I have always been somewhat of an “impractical” person. Despite my mother telling me this during most of my childhood, I never really thought of it as a thing to work on, a thing to… More
Fallen Star Release Date Announcement!
We have some suuuuuuuper exciting news to share with you today!
We are finally ready to announce the Fallen Star release date!
What started of as a 6 week project and ended up becoming a 3 month project instead, pretty much doubling its scope, is now finally getting close to the finish line.
Fallen Star will be released on itch.io on… *insert imaginary drumrolls here*
The 14th of February!
That’s right! Valentines day!
This is going to be the first project that Matt and I actually finish and release into the world. We’ve been making games together since before we even became a couple, so we thought this would be a wonderful way to celebrate both of these achievements.
We hope you are looking forward to this as much as we are and that you enjoy playing this little project either on release date, or after release date, should you be involved in romantic couple activities 😉
Until then, I hope you enjoy these screenshots.
Hope you have a wonderful wonderful week!
-Marta
Flowers and Dragons
The past two weeks have been pretty crazy. It’s almost as though the closer we are to finishing Fallen Star, the more motivated we are to spend time on it, so we have very many new things to share with you.
Just last weekend Matt ported the new version of the code to my computer, sharing with this wonderful new level selection menu which will make my life much easier when it comes to polishing up the last few levels.
Not that there is much more level design to do, last weekend I also finished designing the very last level. Now I just need to go through all of them one last time and add little details and decoration bits, as well as set times for the different medals and add text to all the signs, but the hardest part is done. In less professional sounding words: I am spending hours inserting flowers everywhere and it’s the best thing ever.
I’ve already gone through the first two levels doing this and I can say they look much much nicer now.
I’ve also been working on finalizing some logos, both for Dragon Egg Games and Fallen Star itself. I’m really happy with how they’ve turned out but I’m open to any constructive criticism you may have. I don’t really have a lot of experience making logos, so I appreciate any help I can get. Do leave a comment if you can think of anything I could improve. 🙂
Hope you are all having a wonderful week! Keep being wonderful!
-Marta
Very many levels and a way to pause them
Hello, it’s been a while since the last update. You’ll be pleased to hear that, while we did take a break from social media/youtube/blogging over Christmas (which extended into half of January… oops), we most certainly didn’t stop developing Fallen Star during that time.
I have still been procrastinating all the pixel art I need to do since level design has just been waaaaaaaay to fun. I am currently on level 6, out of the 13 levels we have planned. I am really enjoying the process and I’m super looking forward to letting you play through all of these. Me and Matt are certainly enjoying playtesting them! Until everything is ready though you will just have accept some GIFs instead, hope you like them.
In the meantime, Matt has been working on the pause menu (which I still need to make some UI art for) as well as a new super secret enemy that he is programming as we speak (or as I write at least).
It’s absolutely lovely being back in England. We had some snow recently, although if you live within 200km from any point in England you probably already found out about this when I screamed “SNOW!” in a rather deafening high pitch. I do apologize for that…
Development is slowing down again due to being back at work and even getting up ridiculously early isn’t making up for that. Seeing as this project has already tripled in timescale since it was originally conceived and let’s be honest no one watches our videos anyway, we decided to stop trying to make video updates every week, although you might still get one or two at the end of the project. But I’ll still keep you updated via the much faster and more efficient method of written text. Enjoy!
I hope you have all been having a super amazing and productive January so far and that your resolutions and goals are still driving you forward! You don’t wanna be the person who quits in January, right?
Have a wonderful week and keep being wonderful,
-Marta
2017 Tidings and Evil Grapes
It’s the second day of the year and I just couldn’t resist adding my voice to the thousands of blog posts promising just how much they are going to do with their life this year.
I had a bit of a crazy start into 2017. In Spain we have a tradition in which we eat twelve grapes during the last few seconds of the year. The New Year will be lucky for you if you succeed. It’s surprisingly difficult to succeed, since you need to eat the grapes following the sound of bells, transmitted all across Spanish television (seriously, they’re on every channel. It’s impossible to watch any other program that night that doesn’t consist of people eating grapes). They also make a big deal out of it, so you end up stressing out and putting way too many grapes into your mouth at the same time.
This year I somehow managed to bite my tongue on the first grape and therefore fell behind very quickly, leaving 4 grapes on my cup after the last bell was over. And so I wound up hugging relatives and dancing around the room while desperately trying not to choke. And shoving even more grapes into my mouth hoping if I eat them quick enough I wouldn’t be cursed in bad luck. Not that I believe in that, but you never know.
I always found it weird that this doesn’t happen outside of Spain, but in retrospective, I can see why you wouldn’t want to do this. Oh well, it’s still fun.
I was ridiculously lucky this year in terms of bullet journaling. After my last weekly pages I had exactly two pages left, perfect for a 2016 review. I still don’t know how I managed to time that so perfectly, but that means I get to start a new bullet journal with the beginning of the year, which I am way too happy about.
I’m using this gorgeous little book that my friend Lara got me for my birthday in May. I’ve been saving it to be my second bullet journal ever since and it’s finally the time to use it.
I’m not going to into detail about my goals, since a lot of them are actually unannounced projects, but other than the general get fit, learn Japanese, read more non-fiction books, improve my art skills, etc, etc, etc, I also have 4 specific projects that I want to start and/or finish during the year.
One of them being Fallen Star. I’ve been designing the first few levels for it lately. We’ve never been so far ahead in a game were I actually get to start doing level design (due to the ridiculous scope of Miku RPG, which we still dream of finishing one day), so this is incredibly exciting.
I’m learning one hell of a lot from it, which is good, since the purpose of Fallen Star was mostly to learn stuff and act as a game making experience for both me and Matt. I’m also discovering that level design is incredibly fun and rewarding to do. So fun I’ve been falling behind on all of the pixel art I’m supposed to be doing… Oops.
I hope that 2017 is going super well for you all so far and that your using the super duper energy and motivation boost to work on your dreams and achieve something great with your life. Or if you’re still hangover I hope you start doing that soon.
So then, I have some goals to work on. See you soon!
-Marta
Christmassy Adventures and some Backgrounds
Despite how I’m still behind on buying Christmas presents, this week has felt incredible Christmassy so far. Helping our administrator decorate the office at work today helped. There’s nothing more Christmassy then climbing on ladders and hanging glittery shimmery things while everyone else is working.
“How did the shortest person in the department end up hanging all the ceiling decorations?” you may ask. Or you may not ask, but someone else in the office asked this. Well, I’m cute and friendly and I always get what I want I guess. Also I have quite a good sense of balance, thanks to my slacklining training.
Sunday was rather Christmassy as well. Matt took me on a date through the park and we got to see some stags and deer! I don’t quite know the difference between a stag and a reindeer, so stags are just as Christmassy in my mind. I find it amazing how you can just go to the park here and find some wild animals just like that. In my mind, stags/reindeer only exist in Christmas movies.
It’s interesting how things that people take for granted in one place can seem so bewildering to people from a different place. For example: autumn. I mean seriously, leaves falling down from trees and changing colour? Surely that doesn’t happen in real life?
I’ve been working on quite a lot of pixel art this week, predominantly checkpoints, turret animations, fixing up some new tiles, etc. Matt made a video about it if you would like to take a look. There’s also quite a lot of exciting progress going on in the programming side of things.
I’ve been working on backgrounds for the past few days, which have turned out to take a ridiculous amount of time compared to small tiny pixel art items. They’re super fun to make though and I’ve been really enjoying myself with this. You can have a tiny little sneak peak of one of them behind a quick mock up I did (not an actual level in the game).
It still needs a bit more work but I’m super pleased with it so far, especially with how the colours all work together. I’ve been super excited about Fallen Star lately (not sure whether I’ve actually mentioned the name of this game on the blog before… Hey, look, we chose a name for our game it’s called Fallen Star now!). I think everything is coming along really nicely and I’m super excited to be able to share more stuff with you super soon!
Have a wonderful Christmassy week and don’t forget to stay Christmassy! And if you don’t like/celebrate Christmas then just enjoy December, which is an absolutely beautiful month in case you hadn’t noticed.
-Marta
Something about tomatoes
Hello there, it’s a beautiful evening on Tuesday evening and I have absolutely no idea what to write about.
I can see the night sky through my window, just next to my gorgeous (or rather messy and overgrown) tomato plant and all I can really think of is how much I want to eat those three cherry tomatoes that are looking at me.
I can’t believe I planted this tomato plant over a year ago back in Guildford and it’s somehow managed to survive being left behind when I was in Spain several times, plus the weather, plus being transported to a new home over the summer. I guess plants are sturdier than you think.
I have no idea where I’m going with this, I want to say something deep like people are also sturdier than you think and you can survive just about anything if you just believe in yourself but really I’m just thinking about tomato plants.
Oh well.
Game development is going super duper well at the minute, although unfortunately for me Matt already summed everything up in this video, so there’s not much left for me to say about it. Other than that I’m enjoying the process, which is always good news. And I’m excited to get back to work at it. And I’m excited to eat those tomatoes.
During the initial recording of this video I mentioned how I had been planning to record the pixelling process and then make short timelapse clips (you know, so the video isn’t 95% Matt’s progress) but then as Matt was editing the video I managed to do a bunch of pixel art and forget to record it again so there you go. Maybe you’ll have some timelapses next week. Chances are you probably won’t get any timelapses next week.
Hope you all have a lovely week and stay super productive and happy!
-Marta
Hard Decisions and New Beginnings
Hello, it’s been a while.
If you are subscribed to us on youtube you might have already found out about this, but we have a bit of an announcement to make today:
We have decided to start on a new video game.
“Oh hang on!” you might ask “What happened to MikuRPG?”
Well, MikuRPG is still going to happen, although just not as soon as we were hoping for. The reason for this is that it’s been very hard to cope with both a full-time job and a project of this size lately. It can very quickly become quite discouraging to come home after an exhausting day at work and then immediately start working on a project that is way too big with a way too small timescale. Especially when after 3 hours it feels like hardly any noticeable progress has been made towards the end goal. This had gotten to the point at which we both stopped enjoying game development and decided to take a break for a month (aka October). But even after coming back from this break it just didn’t feel like an enjoyable activity anymore and being stuck in one job we dislike is more than bad enough. The last thing we need is to push ourselves to do two jobs we dislike.
To clarify: We still love MikuRPG. We still want to finish it. But a one month break is just not enough to solve the problems we’ve been having so we’ve decided to focus on something else for now. Which is exciting, right? New game, new opportunity to make something awesome!
The new game, as Matt already mentioned in his video is a platformer which we are hoping to finish in 6 (now probably more like 8) weeks. It’s something very simple, with a minimal amount of artwork and only 10 levels. We are hoping this will not only help build some game making experience for us, but also make us feel like we managed to accomplish something during 2016. As well as, you know, providing you people with a game.
You can watch the video Matt made about this below, including some exciting bits of game play!
Due to me accidentally participating in NaNoWriMo (which I finished on day 25 and am super happy and excited about, by the way), Matt had been working on the project for two weeks before I joined in, so all of the art, except for the very rough design of the character, is just placeholder art he quickly put together for testing purposes. Hopefully by next week I should have lots of time to work on pretty little bits of pixel art.
Oh, I should mention, that character I did was the first time in the past two months I’ve had fun while doing pixel art. I guess the magic of starting a new project is already working.
We are both super excited to share this journey with you and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
Also, since it’s Monday I feel like I should say something along the lines of go crazy and make something you’re proud of this week!
Lots of Love,
-Marta
First Day as an Intern
Good evening,
Whilst programming, I found the following saved on my dropbox. It was written on the first day of my internship at the company I’m currently working for, which was about 4 months ago. I hope you enjoy it 🙂
-Matt
05:33
Begrudgingly, I opened my eyes to the dawn of another day in the life of my miserable existence. Shafts of sunlight fell through the folds in the curtains, and tiny dust particles floated in the golden light like dandruff in a swimming pool. Like a blind drunk, I patted the bedside table until my hand fell on my phone, and attempted to look at the time with my eyes half glued together with sleepy dust. Turning over, I checked to see if Marta was still where I left her, before allowing my head to sink back into my pillow. “5 more minutes” I thought …
06:40
“Captain, you can’t!” cried Rachel Riley.
“No … I must” I replied, donning my space helmet solemnly. A red light washed over the bridge like the tide up a beach, and a periodic siren howled against the background ramble of the crew. USS StarStripper the Third was falling out of orbit of a black hole, and I was the only one who could stop it. Probably.
“Matt” she said, tears streaming down her face and onto her skin tight jumper suit, “I’ve done the maths on this whiteboard. It’s hopeless”
“Can someone turn that bloody siren off please?” I asked, as the ringing in my ears intensified.
I opened my eyes to the sound of the alarm on Marta’s phone. Groaning, Marta climbed over my unresponsive body and turned it off. After pausing to give me a look of indignity, she marched off to the bathroom.
07:34
Breakfast had been and gone, and Marta had finally left the bathroom. She was currently in the process of packing her elaborate salad into a container for lunch. I, on the other hand, had taken two bits of bread, covered them in animal fat and put a slab of cheese in the middle of them. Job done.
Looking in the bathroom mirror I noticed something a bit strange. Due to the way my shirt had been packed by the good folk at Matalan, there were a number of fold marks right around my general man boob area. This meant, at a glance, it looked like I had 4 nipples. At that point I decided to keep my suit jacket on throughout the day.
8:02
We arrived at reception after navigating a busy roundabout, and given visitor passes. My bowel felt strangely empty as I sat on the maroon coloured sofa with Marta. Many people entered the building before the next interns arrived. They took one look at me and decided to sit on the sofa adjacent.
9:34
After a tour of the office and a glass of water, it was time for the first test. Normally I would have been thrilled at the prospect of assembling a computer, but in a work environment under pressure I was less than happy. I looked over to Marta’s desk, and noticed her computer was pre-assembled and working. With a pang of jealousy, I dug into the cardboard box containing a monitor, and set to work.
11:04
As it turned out, my computer booted first time without any problems. Unfortunately for my now colleague, his decided that the on-board graphics would have a fist fight with the dedicated graphics card, and hence produced a BIOS error message. After helping him fix this problem, I realised I’d forgotten the Ethernet cable. Luckily, it connected to the network fine and all seemed well. However, after starting Outlook it became apparent everything wasn’t fine at all.
The server couldn’t identify the configuration for my email account, leaving me without any of the induction paper work I was required to read through and fill out. After someone else’s manager phoned IT for me, he left telling me it was my problem now. Wonderful.
12:26
Lunch time! Since the Outlook horror, I had done the square root of sod all in terms of work. I asked my manager what I should do, and he replied “sit and wait”. So that is what I did. Literally. I sat and stared at a screen, occasionally hitting retry on the email configuration tool.
However, lunch was very good as I got to talk to Marta and Omar (some other guy on my course, very good artist, great teeth / body) over my lovely cheese sandwich prepared before my bowel clearance that morning. Towards the end of lunch, another intern Seb came over boasting about being invited to a meeting. I wondered briefly if my emails had been fixed yet.
14:07
Emails were still knackered. Seb and some other bloke had left for the meeting about 10 minutes ago, and I was still sat there drooling at my monitor. Which by the way, had a bit of a fault.
See, if I adjusted the angle of the screen so that I can see it comfortably, it turned off. This was because of a dodgy power cable, which had a tendency to arc on the contacts. Excellent design feature there. So I was left then with really quite good posture as I strained to see what I was looking at.
15:46
“What is life?” I pondered, watching the seconds of the day slowly go by on the clock face. Before I could turn my attention back to my monitor, my esteemed colleague (the one with the fighty GPU) asked if I wanted a copy of the induction documents via a USB stick. Beside myself with gratitude, I said “yes please” rather too quickly.
16:07
A nice man from IT phoned me and explained why my email wasn’t working. Apparently someone else in the company already had that email, which caused the server to go “I dunno lol”. He said he was going to set up a new account for me which should be ready by the following day.
16:32
Technically, I should’ve been allowed to leave at this point. However, due to various factors I reasoned it would be “professional” to remain seated behind my desk for an extra half an hour. You know, just in case.
Somehow I had blitz through the paperwork and without realising it run out of stuff to do again. So, for the remaining minutes of the day I read through the “work ethics” booklet enclosed in the induction paperwork in excruciating detail, until I knew what I could and couldn’t say off by heart.
17:14
After an unreasonable effort, Marta finally managed to put the front door key in the lock, and rotate it in such a way to open the door. Bounding over the threshold, I dumped my bag, my shoes and the majority of my formal clothing on the floor within the first few steps. Letting out a sigh of relief, I allowed my balls out of their sweaty prison and sat down on the sofa. “Pea” Marta said in that voice, “my parents are going to be here in half an hour. Put some trousers on”.
19:26
“Oh bollocks” I swore quietly under my breath. The supposedly convenient ready meal (“spinach pasta”) we bought the other day turned out to fill the entire saucepan, leaving approximately 3mm on top for some boiling water to sit. Meanwhile, many Spanish words were flying around the living room, a few of which I recognised.
“Ahh Matt ….. something something …. cocino …. something “ said Marta’s dad enthusiastically. Are they calling me a chief?
“Marta, are your parents calling me a chief?” I asked as she entered the kitchen.
“Yes they are, why?” she replied.
“Just wondering” I mumbled back, prodding the uncooked pasta with a fork.
19:45
We sat and ate dinner in the vast shadow cast by Marta’s tomato plant. The salad we had prepared before they arrived was torn apart, with many bits of cutlery fighting for that extra tomato. I politely took some leaves after they’d finish competing, which turned out to be raw spinach. What did you have for dinner? I had spinach with extra spinach.
“Ahh Matt” Marta’s dad gasped between mouthfuls of food, “this is mm very nice”.
“Thanks” I replied, “I got it out of the package all by myself”.
21:30
By this time, I was feeling completely exhausted. Marta’s parents had left by then, and we had both slumped down onto the sofa cuddling.
“Can we sleep now?” Marta asked quietly.
“Uh hu” I replied. “But before we do, guess what”.
“What?”
“We get to do it all again tomorrow”.
October realizations
Hello.
It’s been a while.
As some of you may know, I have taken a break from twitter this month. There is no particular reason for this, other than the creeping feeling of worthlessness that had started turning up. I find social media has a way of amplifying my feelings, both the good ones and the bad ones. So the best thing for me to do when I’m feeling sad or overwhelmed is to take a step back and get away from the noise for a little while.
I had initially planned on getting lots of game development done during this month, and then come back with something amazing to show. After all, isolating myself from social media has amazing benefits on productive.
And my productivity has been amazing this month. Although I realized very quickly that I needed a break from Miku RPG as well, which I decided to take in parallel with my social media break, so really I don’t have much to show.
I have been thinking a lot though. About what I want and who I want to be. I’ve been drawing a bunch, trying desperately to keep up to date with inktober, then realizing I should be trying to avoid pressuring myself into doing anything I didn’t feel like doing, so giving up halfway through. I’ve been actually using my gym membership. I’ve been doing a lot of crochet, I’ve been trying to learn some yoga, I’ve had a surprisingly successful attempt at watercolor. Oh, and as though I wasn’t busy enough as it is, I accidentally started learning Japanese. Oops.
And I’ve been thinking a lot. I haven’t been able to figure out very many answers, but I sure as hell have come up with very many questions. Do I want to make games full time or as a hobby? Do I want to become an artist instead? Is 20 too old to teach myself how to draw? Do I want to pick up my childhood dream to become a fiction writer? Do I want to make an electronics company with Matt? Do I want to travel the world as a part time language teacher? Do I just want to be normal and finish uni and get a 9-5 job and attempt not to hate it?
As I said, very many questions, very few answers.
But, I do have some answers at least, and just for this one realization, this month off has been worth it. This, of course, is something I already knew, but now have the full and complete determination that I need to accomplish it:
I do not want to have a 9-5 job. And I do not want to work for someone else.
Nothing out of the ordinary when you say it like that, but let me phrase it slightly differently:
I refuse to accept any other permanent full time job. Ever. I may not know what I want to do with my life quite yet, but I do know that I want to do something meaningful and fulfilling and find a dream, find a passion, grab on to it and follow it and make my life be worth it. I want to live a life filled with joy and passion and I want to be remembered as someone who always gave 110% and never let go of a dream without fulfilling it first.
And I know that I can do it.
What this means is that I now have slightly over half a year of full time engineering work left, and then another year at uni. Before this time is over I need to find some form of income that allows me to get paid for something fulfilling and fun, while simultaneously working full time and/or trying to get an acceptable degree. Easy, right?
Let’s make November a great month!
-Marta
P.S.: In case you’re interested, these are some of the side projects I’ve been doing this month:
Splashing and Slashing
Today has been a rather eventful day. It started on by getting woken by thunder at 3am and then started off a second time by getting up by Taylor Swift at 6am. Both rather fantastic ways to wake up, I have to admit.
After a not particularly eventful gamedev session in the morning we attempted to get to work. Now of course due to the storm last night the underpass on the way to work was completely flooded, which resulted in taking a much longer and more dangerous route, getting slightly disorientated, jumping over a muddy fence and then running across a busy roundabout with rather heavy traffic.
Thank goodness it’s casual Friday and I didn’t ruin my formal clothes. Although I need to say my shoes have seen better days.
I have been working a lot on our logo design this week, which is always a good reminder of how I’m not focusing enough on marketing and how “oh jeez, has it really been a month since the last blog post?”. The good news is that logo design and calligraphy are close enough to each other for me to be able to back up my decision to spent 17 pounds on pens todays. Definitely a business expense. Even if 10 out of the 11 pens I bought will be used for my bullet journal as opposed to making a logo.
Another thing that I’ve been working on lately is walking and fighting animations for Miku.
Matt is still working on implementing them bug-free into the engine, but you can still see them outside of the game. Consider this a super duper sneaky sneak peak before you get the normal sneaky sneak peak when Matt finally decides to write a blog post about the combat system he’s been working on. How sneaky.
And talking about Matt… He has promised he’s porting the engine to ubuntu this weekend so I can start using it! This is so exciting I don’t think you realize how long I’ve been waiting for this!
I won’t get to pixel art very much this weekend I’m afraid cause Matt will be using my laptop but that gives me a chance to work on some design-y and story bits that I’ve been meaning to work on. Perfect excuse to grab a piece of paper and just get on with it.
I’m looking forward to it.
I hope your weekend turns out almost as exciting as mine will be. I would say I hope it turns out even more exciting but that’s not very likely. Have I mentioned I’m excited?
Have a wonderful weekend!
-Marta
Dragon Egg Games 