Why every RiftPet is an original creature

September 29, 2026 by the RiftPets team

On the morning of 2026-09-19 we opened a folder of brand new pets and felt our stomachs drop.

The night before, we had asked a machine to draw fifteen new species overnight. We wanted variety. We got fifteen pets that had drifted away from the RiftPets look. Worse, two of them looked like somebody else's characters. The pony looked like a very famous toy pony. The hamster looked like a very famous cartoon hamster. Nobody had asked for that. It just happened.

This is the story of how it happened, and why it made us care about originality more than ever.

A plain animal, a familiar face

Here is the honest answer. The prompts for the new species used no reference picture. They were text only, and they said things like "chibi flat cel pony, compact horse body, flowing mane and tail, big round eyes."

When you ask a machine for a chibi pony with a flowing mane and big round eyes and give it nothing else, it reaches for the most common version of that on the internet. For that recipe, the most common version is a pony you have definitely seen in a toy aisle. The words were the trap. "Chibi," "cute," "flowing mane" and "big round eyes" are the calling cards of the exact characters we wanted to stay away from.

The older creatures had been made differently. Each one was drawn with a real RiftPets character attached as a reference, and the instruction was to use it as the exact character. That anchor kept them ours.

Nobody was checking

The next lesson was uncomfortable. We had no test for resemblance. Our checks looked at the green background, the margins and whether a face change stayed inside the face. None of them asked the only question that mattered: does this look like something that already exists?

The pet was also judged by the same agent that wrote the prompt. Nobody who had not written it took a fresh look. And the whole set was purple, which hid the problem, because purple pets with pink and cyan accents all look like they belong together. When we switched to natural colours, the generic designs stood out at once.

Finally, the rule itself had been lost. The very first brief said cute original creatures, and every early prompt said original only. But when the roster was rebuilt, a list of archetypes turned into a list of literal animals, and the word "original" quietly fell out. It lived only in prompt text, so nobody restated it.

The rule we wrote down

On 2026-09-20 we wrote the rule where nobody could lose it. It says that every playable species is an original creature anchored in an archetype, such as dog like, horse like or a bird that flies, never a literal earth animal drawn straight and never a stock mythical creature. The roster names an archetype and gives the creature an invented name. A real animal word can appear in the archetype column and never as the subject of a picture request.

That is why Fanphant is not just an elephant. It is a new creature that happens to borrow an elephant and a peacock, with a fan that opens when the music starts. Every hybrid in the roster has one unmistakable borrowed feature, not three.

What else changed

The fix was more than a sentence. We added several safeguards:

• A locked prompt with a clear list of things it must never say, including the cute words that pulled us toward other people's characters.
• A canon set of plain, approved characters that every new species must be redrawn from, so the reference is always attached.
• A lookalike check that compares each new front against a bank of famous character descriptions, and a check on distance from our own style.
• A blind review, where a separate reviewer who did not write the prompt answers "which existing character does this resemble?" and scores the style.
• A single named style, Rift Cel, that every brief has to cite. You can read the rules in our art style post.

Every base that scored as too close to something else, or too far from our style, gets redrawn.

Why it matters to you

You might reasonably ask why we made such a fuss over a cartoon pony. There are three reasons.

First, respect. Other people made those characters, and they deserve the credit. We would like people to feel the same way about ours.

Second, surprise. A game about hatching things and breeding them into hybrids only works if you cannot guess what is coming. If every pet is a version of something you have seen, the egg loses its magic.

Third, love. People name their pets. They remember them. It is much easier to love a creature that is truly its own, with a silly little tail and a quirk of its own, than one that reminds you of a lunchbox.

What is next

We are still redrawing and reviewing, and the roster is still growing. Beta players will get to meet the residents first, and some will vote on which pairings we draw next. You can meet a few on the creatures page, or read how growth by care works.

Join the beta list on this site for early access.