Today we’re kicking off a competition with one of the coolest prizes we can think of – a chance for your own character to officially join the Aether Universe! We’re inviting the community to create their dream character in our new contest and share it with the world for a chance to be added to Rivals 2.
If you’re new to Rivals or the Rivals Workshop and want to get involved, we’ve got great news because Rivals of Aether is currently on sale for 50% off! You can pick up the game at a discount (or any of our games) during the Steam Summer Sale for the next 2 weeks through 6/29/23 – 7/13/23.
Ever since we added Steam Workshop support, our community has created over 3,000 characters and even more stages and buddies. It’s become such a fan-favorite that Workshop side events are now held at all Rivals Majors. On top of that - Workshop has even become such a core part of Rivals itself that we selected and adapted four of the best community-made characters to add as a free official update to the game in 2022. Now we’ve decided to turn our attention to our upcoming sequel with a public competition!
Starting today, 7/3/23, you’ll have until the end of the year to create and publish a brand new character with the chance to get it included in Rivals 2! We want to spur fresh ideas from the community, so we will only be allowing characters created and published after 7/3/23. Submissions are limited to one character per person and can be officially entered using our Google Form and publishing your character with the “Rivals 2 Contest” Steam Workshop tag. First place will receive $5,000 in exchange for rights to the character, while the winner and four runner-ups will receive exclusive cosmetics in Rivals 2.
While we're on the subject of community-made characters, be sure to check out the amazing characters featured above in our trailer: Lukastar, Rykenburn, and Zephrie.
Official Rules
As mentioned above, to enter you will need to create and submit a completely original character (with the “Rivals 2 Contest” tag) during the contest period of 7/3/23 – 12/31/23. This means entrants should not use movesets or sprites from previous works. In addition, any submissions contributed to by a team must be submitted and represented by a single individual that owns the character. Judging will be done by the Aether Studios dev team based on a number of criteria including:
- Gameplay [1-10 points]
- Visuals [1-5 points]
- Character Background (Element Fit/Lore) [1-5 points]
The top choice will be awarded $5,000 in exchange for character rights and will guarantee the character’s inclusion in Rivals 2 sometime post-launch.
Participants must be at least 13 years old to participate. For complete contest details and requirements, check out our official Workshop Character Creation Contest rules.
Get Your Project Featured
While the competition’s underway we’d love to show off what our community is cooking. Working on something? Use our Highlight Form as many times as you’d like to submit video of your progress, process, or playtesting of your creation. You might be featured on our social media or game spotlights.
We hope everyone has fun with this competition and is excited as we are to see some awesome new characters make their way to the Rivals Universe. If you have any questions about the contest feel free to ask in the comments below, or on twitter, discord, or any of our other social media.