Many of the modern games now include now just a variety of characters, but also a variety of skins to choose from. This provides a cool opportunity for cosplayers since you now can pick the skin that suits you best. The skin that first spoke out to us was Stonehardt. Chad’s always had a fascination with natural materials like hardwoods and stone and the most important part was that Stonehardt, unlike everything other skin except Lionhardt had Reinhardt’s face exposed. Later on, other skins with Reinhardt’s face have been released, but at this point in time those two were the only ones. We always like to make emotional connections with people and one thing we often think gets in the way is when a persons costume has their face covered, it can often give a menacing, dissociative feeling and we didn’t want that. We wanted to be able to look around, smile, and yell to the world that we were a person, we had emotions, and that we wanted to communicate. At this point we had decided, Stonehardt was our skin, we started working on the costume and really getting a lot of the logistics figured out. It was right at the point where we had to purchase the paint that Chad through all of us for a loop, in a matter of months Twitch was going to run the first every Cosplay Contest at their annual convention: TwitchCon. Chad said lets enter, even if we don’t win it would be so much fun to participate, meet people, plus entrants would get a travel stipend. This travel stipend should be enough to cover the build cost of materials as well as any other extra features we wanted to add. The only problem that really came to mind was whether or not the color of Stonehardt was going to display well, video well, photograph well. Also whether or not it would do as well in the costume contest. The decision was made after some deliberation to switch from Stonehardt to Lionhardt. Lionhardt’s colors are much brighter and more vibrant. Gold, Silver, Purple, and Teal accents lights would be much better for this competition.