Frequently Asked Questions
General
Life Is Strange Fans is a website and social network for fans of the videogame franchise, Life Is Strange, published by Square Enix and encompassing multiple games developed by Don’t Nod (formerly Dontnod Entertainment) and Deck Nine Games.
- Add or browse fan content such as Fan Art, Cosplay, Fan Fiction, Music, Videos and Screenshots.
- Favourite everything and create custom Collections, Fan Fic Reading Lists and Music or Video Playlists.
- Unlock Achievements or earn Fan Points and use them to buy Card Packs containing collectible Cards and Power Orbs, which you can then use to Level Up Cards, unlock Concept Art or buy Props to fill Environs (key environments from the games such as Max’s Dorm Room).
- Sell or Trade Cards with other Fans and complete Card Sets.
- Manage everything and track all your Stats from a custom frontend Dashboard.
- Find fellow Fans and chat via a Live Messenger system.
- And so much more!
For a detailed look at everything, check out our Launch Trailer:
Browsing the site is available to everyone without logging in. However, there are MANY features that are only available to members. This includes:
- Adding Content.
- Favouriting Content.
- Following Creators and Characters.
- Creating custom Collections, Reading Lists and Playlists.
- Earning Achievements.
- Earning Fan Points and Power Orbs.
- Buying Card Packs and unlocking Cards.
- Unlocking Environs.
- Buying Props for Environs.
- On-site and Email Notifications, including the ability to turn them off.
- Personal Profiles.
- Adding Friends.
- Custom Dashboard for managing Content and viewing Stats.
- A custom Follow Feed for updates on Creators or Characters you Follow.
- Live Messenger Chat.
No. Life Is Strange Fans is a fansite, made by fans for fans. It is not officially affiliated with or sponsored by either Square Enix, Don’t Nod or Deck Nine Games.
However, all three companies are aware of its existence and have been very supportive of the site and the wider community which encompasses our social channels. This includes sharing Tweets and other social media posts, providing prizes for contests and in some cases updating their own pages on the website where access is requested.
The website itself was solely developed by myself, Chris Anderson. I’m a fan of the games and a web designer/developer from Cardiff, Wales. You may notice the name ‘Pixel Squirrel Studios’ referenced in the footer and throughout the site or in emails – this is just the name of my web design company.
Some additional development for certain features was done by hired freelance developers.
Also helping with managerial decisions, contests and additional art is Co-Admin, Mailen Torras from Buenos Aires, Argentina – known as MaiQueti within the community.
We also have various Moderators on a separate Discord server and are supported financially by generous Patron subscribers, known as Superfans.
For a full list of credits, please see the Site Credits page.
The website was originally launched on February 18th, 2016. Over time, the website began to struggle with performance as it was built upon an existing theme that wasn’t optimised for its purpose and relied heavily on lots of plugins for extra features. The initial purpose of the site – to give fans a central hub to upload and share fan content such as Fan Art, Cosplay, Fan Fiction, Music and Videos – was somewhat neglected because the underlying functions were simply not there as I wanted.
5 years later, after learning a lot of new skills including advanced web design and programming, I have been able to create the version of Life Is Strange Fans that I always wanted to – the version you’re currently viewing.
The new design, additional features and ground-up optimisation make the current site virtually unrecoginsable from the old site, hence 2.0!
No. We have a strict policy regarding the kind of content you can upload to the website.
We have good relationships with Square Enix, Don’t Nod and Deck Nine Games are we do not want to tarnish those relationships by hosting content they might object to.
For more details about this policy, see the NSFW/Content Policy page here.
Adding & Browsing Content
Adding Content to Life Is Strange Fans involves filling out simple forms from the frontend of the website. We’ve written extensive Documentation on adding all types of Fan Content which you can find here.
You must be a registered and logged-in User to see the forms for adding Content.
There are multiple ways to find Content on Life Is Strange Fans.
- From the Homepage.
- Using the Live Search Bar in the Header, or standard Search Bar in the Main Menu if on mobile or tablet.
- From Content Archive page links in the Man Menu.
- From the ‘SIMILAR…’ listings on single Content pages.
- On the main Activity page, which is a feed showing new posts of all types.
- On your Follow Feed (when logged in), which shows only new posts by Creators you Follow or featuring Characters you Follow.
- From the ‘Discover More Content’ listings on all Activity pages, which shows random content you have not yet added to your Favourites.
For a more detailed breakdown of all of the above, please see the Searching & Filtering Content Documentation page.
Achievements
Achievements are digital on-site rewards represented as badges. They are similar to Achievements or Trophies unlocked on Xbox, PlayStation or Steam.
Achivements are awarded to users for various site activity. This might include:
- Adding Content
- Favouriting Content
- Unlocking specific Cards or other unlockables
- Reaching a certain amount of Points
- Visiting certain sections of the website
- And more!
The requirements for unlocking most Achievements are listed on the Achievement’s single page or on the Achievements listing page.
Visit the main Achievements page to see the list of all Achievements and start unlocking them now!
Secret Achievements have their requirements hidden and each requirement will only show after you actually meet that requirement.
The requirements are revealed per requirement. So, if a Secret Achievement has 3 requirements and you meet the requirement of 1 of them, it will say ‘1 of 3 Requirements Met’ and will show you what that requirement was on the Achievement’s single page.
Sure! There’s no way of us stopping that and we wouldn’t necessarily want to. We encourage sharing among the community and helping each other out.
However, please use Private Messaging to communicate and don’t post the secrets publicly, either on your profile, in the public Live Chatroom or on social media.
Fan Points & Power Orbs
Fan Points (or FP) is a digital currency on Life Is Strange Fans, which can be used to purchase Card Packs.
Fan Points can be earned in a number of ways:
- Simply visiting the site each day will reward you with 5000 Fan Points. This is known as a ‘Daily Visit Reward’ and is awarded once per 24 hours. This is determined by your own time zone and the points will be awarded from midnight (your time) onwards each day.
- Unlocking Achievements also awards a set amount of Fan Points at the same time.
- Selling unwanted/duplicate Cards – either back to the site or to other Fans.
- Becoming a Superfan by subscribing to our Patreon. Superfans get a set amount of weekly Fan Points (and other awards) which are given out manually by an Admin.
No. We do not own the license for Life Is Strange and therefore, we do not have the right to monetise it in this way. However, while Fan Points and Power Orbs cannot be bought directly, if you want to support the upkeep of the site by subscribing to our Patreon, one of the benefits is being sent a set amount of Fan Points and Power Orbs weekly – with higher amounts available in the higher Tiers.
Since you’re really supporting the site and the points are essentially only given as a bonus reward this is one way we are able to give out points – it doesn’t actually cost us anything to distribute points, the real cost is the hosting of the website and its media content, so any financial support goes towards that and the points are a ‘thank you’ rather than a product purchased.
Cards & Card Packs
Cards are digital collectibles based on TCG (Trading Card Game) Cards that can be unlocked on the website.
They have a main image (featuring either characters, environments or objects), a title and/or subtitle, a short description, a power orb showing the current level, and a unique identifying number.
Cards are found in Card Packs, which can be bought with Fan Points and will return a random assortment of Cards when opened.
No. Cards have no monetary value, crypto or otherwise. They are really just posts with a specific template, with different variations of the template depending on whether you have unlocked the Cards or not.
You can buy Card Packs from the main Card Packs page. As soon as you buy a Card Pack, you are redirected to its single page where you can open it by clicking a button and confirming, but if you decide to open a Card Pack later, you can view all your Card Packs on your My Card Packs page.
For a detailed breakdown, see the Documentation on Buying Card Packs and Opening Card Packs.
Cards can be sold from a Card’s single page. You can either sell a Card back to the site directly from that page, or list a Card for Sale to other Fans, and wait for someone to buy it.
The ‘Sell Card Back To Site’ or ‘List Card for Sale/Trade’ buttons will not appear unless you own at least 1 of that Card, and some rarer Cards cannot be sold at all.
For a more detailed breakdown, please see the Documentation on Selling Cards.
Cards can be listed for Trade from a Card’s single page.
The ‘List Card for Sale/Trade’ button will not appear unless you own at least 1 of that Card, and some rarer Cards cannot be listed for Trade at all.
For a more detailed breakdown, please see the Documentation on Trading Cards.
Cards have a Max. Available value, meaning the maximum amount of the same Card you can own. Superfan Exclusive Cards and Limited Edition Cards have a Max Value of 1, Gold Cards have a Max Value of 3 and most other standard Cards have a Max Value of 5.
Once you own the Max Value of a Card, you’ll be able to convert them to a Gold version of the same Card directly from the Card’s single page. You will actually lose 4 of the 5 standard Cards, leaving you with 1, but also receiving the Gold version.
Rarer Cards cannot be converted, sold or traded.
For a more detailed breakdown, please see the Documentation on Converting Cards To Gold.
Cards can be Levelled Up from their single page. Levelling Up Cards is required in order to access certain parts of the website – for example, for unlocking Environs.
If you own at least 1 of a Card, you’ll see a ‘Level Up Card’ button below the Card itself.
Levelling Up Cards costs Power Orbs, with the cost increasing with each Level.
For a more detailed breakdown, please see the Documentation on Levelling Up Cards.
Not all Cards, and not directly from their page, no. This feature was originally included during testing, but it made the Card Packs rather redundant and took away a lot of the excitement of the gamification overall.
Technically, Cards can be bought with Fan Points if they are listed for sale by other Fans on the Card Listings page. Please see the Documentation about Buying Cards for more information.
Occasionally we will run special events where certain Cards can be bought directly from their page with Fan Points for a limited time only. Keep an eye on our social channels, as this is where we would usually announce such events.
Environs & Props
Environs (short for Environments) are key environments from the Life Is Strange games. They are represented as static scenes of an environment, built up in layers, almost like a sticker book. The different layers represent Props, which must be unlocked in order for them to appear in the scene.
For more details about Environs, see the Documentation on Discovering Environs.
Unlocking Environs involves meeting certain requirements. Those requirements will be listed on the Environ’s single page.
Generally, these requirements include owning certain Cards at a certain Level.
For more information about unlocking Environs, see the Documentation on Unlocking Environs.
For information about Levelling Up Cards, see the Documentation here.
There will be some limited interactive elements for all Environs. This will include being able to toggle on and off ‘Powered Props’, e.g. lights and other electrical items. It may also involve being able to toggle drawers/doors open or closed.
For more information, see the Documentation on Interacting With Environs.
To see all the Props available for all Environs/Angles, you can visit the Prop Store from the Main Menu.
Props can only be bought with Power Orbs and the type of Power Orbs required will vary depending on which game the Props and/or its related Environ are featured in. For example, Max’s Room requires the Season 1 Power Orbs known as Chaos Orbs. Chloe’s Room requires Tempest Orbs, which are introduced in Season 2.
For more information, see the Documentation on Buying Props For Environs.
Superfans
Superfans are users who have subscribed to our Patreon and therefore recieve extra benefits that standard users do not. There are 3 tiers:
- Superfan
- Superfan Plus
- Superfan Ultimate
All 3 tiers have the same benefits and access, but the higher tiers will receive more weekly Fan Points/Power Orbs accordingly.
- Weekly Fan Points (amount varies depending on tier selected).
- Weekly Power Orbs (amount varies depending on tier selected).
- Access to rare Superfan-Exclusive Cards – these will be awarded periodically by the site Admin.
- Receive any Limited-Edition Cards on request, after their run in Limited Edition Card Packs ends.
- Sell Cards back to the site for Fan Points at double the percentage of the original price (60% instead of 30%).
- Double your chances of getting rarer Cards in Card Packs.
- Get up to double the amount of Power Orbs in Card Packs.
- A Superfan page on the site to express your fandom and the ability to publish Superfan Blogs.
- Access to an exclusive on-site Superfans-only Chatroom.
- Exclusive Role and access to a Superfans-only Discord channel in the Life Is Strange Fans Discord.
- Credited on the site.
Simply head over to our Patreon page and select your preferred tier to subscribe!
You will be contacted either via Patreon’s own messaging system, the website’s messaging system, email or social media to provide details about your onsite Username so we can upgrade the correct account, your preferred Superfan page name and your Discord server username if you are an active member of our Discord server.
Your first awards will be given immediately, or as soon as an Admin is able to.
No. Any Cards including Superfan-Exclusive Cards that were given to you while you were subscribed, will remain linked to your account.
Your current Fan Points or Power Orbs balances will remain the same and no points will be deducted.
You will simply not receive any additional Superfan-Exclusive Cards or weekly Fan Points/Power Orbs after you unsubscribe.
Fan Points/Power Orbs will not be backdated. You will only receive the usual weekly amount from the first week you resubscribe.
However, any Superfan-Exclusive Cards you missed while unsubscribed will be given to you on request.
Sure! Any help at all is appreciated. You can donate via PayPal to [email protected]
As a thank you, you will be added to the Special Thanks section of the Site Credits page and also receive one-off rewards of 50,000 Fan Points and 25,000 of each Power Orb type.
Bugs
We have a dedicated Bug Reporting system on the site for submitting either functional or visual bugs/issues.
Simply head to the Bug Reports page, where all the Bug Reports are listed and can be filtered through.
At the top of the page you will also see a ‘Submit New Bug Report’ button if you’re logged in, which will bring up the required form in a modal.
When you submit a Bug Report you will receive an email. Along with the details of the report you submitted it will include a Current Status section, which will be ‘Reported’ by default.
When we first see the Bug Report, we will change the status to ‘Acknowledged’, indicating that we are aware of the Bug. We may also add Staff Notes. You will receive another email letting you know that the Bug Report was updated. You will see any Staff Notes that were added, as well as the updated status, also with a link to the Report so you can see the details on the site itself.
The next stage is ‘In Progress’, which we will update the Bug Report to when we are actively working on a fix.
The final stage is ‘Resolved’ when we are confident that the issue is resolved.
Technical
Life Is Strange Fans is built using WordPress, which is a PHP-based CMS (Content Management System).
WordPress is currently used by more than 450 Million websites worldwide.
Some plugins enable very small features that are really only relevant to managing the backend of the website, so we’ll just highlight some of the most important plugins that affect the frontend here.
- Elementor Pro – This is a page building tool that allows us to create the custom templates for all custom post types on the site more easily in a WYSIWYG way, with less code needed.
- Gamipress – This is the plugin that all the gamification systems on the site are built with. However, it has been heavily customised with a lot of custom code and templates including the Cards system, the Card Packs system and the ability to sell and trade Cards. The plugin does have an add-on for transferring Achievements between users, but it is very limited and did not meet our requirements, so we built our own!
- ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) Pro – This plugin allows us to add many custom fields to our custom post types, allowing for additions such as Featured Characters, Cosplay Items, YouTube URL’s, etc.
- ACF Frontend Pro – This plugin allows those custom fields to be included in custom forms, mapping them to the custom fields, which are then saved and viewable on the custom post types.
- Ajax Search Pro – This plugin is what enables the live search bar in the site header, allowing for instant searching of content on the site.
- FacetWP – This plugin is used for adding custom filters such as ‘Filter By Character’, ‘Filter By Tags’, ‘Filter By Card Type’, etc. which allows users to narrow down results, including the ability to ‘stack’ filters for ultimate fine-tuning.
- WP Favorites – This allows users to Favourite various content around the site. It has been customised further to allow multiple types of Favouriting – for example, ‘Following’ Creators or Characters is actually just Favouriting them but customised to look like Following. Having Favourites (or Follows) saved into the database for each user is vital to enable such features as listing which users have Favourited certain content, as well as being able to create a custom Follow Feed for every user.
- Buddypress – This is an add-on for WordPress that enable key social networking features including Profiles, Friend Requests and Messaging.
- Youzify – This plugin enhances Buddypress further by improving the UI and allowing for customisation of Profiles including additional custom tabs such as showing what Cards users own or Favourites they’ve added.
- Better Messages for Buddypress – This plugin greatly enhances the default Buddypress messaging feature, which acts more like a forum setup, .i.e. not live and requiring page refreshes to see any new messages, not to mention a very dated UI. Better Messages enables near-instant live messaging. We also pay an additional fee for the Websocket version, which enables extra features including actual instant messaging, live notifications, ‘Is Typing’ indicators and read/received receipts.
- WP Dark Mode Ultimate – This plugin allows for instant switching between light and dark themes on the website. However, the default dark mode themes are not perfect and so we spent 6 months customising the dark theme to exactly how we wanted it.
- Leopard Offload Media – This plugin creates a vital link to a bucket on our Amazon S3 account, which allows all media, as well as CSS (styling) files uploaded to the site to be stored on that bucket on Amazon servers instead of taking up space on our own server. This means faster loading of the pages and its media.
- WP Mail SMTP Pro – Emails delivered through the default WordPress PHP Mail system often end up in user’s junk mail folders as they are incorrectly marked as unsafe or spam. This plugin improves the deliverability of emails from the website by delivering them through SMTP protocols – linked with an Amazon SES account, this ensures emails are not only delivered quickly but also reliably and consistently, as trusted ‘headers’ are included in the emails. Because these emails are confirmed to be coming from a trusted, authenticated source, this ensures they will always be delivered and will not end up in user’s junk mail folders.
- Code Snippets – This plugin allows us to add custom code to the website in bitesize snippets, which can then be enabled or disabled individually. This includes custom functions such as the functions that are triggered when opening Card Packs – for example, for awarding random Cards and Power Orbs.
- Hosting – Siteground Cloud Hosting
- CDN (Content Delivery Network) – Cloudflare
- Media Storage – Amazon S3
- Email Delivery – Amazon SES in combination with WP Mail SMTP Pro plugin
Myself, Chris Anderson, created the entire website alone, but some additional features required help by hired freelance developers.
- Playlists System – The Music and Video Playlists are complex additions that required extensive knowledge of Javascript as well as integration with the YouTube and Soundcloud API’s. Although I created the actual structure and layout of Playlists, including the PHP code required to link them to Music or Videos added to them, I am currently still learning Javascript and so additional help was required to finalise their functionality, including the ability to Pause/Resume, Skip and Previous songs or videos. Freelance developer Nathan Rees was the developer who helped with this system.
- Bookmarks System – Being able to create Bookmarks of content in Chapters was easy enough to implement. However, in order to make the process as simple as possible I wanted users to only need to highlight the content they wanted to save, right-click and select ‘Copy Link To Highlighted Text’ and then paste it into the form. Users would only see the generated link, but behind the scenes a hidden field would also paste in the actual content. Again, this required Javascript knowledge I did not yet have and so required additional help. Vladamir Atanov was the developer who helped with this system.
