Hello, fellas!
Ueda M. turns XX (asking a woman her age is bad tone)!
Our story began here, on Ringo's Steam forum when I was looking for a Japanese translator and asked players for the help:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/846110/discussions/0/1728701877525133113/?snr=2___
We continued to talk via email, she proofread the whole translation, and then in the middle of Arrest development I proposed to draw some sprites for a jrpg game (which is going to release next year, I hope:
So we started to work on it, she tried pixel art for the first time as I remember and her 5th or 6th background work was this:
During the development, CIRCLE Ent. (my Switch publisher) proposed to make a physical release of Ringo but we were short on time (we had only a little more than a month to deliver all materials), and I asked Ueda M. to use her Ringo fan art as it. She, thankfully, agreed, so we used a manual she made just for fun in the meantime as the official manual:
But we still needed cover arts, box arts and something special to include in the Collector's edition. And Ueda M. had done everything!
etc.
It was so fun to work on Ringo'a manga and also I wasn't too sure if we could handle the jrpg scale, so we decided to make a manga our of it.
7 (8?) months later the first chapter turned out great but the sales didn't ) We sold only 15 copies at Comixology. Making of the next chapter was put on hold, and we returned to game development, and it was FA this time:
~ 4700 yakuza frames
~ the same 4700 yakuza frames but without the jacket
~ 4500 NPC frames
And beautiful cover arts for the game on both platforms as well, of course:
and something special for the physical edition:
And as I said earlier we are almost ready to deliver a new one. After Artem "Wedmak2" Belov put his passion on pause (I hope) and my dad couldn't catch up with the raised quality, Ueda M. had to do everything (art-wise): both characters and backgrounds. But after all it was too much even for her, so the super talented Altai Demon joined the team to finish in pixel art all location sketches she made for the game.
But the characters (huge amount of frames again) are totally on Ueda M.
What can I say in the end. Meeting Ueda M. was just another gift of Gods for me, I appreciate and respect all team members, but she's really our team's joker who can make almost anything.
Happy birthday! I wish you a good health above all, thank you very much for everything and I hope that you'll continue to work with me further!