welcome to art fight itās one of my Favourite things
the site is live all year even though the event only goes on during the month of July! you can submit your characters any time under that little Submit drop down. the option to Attack other players will appear in this same drop down when the event starts.
try and upload a good reference image of your OC that is flat coloured and clear! write some personality notes about your OC in their bio. this will help give other artists a better feel for your character and generate ideas on how to draw them. aim for a bullet point list of traits [example: smug, cheerful, playful etc] instead of dumping five paragraphs of lore in there. that said, a few sentences will work fine too! just cover the basics.
you can also link an external page if all their personality info is already on another site such as toyhouse. this link will show up on their profile. here's my character Adontis' page for example;
the next important thing to set up for your characters is Permissions! these are boundaries you establish for what is and isnāt okay when other players are drawing your character.
you can set up permissions for your characters individually, or make global permissions that appear on every characterās page so you donāt have to write it in for each and everyone one manually.
you can see my global permissions in that screenshot above. i recommend keeping it short and to the point in a bullet list. global permissions appear on each character's page by default.
if you want to make a character whose permissions differ from your global rules, you can fill in unique permissions for them on their profile and click the ādisable global permissionsā checkbox. this will get rid of the global rules on that characterās profile and only leave the custom ones you made for that character.
Tags are a newish feature on art fight. there wasnāt really a way to search for characters you wanted to draw before [beyond the random button under the Browse drop down, which would just pull up any random character regardless if the player was active or not].
I recommend tagging the essentials: what species your character is, your username, etc.
when it comes to the actual attacking part, read through the Attack Guide! when submitting an attack, YOU have to score your own art based on what you drew. the guide is pretty thorough about how to score your work. if youāre unsure, go with what feels best. just donāt go giving yourself Maximum Points for every attack if the art doesnāt merit them and youāll be fine. the mods do go through submissions and tally points after the event's done. be warned, though: you cannot edit attacks AFTER theyāve been posted! that means no last-second edits to the main piece after you hit send! you can edit thumbnails though.
if youāre attacked you can Revenge that attack! when submitting an attack thereās often a button on that page for Revenge [or something similar] if you're attacking someone who previously attacked you.
be sure to check the team of the person you're attacking! when on a character's page their name, and the player's username, will turn up in the colour of their respective team. mine is still green because I was on Team Bloom last year and the new teams won't take effect for a bit yet.
you can friendly fire against someone on the same team as you, but it doesn't grant you any points; even if you revenge them. neutral players exist too. they are users who haven't yet chosen a team whose names [usually?] appear in grey. if i recall right, attacking neutral players doesn't grant you points either.
a thing to note: don't feel like you need to make elaborate, grandiose attacks. it's a casual internet game. it's meant to be fun, not stressful. no one expects you to churn out a magnum opus for each and every attack. you can make all your attacks shitposty ms paint doodles if you want. sure, it won't net you as many points per piece, but that is completely allowed.
in my many years on the site, the first few days of art fight are often laggy, as in: the site will crash repeatedly or load at a snail's pace. i recommend looking up some characters you want to draw and saving their refs in advance to work on during the first couple days until the site is stable. of course, now that i've said that the site will likely be fine. but you never know.
anyway i accidentally wrote a novel on this and i'm VERY sorry oops i am just quite enthusiastic about this game
