Hi I’m Lumi \o/ I was born in 1987, São Paulo, I’m graduated in Design by the Architecture and Urbanism College of University of São Paulo.

I entered in this illustrator life in 2005, when I used to sold fanzines in anime events. I had the honor to meet the great team of Ethora magazine and won their contest to participate in a special edition, where each page was drawn by a single artist. Then, through Elton ”Erto” Azuma, Ethora’s editor/writer/illustrator/dunnoe, I was recommended for Marcos Inoue, of E-Vision Studios, who was searching for artists for a project called Alaya Seed.

After doing some freelances for E-Vision I started working there and besides doing illustrations I learned how to make layouts and vectorize (I was an intern there for 4 years, Lino joined by the third).

E-Vision also had some game projects, which included various flash minigames, an online/physical card-game, a fighting game with an avatar builder and social stuff. But as the team was too small and the projects too ambitious, almost nothing got finished.

By the end of college, a group of friends began to gather in a game study group, which later originated Catavento, a indie game dev team which I belong.

After I graduated I worked two months at 8D Games and then went to Best Cool Fun Games, where I worked on Bunny Shooter, Fireworks, Go-Go Goat and Pet Dash. I left in early 2012 and since then I’m freelancing. I did the art for Tapps‘s Jack Pott, and now I’m dedicating myself for Tsubasa while there’s still time. /o/

To see my artwork check out my portfolio, here is my Linkedin, and a very cool article by Gamesfoda.

This weekend we attended the Global Game Jam, the world’s largest game jam event. It was the second marathon with the team, so we were better prepared. I would take part with Catavento but I ended up joining Lino who decided to attend in the last minute.

Our biggest challenge was that he had no computer (lol), but found a way to program on an iPad, using a code editor called Textastic. Without an engine, good part of the time was used to create the basics.

There was a pretty big restriction on the number of things moving on the screen, so the size was limited to 320×460 pixels (therefore we could also play on iPhone). The chosen style also has to do with these limitations.

In the beginning everything went wrong and we seriously thought about quitting. Some tests were running at super low fps, which dropped our courage a lot. But after testing a few alternatives, the result was pretty cool and we continued developing.

The art side was pretty tought too. My wacom bamboo died at the beginning of the event (but I borrowed Luci‘s). Because of the restrictions mentioned above we had to do it in pixelart, one of my weaknesses, and because Lino thought we could be needing to map each pixel in the sprites I worked with a limited number of colors (nine total). In the end we could use pngs and the number of colors increased (to 20 I think).

The music was made by Pati, who also composed the soundtrack of Viktor the Nth in the same jam (yup, she is a wizard). But because of the final rush to finish the game we didn’t had time to include the songs in the submitted version. orz

This is the final result, we are still working on an update to fix the dialogues, add music and NPCs animation, but it is playable! http://globalgamejam.org/2012/redo
      

In the last weekend me and Luci (catavento.art.br) and Gustavo (tsubasa.com.br) and Pati (cadenza.mus.br) attended the SPjam, a 48-hour game development marathon! The raffled themes were “fire”, “mist” and “infinity”, we could use one or more of them.

Our game is based on the japanese festival “Tooro Nagashi”, where people release boats containing lanterns into the river to guide the souls of the deceased to the Afterlife. The game objective is to find the lost souls in the river, avoiding evil spirits. You control the boat by touch and draging on the screen, the movement speed affects the intensity of your light, so if you go too fast your candle goes out and the game is over.

With the oriental theme it was relatively easy to define a visual language. I intended to follow an ukiyo-e theme but I didn’t adapted so well to that style, and in the 48hs rush I ended up creating something I was more confortable.

Some things had to be cut for the lack of time. Obstacles, for example, were supposed to be elements in the river, but as they had no depth in the scene (z-index stuff) they always appeared above the boat, screwing the perspective. To solve that Gustavo had the brilliant idea to use spirits instead, because, since they float in the air, that wouldn’t be a problem.

Everyone is very excited about the project and we intend to continue it, implementing the missing features. If all goes well we plan to release it on the AppStore this year! (edit: sweet illusion orz)