Omg thank you so much to everyone who supported me 😭😭😭 you are the best that God bless you all and that I can bring a lot of love with the commissions I will make.
So, I will continue to work on the commissions, and I don't know if I leave this sale active or not. I think I will leave the sale until February 🤔 For commissions, I will just be available on 1 February 😅 so thank you again, everyone. I will think about a gift for you all 🥰
Happy Pride Month everyone! And with that— we're happy to announce the rc catalog pride event is in full session! Unlike last year, we've decided this time to let you guys go wild— do whatever you'd like! No specific themes, prompts or anything, just be wild, be queer & be sexy 💫
Our main rules being that it (of course) fits the Catalog guidelines & that it's a new creation, of course.
Make sure you put a page break if your creation is over 100 words
Literally never use Tumblr aside from occasional reblogging (sorry for the DM's that I have struggled to respond to in um.... YEARS, I am SO sorry) I just want to say how much I miss older PlayChoices.
I haven't picked up the game in ages, I used to play pretty much every day. I jumped ship around the time Alpha was being released I think? I would maybe make a yearly appearance on the app to replay old books like ILITW, D&D, TC&TF, etc. The app used to share intriguing adventures in fantasy settings, historical dramas/mysteries and campy stories about rising to stardom. It started to almost exclusively create more smut oriented stories (which is fine but I feel like it really deterred good portion of the fan base, myself included)
I remember stories like Open Heart, Desire and Decorum and Blades of the Light and Shadow updating and the PlayChoices tag trending at number 1. Fan art, fan fiction and edits were being posted DAILY. Theories, speculations and memes would circulate, inside jokes would form, heated debates about yet another book using OH faces for MC would spark discussions. It felt like a thriving fandom bonding over different stories that were being produced by Pixelberry.
I don't know when momentum truly started to slow down on the app as I had abandoned ship before it truly became obvious, but I can't help but feel like the use of AI generated assets really stomped the passion a lot of fans had for the game. I also feel like a large portion of the fan base were maybe deterred from the overwhelming amount of smut books and lack of other genres being explored. Smut sells, I don't blame Pixelberry for this decision, but I feel like it was a really polarizing action on their part. Books like ILITW, BOLAS and ES really showed how a story doesn't have to rely on the romance aspect for it to be received positively by its audience (I would like to mention that I am aware that there were some books displaying relationships in more harmful and dangerous lights without calling them out within the narrative, such as Witness. If I recall correctly my experience reading it presented a possessive dynamic that was never discussed further, there was toxicity that was never confronted within the narrative, creating an unhealthy message to the player/reader)
I look back and think of how the Playchoices tag would trend a few times a week and smile. I think back to the community it made, how artwork of various mediums were created inspired by the books that were being released at the time. The excitement for a new book sequel to release, the dread (affectionately) of yet ANOTHER TRR book being released. I think back to how the characters in the older books and the fan artists of the community inspired me to pursue my illustrations more seriously and see my art in a new way and push myself to draw in a way that really resonated with me. It was truly heartbreaking to see Playchoices turn to AI slop instead of actual artists for their assets. I would take reused OH faces for the 1000th time over the genuine horror slop I've seen on my feed.
All this to say, without this app and its fandom I may not be where I find myself in my personal and professional art journey, for that I will be eternally thankful.
Thank you to anyone scrolling this tag and takes the time to read my ramble, sorry if it is all over the place and is read in a negative light. That's not my intention rather.... disappointment? Longing for old PB? Reminiscing perhaps? Idk but I just wanted to write a virtual message in a bottle and send it off into the virtual Tumblr sea I suppose.
I hope you have a good day to who ever is reading :3
The wedding/baby boom in the summer/autumn of 2019 probably wasn’t major but very disappointing as the golden age was ending
2020: Witness released and no one (or only very few people) liked it. The Nanny Affair was not long after, and although it had marginally better writing, it was a bad sign of things to come
2020: Open Heart 2. I won’t deep dive into the drama (I’ve spoken enough about it already) but it said A LOT about the values of PB studios, revealed the toxicity of the fan base, and showed the disdain PB had for some stories/characters over others, and by extension their fans. A lot of people were turned off by all of it. Open Heart 3 fixed nothing.
2020: in general the pandemic had slowed down production for a lot of stories resulting in a very thin line-up
2021: The trend of steam-before-plot stories continued and single LIs were becoming much more common
2021: although it didn’t start this way, every book would now be released under their new vip schedule, including Wake the Dead and Crimes of Passion which they had spent a good year promising ALL fans they would receive it soon. The only exception would be sequels. The online fandom now had to be extremely wary of spoilers
2021: the official cancellation of many fan-favourites including (but not limited to) It Lives, Hero, Nightbound, Ride or Die, and Distant Shores
2022-2023: I don’t remember anything major but a vast majority of books would be single LI, steamy, or generally disappointing and a lot of fans lost interest
2024: sequels would now be included in the vip release schedule. Either join vip or be left behind
2024 onwards: AI killing what little of the fanbase had held on so long
They had a really good run and Choices has meant a lot to me over the years. I have fond memories of playing ILB in my car before I had to go somewhere, or getting excited for a MOTY chapter when I drove past a private school on a release day, or the way I played OH after a late shift and gasped out loud when Rafael was hurt in chapter 14. But time marches on and things come to their end 💔
My wife, Hana Lee :D
I miss her so much, I miss drawing her, hoping to draw her more later!!
I am also currently taking drawing requests for characters, check it out!
Some of you may have already heard of Choices' recent takeover by a rather questionable company that produces AI-generated TV shows, following over a year of using AI-generated content in all of its recent stories.
Unfortunately, it's quite apparent that Choices is following the footsteps of Lovestruck in its final days, where bad content is resulting in consumer boycott and a dwindling fanbase, which means that its shutdown is also now highly possible. Some people over at r/Choices and r/ChoicesPreservation have expressed an interest to archive the game, just like our community did almost half a decade ago.
They have no solid team or blue plan in the works yet, but some of our experienced members from LS Salvation Squad are already over there helping them get on track, using their prior experience with archiving Lovestruck.
If you are also a fan of Choices, and have interest, time and energy to help out, please consider joining them on discord.
A couple days ago, I made a post addressing Pixelberry/Series Entertainment's "It Lives Within." At the time, I wasn't aware of the story, I only knew that the name was the same. Since then, I saw many people accusing it of plagiarizing our game. I decided to look into it more, and after having watched all the episodes on YouTube, the claims of plagiarism unfortunately seem to be valid. As such, I'd like to further address this situation, and provide a list of stolen ideas and art with screenshot proofs and explanations.
A few years ago, I had a video call with one of the original writers for the It Lives Series. He no longer works for Pixelberry, and did not work with them at the time of the video call. Though I knew nothing about their original plans for the game before starting this project (including that they also intended to name the game "It Lives Within"), he told me their plans on that call. It was going to be a survivor-type cave crawl story with giant bug-inspired and creepy crawler monster enemies, where you play as a new character who is attacked by these creatures while camping and separated from their friends. From my understanding, Connor and his crew would be sort of like Sam and Dean from SPN, acting as these experienced "hunters" who help protect them.
That is not what the story of what Choices "It Lives Within" was. At all.
This means that the AI """writers""" at Series Entertainment/PB were not creating this story based on the original writers’ plans. They made their story idea later - after ILW was completed in its entirety. Therefore, it's reasonable to follow that unlike the title, these similarities are not coincidence. Though even then, the title It Lives Within had to do with the cave setting and going literally into the earth, while the AI version has nothing to do with caves. So the reasoning for the title is not the same as the reasoning for their original title.
With all this in mind, let’s go over the similarities between our game and the Choices It Lives Within AI show. I am going to be putting it beneath a read more, in case there are people who are interested in playing ILW and don’t want to get it spoiled.
Major things they stole:
Their villain, Silas, is Matthias. Literally, that's it. He's Matthias.
Silas is an immortal man who looks just like Matthias who's been alive for almost 200 years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. He wants to sacrifice redfield Noah due to his connection to the Power (Rowan anyone) as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to... I'm not quite sure what, exactly, as the story was a bit hard to follow. He thinks he’s all manipulative and the main crew states that "He’s getting us to do his work for him!”
And then there's his appearance. That's the same hairstyle. He's the same age. Same race. Literally, just like Connor in their story is as recognizable AI-version of his in-game sprite, that's what this guy looks like. All he's missing is the beard.
The gang's base of operations is Cora’s cabin
This one is interesting. It's such a tiny detail, and I'd grown so used to the cabin being their safe place that when Connor was like "We need to get back to the cabin" it literally took me a moment to realize - wait. They had nothing to do with that cabin in the original series. Using that as a home base was literally our idea, an It Lives Within original.
The main enemies are mind controlled townspeople working for Silas
Instead of following the precedent of the previous games and having the enemies be Power-twisted animal monsters, they decided to make their enemies humans that are mind-controlled into zombie-like beings that attack the gang in hordes. There's even a scene where the gang is driving through them in their car. This is a rip-off of It Lives Within's horrors. And on top of that, they copied the carnival scene where Harper driving through the horde of horrors.
Noah and Devon's relationship
Their relationship in this '"TV show" has suspicious similarities to their friendship/romance routes in ILW. They made Devon be redfield Noah's anchor to reality, and even had Devon use memories to help ground Noah, which we showed in the cabin scene where Devon and Noah play baseball together. And I know there were Noah x Devon shippers outside of me before ILW released, but it was never PB's plan to canonize them. So the fact that they are seemingly changing course to canonize them after they grew so popular in the fan version feels a bit too coincidental.
Scraping fan art for their AI animation frames
But what's even more egregious is that they have even stooped to scraping from fan artists, who have nowhere near the same following or exposure as our project does. Seriously, what are the odds that the MC they choose to use matches this artist's MC's race, gender, hair, and outfit exactly, that they used Noah's old outfit, that they are literally positioned on the same sides of the image? It's blatant plagiarism, and it's despicable. @errajay I'm so sorry they did this.
These are the biggest similarities, but considering that it was only like 15 minutes of content, that means that a high percentage of the story was stolen. Sure, the exact details of "Silas's" plan are different (he's like a horcrux for the "entity" aka power and he was split into 43 parts and Noah's one of his parts and he needs to kill him to get it back and be free or something) it's the same concept: immortal man who's trapped making a complicated ritual requiring sacrifice while manipulating people to get everything into place.
If you want to see for yourselves, please find it on YouTube. Do not support them with clicks or traffic on their app. Thank you! Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, no AI was used in the drafting of this post 💖