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

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