We’ve heard a lot of feedback regarding the addition of the new skin tones. We want to first say that we appreciate all the feedback you’ve sent in and that we’re using this information to take a closer look at all of the skin tones.
We understand that this update may have led to some of you needing to either redo your custom overlays or update your characters/scripts/templates – and that for those of you participating in the Dirty Dancing contest, this was an unplanned-for inconvenience that cuts into the time you had to work on your story. With this in mind we wanted to let everyone know that we’ll be extending the deadline for the Dirty Dancing contest by 7 days. That means the submission deadline will now be August 7th. All other dates for the contest, including when we run it, will also be pushed back by 7 days.
Specifically for those of you who are redo-ing your custom overlays, we’ll also be making it a point to prioritize reviewing custom overlays until the submission deadline. Our team is currently backed up on the reviews of custom overlay but we’re shifting gears to try to get through the queue as quickly as we can. if you notice that by, July 19th, you haven’t gotten your custom overlay reviewed within 3 days, please do contact our support team at: support@episodesupport.zendesk.com!
On a different note, we wanted to also give a big shout out to Dara.Amarie, who did an AMAZING job updating all of the character creator templates shared with the community. She’s graciously willing to work with us to get her work more broadly onto the Writer Portal for everyone to use and we’re really excited about partnering up to make these templates as useful as possible for all of you.
Once again, we want to thank everyone for sharing their feedback. We understand that this was a bit of a rocky release and we wanted to assure you all that we’re working towards making things right.
Thank you so much for this! I really appreciate you guys giving us a chance to get our art work in order, and prioritizing it for reviewing. This definitely helps a lot
I actually really like most of the new skin tones and they’ve been great replacements for the old ones. It’s just the rose ones in particular that confuse me. To be honest, exempting people with deeper skin (like rose 10 & 9 these look nice), I’ve never seen a darker skinned person with pink undertones. We usually run neutral or golden.
Thank you for listening to our concerns. It means a lot to us to hear from you guys regarding the changes. Also huge congrats to @Dara.Amarie ! You have been a lifesaver with your templates.
Hi Jesse! I am so happy to read that the overlay approvals will be taking less time again. That’s great news. Does this include background approvals as well or will we have to plan with a longer wait here? I would just like to be able to plan my updates better again. Thank you!
I feel like for the lighter skin tones are either too pale or have too much of a redish/orange overtone. The darker skin tones are the same way. They’re either too dark, too light, or too orange for my previously created people. I’m having a hard time recreating my characters with a skin tone that fits them. I like the variety though, but I can’t help but notice the more drastic shading is better suited for actionpacked / moviestar-ish stories and not works that are more down to earth. Maybe I’m just used to the previous skin tones, idk.
This will mostly focus on custom overlays since there are some that may have been affected by the shift in new skin tones (selfie overlays as an example).
We’ll still be working through the regular image reviews alongside the prioritization of overlays. Backgrounds can take a bit more time to review compared to overlays since there are more elements to it that we need to check but it is something that we’re still working on trying to help process.
Backgrounds used to always take 3, max 4 days to be approved. I’ve been waiting 11 days now for one background, and despite updating about the situation daily on IG, getting lots of angry messages from irritated readers at the wait. Surely you can’t tell us that a two week wait for background approval is now the new norm, because “there are more elements to it”? This isn’t reasonable. Writers need the backgrounds to be approved too in order to publish the chapters.
