21 Types of Cakes also I’m old tomorrow

So apparently I’m going to be 21 tomorrow.

Despite my rational mind knowing that there’s only a single day in between today’s 20 and tomorrow’s 21, the whispered fears of slowly growing into someone who is supposed to know what to do with her life by now continue to haunt me.

I’m going to be honest with you, for the majority of the day I completely forgot it was my birthday tomorrow. This is the first year in which I haven’t been looking forward to it for weeks, barely being able to wait for cake and presents and being allowed to be the centre of attention.

It’s not that I was dreading my birthday or anything. I simply forgot about it for a very long time. Then I was reminded (thanks Hanna!) and then I forgot again, only to remember hours before the occasion.

In the spirit of cake and aging, I tried to do one of those “30 things I want to do before I’m 30” posts, but I could only think of 3 things for that list and I really don’t feel like another identity crisis right now. Instead, I’m going to conmemorate the occasion with 21 pixel-art pieces of cake, because it’s the first thing that poped into my mind. Enjoy!

1. Strawberry Cheescake
2. Fruit Tart
3. Chocolate cake with vanila icing
4. Lemon cake
5. Strawberry and cream cake
6. Wedding cake
7. Carrot cake
8. Layered chocolate and biscuit cake
9. M&M cake
10. Brownie with icecream
11. Blueberry muffin
12. Angel cake
13. Obnoxiously large chocolate and cream cake
14. Marmor cake that vaguely resembles a sine wave
15. The sort of cake you would eat if you were on a diet
16. Lemon, kiwi and strawberry cake… Does that exist? I’d eat it…
17. Chocolate cheese cake
18. Strawberry muffin that is definetely not the same as the blueberry muffin
19. Some sort of cake in the shape of a hat
20. Victoria sponge (apparently this is an english cake? Thanks, Matt!)
21. Birthday cake. Look I got 4 candles I’m almost a grown up!

I have no idea what I’m doing with my life, but that was fun so that’s all that really matters, right?

Have a wonderful week.

-Marta

Ramblings and Promises

Hi.

So I realize it’s been a while since I wrote something here.

It’s been a crazy couple of months since Fallen Star release. We are working on a new project now which I’m still not sure on when we are going to announce but I hope I’ll be able to share more info with you soon.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with my life lately. Being in a job that I don’t like sucks, but it’s also great for fueling motivations towards everything else I want to do. The fear of being stuck in this job forever is one of the things that gets me off the couch after dinner every day and onto my computer.

“Go work on your dreams” I tell myself.

“What the hell even are my dreams?” my brain has been replying lately.

The truth is, I’ve spent the past two months trying to figure that out. I go from this state of being full of energy and motivation, ready to do everything I need to do to become the person I want to be, ready to pour my heart and soul onto my work, to a state of not knowing what I want to do with the rest of my life and not even being able to get out of my chair and away from my computer, so just sitting there staring at the work I was so into 5 minutes ago and just being confused as to where my energy went.

This may be just another up on this roller coaster. But I’d like to think it isn’t. I’d like to think this up is here to stay. Because I know that it’s okay to change my mind and it’s okay to want to do something different and it’s okay to question my own passions sometimes. I know I know this. I know I’ve always known this.

But sometimes I forget.

I want to be able to say that this is it, that I’m done with this up and down and that I’m going to stay up and I’m going to always give 100% in everything I do. I want to be able to say this and know that I’m going to keep my word. But I cannot. Not yet. And that’s okay as long as I keep trying.

There’s a lot of things I’ve been trying to figure out but there’s no reason why I should stay silent while I do this. There’s no reason why not knowing what I want to do should mean to just not do anything at all.

There’s a bunch of things that have been helping me get myself out of this state of confusion and constant sleepiness, one of them being my boyfriend Matt, whom I’m afraid I cannot share with you. He’s taken. 😉

Some of the other things, however, I have shared below. If you’re anything like me, I hope they help. But, then again, if you’re anything like me, I know they will.

Videos:

Blogs:

Harnessing Entrepeneurial Manic Depression – Making The Rollercoaster Work For You

ZackBellGains 3. Especially the section about saying yes to things.

These are just my favourite go-to places for motivation at the moment. I plan on going back to this post and adding anything new that I come across, so keep an eye out!

Also feel free to let me know what gets you out of bed in the comments, I’d love to see/hear all of your favourite snippets of motivation 🙂

For now, I’m going to continue making video games and trying to become the best version of myself that I can be.

I hope you are having a wonderful week and I hope you know that I believe that you can achieve great things today. Go be amazing!

-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

 

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:

 

Cute crochet elephant

Watercolor landscape

Inktober 31witches drawings

 

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

Spanish Invasion and other Distractions

Hello again, it’s been a while.

I believe in my last blog post I talked about being in Spain for the holidays. That was fun. I had some touristy times when Matt was visiting and then a very productive pixel art week with occasional beach breaks once he left.

Much has happened since then in terms of life, but not that much has happened in terms of game development. Which are the two main reasons this blog has been a little quiet lately.

We moved back to England, where we started our new job while simultaneously still trying to settle into the new house. Matt had his driving test, which resulted in us spending the weekend at his parent’s house and me spending one of the days petting sheep. My friends came visit all the way from Spain for two weeks and then three days later my parents came to visit all the way from Spain for two weeks. And of course once they left we (and by we I really mean Matt but I helped) spent a week giving a friend programming lessons so he wouldn’t fail his retake and get deported to Egypt.

All of that of course, while working full time as an intern engineer. Have I mentioned I had never worked full time before? Or for that matter had a proper job?

And this, my friends, is why I don’t have much progress to show.

I do however have a lot of lovely photos of all of our family and friend times to show. It really has been lovely spending so much time with all these people, but saying that I’m so glad to be back and pixel arting! I started getting back into gamedev this Monday and I’m already feeling so pumped about Miku RPG!

Hopefully I should be back on track soon, especially with my little bit of extra time this bank holiday Monday!

Also hopefully now that we are all settled in and all of the Spanish people are back in Spain and not requiring 99% of our free time anymore we can be a little bit more regular with these updates. Maybe next time they’ll even be game related, who knows.

Hope you guys are all having a wonderful week! Keep making cool stuff!

-Marta

P.S.: Oh! I almost forgot! I got interviewed for a gamasutra blog by the lovely Wes Platt! You can find the interview here if you are interested!

 

Still alive!

So I just logged into wordpress and apparently it’s been 23 days since the last post! So much for daily blogging, huh?

It’s been a crazy 23 days though, I can assure you that.

Right after our last exam at uni (which I reckon went rather well and I’m excited to find out what results I got in it) we went straight on to the process of putting the entirety of our belongings into boxes.

If you know me in person, you probably know that I am very much of a morning person and really dislike going to bed late. “Late”, by my definition being after 10pm. Well let’s just say that packing didn’t stop until midnight, and that we had to get up at 6:30 the next day to pack the rest. Not one of my favourite things in the world, although I have to say I rather enjoyed the experience (despite feeling completely and utterly exhausted). Apparently, putting things into boxes is weirdly nostalgic. Don’t ask me why.

Me and Matt decided to film the process and add some nice nostalgic music to it, so if that’s something that tickles your interest, you can find it here:

At this point we had three days (during which I must add, we didn’t have access to any form of Internet connection) unpacking everything again and trying to make a strange empty place into somewhere we could call our home are refuge for the next year.

The first night felt incredibly lonely and scary, although I can imagine it would have been much lonelier and scarier if Matt hadn’t been sleeping next to me.

At this point my brain and body was at it’s limit, and I just needed an early night. But of course by the time we were done putting the bare minimum of things away, just enough to make some dinner, it was already later than I would have liked. And dinner of course took a ridiculous amount of time despite being an instant-type meal, since we had to figure out how to use a gas cooker. Also since we didn’t have a bin. Nor bin bags really.

But still, around 11pm we were ready to go to sleep. Or so we thought… Turns out, when we tried to make the bed, we found that the headboard was full of hair, I’m assuming of whomever lived there before us. When I say full of hair, I don’t mean one or two. I mean I thought the pink colour was a few shades darker and greyer than it was until I got closer and realized.

So that started yet another lengthly process of trying to figure out how to use the hoover, realize it’s not working and then unscrewing the headboard and putting it away all together. Not fun.

Surprisingly, I ended up having the best night sleep I had had in months. It was either a really comfy bed or, more likely, my exhaustion had finally caught up with me.

Fortunately for us, the rest of our 23 days unplanned blogging break were way nicer! Right after moving in (I mean really, we aren’t fully 100% done unpacking yet but we’ll get there eventually, right?) we started packing our bags yet again and got ready for our trip to Spain! It wasn’t much of a trip for me considering I live here, but Spain is so much more excited when Matt is here as well! Being with a funny and very pale looking English person opens the door for me to experience all of the more cliché tourist parts of the island in which I wouldn’t want to be seen on my own. We got to look at different caves and different fireworks, went to different mountain places and different beaches, had fancy dinners in fancy restaurants and generally had a very nice time.

Matt is back in England now, so these past few days have been a little bit less hectic. I’ve actually had some time to work on Miku RPG! I’m trying my best to get as much progress done as I can before I’m back in England (in like 5 days), so I should get going with that again!

I hope you all have an absolutely wonderful and amazing day!

– Marta

Exams and a Walking Bush

So, you may or may not have noticed that we have been a little bit irregular with our last couple of posts. This is mainly due to exams being in the way, and it will probably continue to be quite irregular for the rest of the week. However, we have decided to give up on daily blogging and change it to every other day. This is mostly due to the fact that it continuously feels like we don’t have anything interesting to say every single day and as I result I feel like our blog posts have been getting less and less interesting.

This may be due to the fact that we spent the majority of our time revising these days and therefore don’t do anything interesting with our days that we can talk about on here nor work on Miku RPG enough to be able to show some progress every day. At the minute we are lucky when we manage to fit in a whole hour of game development into our days. One hour isn’t enough to make anything interesting.

Today was one of those rare days in which I actually managed to spent a full hour working on Miku RPG, so at least I have a little animation to show you.

I’ve been working on the side animation for the past three days, and I did the back animation this evening. I think it’s looking kind of cute, I’m excited to see it actually implemented inside the game. Hopefully this should happen soon, since Matt is trying to get the engine to the point where I can use (and make an ubuntu version of it so I can actually use it) it before getting separated into different countries. So within the next two weeks and a half. I’m incredibly excited to start experimenting on it and making little test maps to see what still needs to be drawn and added.

But in the mean time, I’ll just keep working on all my pixel art and dreaming of seeing it implemented one day.

Have a wonderful day.

-Marta

Home-Grown Tomatoes and Pixel-Pigs

8 months ago, I planted a few little tomato seeds into a tiny little pot and hoped for the best. I say pot, really it was some laundry product packaging that I thought looked like the right shape and size.

My plants have had a rough time, I have to say. With the whole not really knowing what I’m doing thing; planting them just before the winter because I don’t want to wait; and spending prolonged periods of time in Spain, sending my plants on long train journeys so Matt can take care of them for me or leaving them behind for the landlord to water if he’s around the area, I’m not surprised I only have two survivors.

And yet, today I’ve been able to enjoy 3 wonderful (although rather small) tomatoes with my dinner, and I have many more waiting to get ripe.

This makes me super happy, seeing as most things I’ve tried planting so far end up dying and by most things I mean everything I’ve planted so far except these two tomato plants.

Considering how I never really stay in one place for too long, I’m not surprised this is the case, but I’m still incredibly happy and proud I managed to do this.

I’d like to say these are the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted, but I think I might be slightly biased here, since it took me so long to grow them (because I planted them in the completely wrong season).

We are moving house again in less than three weeks, and I’m slightly nervous about it. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with my plants. One of them is quite weak at the minute cause it’s gotten way too big, so I’m not sure whether it can survive the move. And after the move, I will be going back to Spain for 3 weeks, and won’t know anyone in my new area to water them for me.

But it’s okay I guess, they’ve already survived for more than I expected them to. I just hope the 17 green tomatoes I have coming up ripen before I have to go back to Spain.

In other news, I’ve been doing some more work on our piggy for Miku RPG today. I’ve fixed some minor things on the front and side views and made a new back view. I’m quite happy with how this is going and I’m looking forward to animating it and setting it loose inside the game.

Have a wonderful day!

-Marta

Ho ho ho and a bottle of pixel art!

It hasn’t been a particularly eventful day today, although after the ants war from the last couple of days this is a rather positive thing. I am happy to be able to tell you that we have defeated the ants. Or so we think. There were 3 of them walking around our kitchen this morning, but after sealing the hole with even more parcel tape we haven’t had any more encounters. We also don’t have a usable bin yet. We are currently using plastic bags tied to a chair, to make it harder for ants to reach. Just in case.

Exams are slowly approaching, and by slowly I mean we have 4 more days for the first one. I was a little stressed yesterday and tried going through some notes, but then I bumped into a whole topic (out of 6 for this part of the module) about how to test and debug code, which basically just repeated the sentence “Think carefully” on every slide and another whole topic about data types. I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that this half of the exam isn’t going to be particularly difficult. And as for the other half, that one will be difficult but I’ve been revising that bit for the past month, so I’m not too scared.

It still feels like I’m supposed to be revising, so I’m looking forward to the time in which I can finish all of this and finally work on Miku RPG full-time! For like 3 weeks before I start my uni placement…

Anyway…

Seeing as exams are so close and I should be revising instead of making a video game I have of course been making a video game anyway and worked on some more characters for the pirate-ship quest/story part. I’ve made 4 new ones of these for your viewing pleasure. Here you go:

Matt said this posts ends a bit too quickly and I should talk about what I’m going to do tomorrow before I leave. I’m going to be honest, I have no idea what I’m going to do tomorrow. Maybe some more pirates. I’m aiming to have 12 of these to populate the ship. Or maybe I’ll work on some animal-animations. Or I could keep working on that witch house now I’ve had a bit of a break from it. Or I could start working on something new. I guess if I told you you wouldn’t be as excited to read the blog post tomorrow so it’s probably a good thing I haven’t decided yet.

Have a wonderful evening!

-Marta