hi! As a person of colour who plays Alchemica, I'd just like to clarify some stuff about racism. Whether or not a person intends to be racist does not affect whether their actions are racist or unintentionally support racism. Now the lore behind the lekumba's is reminiscent of the history of black americans, and while this may not be intended, it could be interpreted as representative of this period of history. What becomes a problem is the idea that, originally when the Lekumba's where a developed civilization, they were a lighter colour, but now, when they are considered less intelligent, they have darker skin. This idea subtly promotes the idea that dark skinned people are less intelligent. Now I'm not expecting a change in story or plot for this one thing, the real problem comes in with the fact that the Lekumba are the only dark skinned characters in the game. While you may not choose to have black, white or coloured people, because the races are human, Dwarven, elven etc, the only skin colour for a human you have shown is white. And perhaps this is normal for you, I don't know where you come from, you could be from a white majority country, so wouldn't have the understanding of racial tensions in somewhere like the USA or Australia. What would help your game be less unintentionally discriminatory would be the inclusion of a multitude of skin colours in human characters, in future. I also understand that you are making a fantasy game, probably being inspired by other fantasy media. The fantasy genre has its problems with racial depiction and racism deep rooted in its culture and so its understandable that you might have accidently picked this up. It's ok to make mistakes, especially when you don't know any better and this comment isn't meant to shame you and tell you you're a horrible person. I just want to help you learn and understand, and hopefully fix or acknowledge the connotations for some of your decisions and hopefully in future do better. I'm happy to explain anything in a bit more depth if you don't get it or anything so don't be afraid to ask!
Viewing post in RACISM in Alchemica?? comments
Hi,
Thank you for your reply. First we need to clarify that the Lekumbas were just as developed as any early civilizations do when they came out to the surface. Their civilization became advanced after that point of time. Their background story during that period, and how they radically changed their lifestyle to be the mask-wearing nature-loving communities as seen in Alchemica Chapter 1 will unfortunately play a large part of the main story in later chapters so we can't spoil things further.
Rest assured that more "colored" characters and races will be added as we develop the game further, and they won't be limited to our normal skin color palette. There are just too few content in Chapter 1 to justify adding more type of sprites (there are exactly one elf and one dwarf in the game as of now). We tried to simplify things for our development time for Chapter 1, but as more content is released, more characters will be introduced to the game. In fact we already throwed in some hints about other unseen races that Charlotte will later meet in the game.
Hello @Athena42, person of no color but I just want to quickly address a point your comment missed or ignored.
As I understand it, @Crunchy Bit Games please correct me if I'm wrong, but the original skin color of the Lekumba is pale or white, they have color because they value the sun as evidence of their freedom, so they are sunburned badly or baked brown even though they are in fact white or pale at birth.
My question then becomes with all this potion brewing how is sunblock not a thing with them? If they truly are that changed by the time spent enslaved underground then I would expect sun exposure to be painful and result in skin issues like melanoma.
So color is not the issue that I see here, the masks and the architecture are where I can see race being a factor. But the concept of ancient tribal people with powerful magic and technology they don't remember because of slavery, this is neat.
So maybe try to make it more clear that they are actually Asian pygmy inspired and just dark from spending too much time in the sun. Maybe think about changing the skin color to a red tinged brown, like amber beer, that might convey your point more strongly.
Missions and item purchase could also further reflect this, give them an interest in obtaining skin ointments and tinctures related to sunburnt skin and skin related medical conditions, maybe some of them would have eye problems as well unless the mask takes care of that.
Now I have only started playing this game so maybe I will find something that changes my opinion but I say just own it and admit that you were inspired by mask wearing Pygmy tribal people because they are neat and you thought it would make an interesting contrast with them once having been even more advanced than the dwarves.
Honestly though I am loving the characters so far and can see myself quickly becoming lost in your fantasy world, really looking forward to the next chapters, especially if things remain as creatively fresh as what I'm seeing thus far.