My Robot Nation

Last week, io9 posted a cool article about My Robot Nation, a company that makes ceramic toy robots along the same lines as the blind-boxed vinyl art toys you may have seen. You may be wondering what sets them apart from all the other companies. Well, you get to design your own robot! You read that correctly! You design your very own robot!

In a process that will be familiar to any MMORPG player, you customize all the aspects of your dream robot online. You choose the style of head, torso, arms and legs as well as the colors. You can even use a color wheel if the default palettes don't have exactly what you want. I hear you say "Wow, that sounds amazing!" But wait! There's more!

Body part selection

Yes! More customization! There are all kinds of doodads you can size, rotate and place on your robot...all kinds of robot-y things like buzzsaws, rayguns and hats! What do you mean those aren't robot-y? And on top of that there are stamps (like dials, rust spots, hearts and numbers) you can add. The options are almost limitless. Oh and did I mention you can get it created in 2", 3", 4", 5" or 6" sizes? Even with all the options in front of you, the size is the only factor that changes the cost.

Just look at all those tabs along the top!

Holy cow! More tabs!!

The main My Robot Nation site has photo galleries, a dev blog and a place to vote on customer creations. There's a couple of comic book inspired creations in there, pretty funny.

This site is going to become a major time sink for me. I spend waaay too long in MMOs customizing my characters. I can (and have) spent hours tweaking a design to get it just right. One thing I have noticed with the site is there doesn't seem to be a way to save a "work in progress" and that annoys me a bit as someone that likes to fine tune the details. The cost will prevent me from creating a robot army too quickly but I don't know if that's good or bad.

To find out more (and get a 20% off code good until 11/21) head over to io9. The whole process is something I find pretty amazing. It's like living in the future!

I logged in quick this morning to play around with it for about 10 minutes. As I was cycling through the heads, the design of this one just screamed Creature from the Black Lagoon at me. I still have some tweaking I want to do to make it more Creature-y before I commit to have it created. The vent on the chest is the only accessory I added to it so far, an attempt to reproduce the Creature's underbelly scales in robot form.