OngoingWorlds blog

News & articles about play-by-post games, for roleplayers & writers

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Need a Scifi Avatar for your character? There’s a website for that!

Last week I discovered a website that seemed very useful for people roleplaying in a scifi setting. Called Sci-Fi Avatars, it’s a large database of Photoshopped character images you can take and use as your character.

Star trek avatars website screenshot

With photos of loads of different aliens from Star Trek, Klingons, Andorians, Bolians etc, you can just pick one and use it to represent your character without having to trawl the internet or attempt some dodgey Photoshop yourself. 

So I asked the owner, Janet M Summers to write a bit about the website, and why it was started.

Sci-Fi Avatars is a website that was created to meet the demands for avatars for simmers or roleplayers.  It began in 2002 when Artemis, also known as Tom Farr, encouraged FruitLoop to make a website for the avatars she was learning to make.  What resulted was Star Trek Avatars, a site meant to fulfill the need for avatars for Star Trek RPGs such as those in Obsidian Fleet, Horizon Fleet, Epsilon Force, and others.

Four sizes of avatars were placed on the site: 100×100, 150×150, 180×180, and SMS size of 200×300 which, as Nova replaced SMS, was enlarged.  Most of the avatars were in the Nemesis/First Contact style of uniform, though others sporadically throughout the site were in other uniforms.

Artemis retired from simming in later years, and FruitLoop decided to take the site to the next level: Not just one type of uniform for each celebrity on the site, but all uniforms and all colors.  The project is still underway, with Movie Era and Enterprise being incorporated into the site along with Nemesis, Nemesis Dress, Next Generation, Voyager, and Flight Suits from the Voyager episode Drive.  This meant a new site was needed and FruitLoop enlisted the help of Kuro-Chan from Kuro-RPG to make a new site for Star Trek Avatars.  The result was a high quality website where one simply selected a few choices in drop boxes and was immediately taken to the desired uniform, gender and species.

In 2012, FruitLoop met Wayne and Sci-Fi Avatars was born.  Stargate Avatars were added, as were more Star Trek for the project previously mentioned.  Wayne left in 2014, yet the site is still going strong and will continue to do so as long as there is a need for RPG avatars.

Thanks Janet! If you want to see their archive of Sci-Fi Avatars, go to the website http://stavatars.com.