UnVale is the perfect platform for writers, artists, and storytellers to bring their visions to life.
So, what are you waiting for? Visit UnVale Market for exploring characters that are for sale, trade, or for free. Edit your OC and select the appropriate market icon to have them appear on this page.
And don't miss out on UnVale's epic events: catch the highlights from #UVFairytale, #UVInSpace, and more.
🧞♀️That’s the tale for today. Share us with friends for good luck and glitter. See you around!
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