Salty Bet vs Twitch Waifu Chan
It’s no secret that we here at Twitch love Salty Bet. PC Gamer called it the “pop culture royal rumble that [they] can’t stop watching,” and it’s easy to see why considering it’s on 24 hours a day. One of our own recently took their devotion to the Illuminati to a whole new level, as Twitch Director of Korean Operations, Albert Kim, went and created not only his own Salty warrior, but one that would bear the company name. Meet Twitch Waifu Chan.
The first version of Twitch Waifu Chan (named after the community’s affinity towards calling any cute, female characters their “waifu”) went into production in early September. Albert prepared for her first battle which would take place during the eighth installment of Salty Bet’s regular tournament series, The Shaker Classic.
“After watching Salty Bet for the first few times, I wanted to create a character for Twitch as a gift,” says Albert. “It’s great entertainment and I wanted viewers to see something from us in this cool, 24/7 channel. So I Googled ‘how to make a MUGEN character’ and watched some videos. I felt it was easy enough and decided to just get into it.”
It may have sounded easy, but in the end it would consume roughly 30 hours of Albert’s spare time in order to create the character from scratch. Creating the actual sprite was a process that took an estimated 3–4 hours, all of which he streamed live on his Twitch channel. However, the remaining 26 hours were spent on programming it to function properly once in game.
While Twitch Waifu Chan would ultimately be defeated by the god of MUGEN, Rare Akuma, Albert was unfazed. Work began immediately on Twitch Waifu Chan HD as he was determined to make her better than ever.
“For HD, coding and sprite time were split fifty-fifty. I got more used to the common sense of programming and MUGEN’s engine. I can say I got a lot more done and faster than the first time I tried to make the character, but of course there were new challenges as well.”
Twitch Waifu Chan HD was ready for battle once more, and so the highly anticipated rematch was set for The Shaker Classic 10.
Having redeemed the honor of Twitch, Albert is very appreciative of the Salty Bet community.
“I greatly appreciate that [SaltyBet] let me experience this whole process and share it with the Salty Bet fans. As for Salty Bet itself, I think it’s a great idea to innovate this kind of entertainment on Twitch. The chat really makes it amazing and there’s a great community behind it all. I wanted to do what I could to support it, hence Twitch Waifu Chan.”
As for Albert’s Salty Bet career, he may want to stick to creating incredibly powerful characters than betting on the fights themselves.
“Most of the time I go all in, so I never went above five digits,” says Albert. “The one time I was actually over that I must have had around 32k Salty Bucks. I went all-in on some Touhou character and lost it all. This really shows that I am not a good Salty Better. But after I lost, there was a fan on my stream who gave me a donation of Illuminati (Salty Bet’s premium membership) to check stats so that I could make smarter bets. I was really thankful that I took it as a pity gift! However, even with the stats and the Illuminati, I still never go over 5 digits.”
“I think I have bad luck.”
Tune in to Salty Bet and try your own hand at this crazed fighting game experiment. And remember, always bet on Twitch Waifu Chan!