Transcript

Aaron Nemoyten (00:44)
Welcome to Make Games Drink Coffee. Christina, it is really, really cool to have you. Thank you for joining us.

Christina (00:52)
Nice to be here!

Hi, I’m Cristina. I’m an illustrator. I’ve been doing it professionally since 2002 or 2003 maybe. I’ve been working as a professional game artist since 2009. And I’ve done a bunch of things.

I’ve worked for Minecraft at Mojang and also done a bunch of art for other games.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:17)
One of the things I wanted to ask you about looking through your art station is I saw you had some early sort of it’s digital painting, but it’s sort of in the style of surrealism. was like clear Salvador Dali commentary and a really cool one with a guy wearing a tie that becomes a fish.

I love art like that and I just ask how does that fit into your timeline as an artist? Because right now you specialize in pixel art. So I’m wondering either you went from point A to point B or you’ve just always been interested in both of these things and you decided to specialize in one professionally.

Christina (01:39)
Yeah.

Yeah, thanks for the question. So when I was 20 started like doing art for real, I was like super into Salvador Dali and read his autobiography and you know was all sorts of into surrealism and the thing that I

that was made clear to me as I studied those kinds of stuff is if you want to have people look at your art and

I don’t know, your art stays with them. It has to be technically proficient and shocking or otherwise, I don’t know, affect them somehow. So I decided I’m going to be so good at rendering, doing realistic light-shadow anatomy proportions and stuff.

I’m gonna be so good that people cannot illustrations. And that was the whole point to it.

So anyway, that’s how I started off.

I wanted to be real good at rendering realism and having obviously some surrealist ideas here and there like the necktie that becomes a fish. I was trying to say I hate formal attire. When I used to have to wear a tie because I’m trans women so…

Aaron Nemoyten (03:18)
Yeah, I love that.

Christina (03:25)
I started off like having to dress in a male way. Now when I dress in a tie it’s because I’m a big old dyke. So it’s also appropriate. So

Aaron Nemoyten (03:36)
So

your own context. You’re like, I’m doing this on purpose now, not because society is saying that I have to, which makes it way cooler.

Christina (03:43)
Yeah, exactly. I was

studying to be a doctor and they were really, really strict with men dressing this way and women dressing the other way. And patients were always like, doctor to all of the male students and nurse to all the female students. It was like a huge, ugly mess.

Anyhow, so like yeah, I started with realism first and realism comes really easy to me because see a still life or a model I draw from life.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:03)
makes sense.

Christina (04:16)
So yeah, that’s the easy thing. The hard thing that I always wanted to do was do stylized real well. And that was a lot harder. And pixel art is neither here nor there. It’s just a medium. It’s not an art style.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:33)
I do want to get back to that, but I also want to address something really interesting you said about when you were, you know, in your early twenties and you were trying to be noticed as an artist the idea that it had to be technically proficient, sure, but also shocking and attention grabbing. And to me, I hear

There’s this sort of like the youthful interpretation of that, which is where thing that grabs you emotionally is very obvious. And then I would imagine that, you know, as you get older, the idea of what is going to grab people gets more broad and you sort of develop an understanding of really how to speak to people emotionally in a more subtle way that’s still very effective. And I’m wondering,

how you feel like your thinking on that has changed over the years.

Christina (05:28)
yeah, I was definitely like an immature kid. That said, the things I do now…

I don’t mind what people think about my artistic skill, but they do seem to respond more to realism and more to… as if it’s like harder or cooler, more, I don’t know, epic or whatever. But like for me, what I draw and paint is more emotive.

Maybe more stylized stuff.

Aaron Nemoyten (05:59)
So you mentioned that you started learning art and then you started being a artist years later. So I’m wondering how did you get into the industry? Did you always want to be in the industry or did you just sort of fall into it? What’s the story there?

Christina (06:16)
right. So I always wanted to be in the industry, in the games industry. I started as an illustrator while I was studying to be a doctor. there is a really, really famous author of kids books called Eugene Trivizas. He’s Greek.

And he, like the most famous children’s book author in Greece. And he was kind enough to offer me an illustration job when I was like 24, still studying. And I kind of needed it because I knew I had to get out of, you know, my hometown and transition and do the whole trans thing. And I needed the money. So since I was already a professional,

illustrator high credentials, know, people knew my work because of that children’s author. I went on to do like magazines and advertising agencies like the biggest like jobs I could find in Greece and became, you know, increasingly

at 29, that was like 2009, chanced upon Dan Cook, who’s a great game designer. He like Spry Fox, who make Tribletown and a bunch of other games.

And he gave me job doing the entirety of the art for a game called Panda Poet. It was a word game and when you put in words they turned into pandas but because it was a grid like the bigger the words you use, the bigger the surface you covered, the larger your pandas were. It was like just a cute thing.

So I had to make long pandas and tall pandas and everything in between. Fat pandas. Yeah, that was my first job and I took it from there. After that I’ve had a steady stream of jobs coming in in the games industry. And I haven’t looked back, I don’t think.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:04)
You

is so cool. played that game. I remember it. just thinking in terms of like,

Christina (08:22)
Really? my god.

You remember Panda Poet?

Aaron Nemoyten (08:26)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s, it’s

Christina (08:27)
That’s amazing! wow.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:29)
Actually, I’m wondering, this popped into my head when you were talking about how naturalistic illustration, realistic illustration came more easily to you than stylized. There’s that scale. I don’t remember what it’s called, but it’s the question of like, if someone says visualize an apple and you close your eyes, what do you see from one to five? One being like, I don’t see anything and five being

I see like a photograph of an apple. Do you have a very vivid visual imagination?

Christina (08:58)
No, I have what’s called aphantasia like lack of visual imagination. So I close my eyes and I see only And people usually say like, close your eyes, imagine the apple and then draw it. And how we work apparently is how I work at least, but also a few others.

is I know what an apple looks like when I see it, right? So if I start drawing, I start make headway into what I want to become an apple. Does that make sense? Like the more I draw, the more it makes sense to me and I change it until it’s like an apple.

Aaron Nemoyten (09:34)
That is so interesting. It’s more the method of the joke about how do you carve an elephant out of a block of marble and it’s just chisel away anything that doesn’t look like an elephant.

Christina (09:46)
Yeah, correct.

Aaron Nemoyten (09:48)
I remember reading that one of Disney’s sort of most internally famous artists who I think was one of the lead animators on the Little Mermaid.

had aphantasia as well. so there was this, you the question of, there any correlation between, are you a good artist and do you have a good visual imagination? And the answer is no, which I think is so fascinating.

Christina (10:11)
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I guess it’s all skill. That’s why I don’t believe in talent. Sure, innate inclination, interest in drawing and learning more about drawing, sure. But talent, I don’t say it.

Aaron Nemoyten (10:26)
when I was looking at your pixel art, I noticed a common approach to color and that all or most of your work,

has this quality of I don’t want to say washed out. I don’t think that’s the right word because washed out sounds negative, but It feels like it has this common aesthetic of being a little bit more pastel and using lighter colors. Does that make sense? Is that is that something you could talk about?

Christina (10:55)
Yeah, of course, I can talk about it. I can tell you that I don’t think about it. personal style is not something I think about a lot. I don’t think I have one. But also, I remember older illustrators saying that visuals, like Andrew Loomis, for example.

They used to say that visual style is just your personal quirks. So if I consistently go for a specific color palette, that’s a personal quirk. Maybe people can recognize this is my work because of the color palette, maybe not. But it’s not like conscious or anything.

Aaron Nemoyten (11:31)
That’s really cool. I hope that some people listen to this who are artists trying to find their way and hear that, because I think it’s so cool to just say like personal style is of just however your brain is wired and whatever comes out is fine. as long as you’re really good with the technical fundamentals, then all the other you know, will kind of work itself out.

Christina (11:45)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, beginner artists are very, very preoccupied with personal style. I was too. I found out I didn’t have to be. It comes naturally after a

Aaron Nemoyten (12:11)
scrolling through your blue sky posts late at night as I’m waiting for my daughter to fall asleep. One of the things I noticed was a post about, hold on, I got the name of the game here, Mutant Space Bats of Doom. And so I saw that and I thought this would be a great opportunity for you to talk about growing up with a different set

Christina (12:23)
my god, yeah?

Aaron Nemoyten (12:31)
of games than what I would have grown up with and what a lot of people who are consuming the mainstream games nowadays would have grown up with. Because I know that there’s in Europe, there’s like a whole different set of stuff that people had access to. And I think the sort of further away from the main English speaking countries you get the weirder and more bootleg the games get is that is that more or less accurate?

Christina (12:57)
Yeah, that is

exactly accurate because Greece may be Europe but it’s not really like it’s it’s the Balkans it’s next to Slavic countries we’re like a lot like Slavs in some ways next to Turkey we’re lot like Turks and Muslims and Arabs in general in a bunch of other ways were not like a rich country in the 80s when I grew up

And so like a lot of the played were on Commodore 64 Which was like a really cheap computer that like really really well known We used to pirate like Disks like floppy disk actual floppy disks though the big ones that were actually floppy five and a half inch. Yeah

Aaron Nemoyten (13:41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. I remember those.

Christina (13:45)
And we wrote our own games and traded between us, groups of friends, and also sent games and tracker music via snail mail. We sent envelopes and it had a small floppy inside. sometimes it came bad, it had bad sectors.

and we used, I don’t know, Commander to fix it before Norton was like malware. It was actually like useful, like utilities for disks. And yeah, I played Space Bats of Doom. I played everything that came on companion disks on PC, like magazines.

So I played every shareware and you know freeware, title and shovelware sometimes like crappy games But like those were like kind of precious to us

But I still miss that kind of like magazine culture and game dev culture in Europe where we traded like games on discs or wrote, ah, I didn’t

I don’t know if you know, we used to write listings. We used to buy books or magazines and they had games in them. And you would type them out on your computer, like in BASIC or QBASIC or whatever.

Aaron Nemoyten (15:06)
yeah, yeah.

Christina (15:11)
It was really, really…

auspicious and hopeful and a creative time for me at least. And it felt like that, like all the magazines and the books about computers had like futuristic covers and there was like an optimistic view of the future of what technology is going to bring. And I remember that like in science fiction books and everything, it used to point to

the betterment of humanity and all that stuff.

Aaron Nemoyten (15:45)
I do remember a time fondly when we all looked at computer technology and the internet and thought this is so cool. This is the future what’s going to become of it and it was when all of these things were still mostly the domain of weird nerds

And I miss those days. I miss the days when the reputation of technology even among the general public was oh, this is cool. This is the future

One of the really cool things that you’ve posted a bunch of times is demake concepts. And I love these. And for anyone who doesn’t know what I mean, this is when you basically post mock screenshots of a pixel art version.

of a game that doesn’t exist that’s either based on a popular IP or it is a newer game that like didn’t exist back when it would have had to be that kind of pixel art. And those are so cool. I think the one that you posted recently of the latest iteration of the Ninja Turtles as a point and click adventure was so cool. I love those character designs anyway. And I feel like the way you presented it was like.

I looked at it and I used to play Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle and stuff. So I see that and I go, man, that would have been so cool. And I’m wondering, have you been contacted by people who are in a position to at least have control over those IPs or those games, those properties, whatever, have you heard from the people that control those things about those demake concepts that you’ve posted?

Christina (18:07)
not the one that posted, no. But I’ve been offered a chance to pitch a Sam & Max game. Like an official Sam & Max game for the playdate.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:15)
Oh, that’s so cool. Yes.

Oh, wow. That’s not what I expected.

Christina (18:21)
So,

Aaron Nemoyten (18:24)
That is cool.

Christina (18:25)
I also made like, I was asked to pitch some designs for a Steven Universe game.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:31)
I saw you posted some of that on, I think, ArtStation. Yeah.

Christina (18:34)
Yeah, and

Rebecca Sugar saw them, but they didn’t think they wanted to go with a pixel art direction for the game. And it makes sense because the show is hand drawn and everything. Digitally inked, but hand drawn, which is really, really cool.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:54)
Right.

OK, this is my favorite question to ask people in the game industry. What is your favorite game of all time and why?

Christina (19:01)
people probably don’t even know this game. I’m gonna say like I’ve been playing for like four decades now.

Aaron Nemoyten (19:04)
All the better.

Christina (19:10)
I have a favorite game per decade, if that makes sense, but the ones I enjoy and go back to a lot are Rainbow Islands by Taito, 1987 or something.

It was advertised as the story of Bubble Bubble but it had nothing to do with Bubble Bubble other than maybe the characters but it’s a vertical platformer, single width screen but scrolling vertically quite a lot where you spawn rainbows and you climb on them and you have jump

and it’s also incidentally your weapon so if an enemy is under your rainbow and you jump on it the rainbow falls and kills the enemy but it’s also your mode of like transportation and moving up so you want to be careful when you jump or when you just walk on it and yeah that’s the reason it’s my favorite is I had it on

Commodore 64. It had an amazing soundtrack which was a rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow by from the Wizard of Oz. It was amazing on the the SID chip of the Commodore 64 and what was Yeah, I had it I played it to death I could never finish it because I was a kid and didn’t have like the maturity to have good reflexes

Aaron Nemoyten (20:23)
Yeah, yeah.

Christina (20:41)
I also played it on the joystick, the old timey joystick with the button on top. Yeah, it was shit for platforming. You couldn’t use keyboard because the arrow keys on the Commodore 64 and 128 were like in a row next to each other, up, down, left and right. They were not like in a…

Aaron Nemoyten (20:45)
that’s gotta be awful for platforming.

Christina (21:03)
in a cross shape so you can… Yeah, it was like awful. And…

Aaron Nemoyten (21:05)
Yeah, I remember keyboards like that, yeah.

Christina (21:09)
Yeah, I think that’s my favorite game because I own it because of the soundtrack and because the art was… I didn’t know what anime was back then, but it was an anime aesthetic. The next game that caught my eye, like, or my imagination was…

Civilization and SimCity I used to print my cities using a dot matrix printer that my dad had for work and it was like And I printed the cities and I printed them larger than you know Like real size life size of the computer screen so it was multiple sheets of paper and I lined my wall and I looked at my city and was like

I can see a pain point here because this factory is gonna end up causing too much pollution. So I used to scribble on my, you know, and revise my cities and reprint them. you’re a kid, I don’t know. Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (22:05)
That’s amazing. Did your

parents ever get mad at you for using up the printer paper or the ink?

Christina (22:10)
No, because my dad worked at the clinic as a doctor and they had a lot of consumables back then, like paper and ink and stuff were really cheap. So yeah, it was really fun experimenting.

Aaron Nemoyten (22:26)
here’s one of the final fun questions that’s very open-ended. As a game developer or just as a person who loves media, entertainment, whatever, what are you excited about right now?

Christina (22:36)
not AAA games. Interestingly, I heard GTA is now considered a 5A game.

Aaron Nemoyten (22:39)
I get it.

You

Christina (22:47)
And like

Rami said,

GTA 6 is the first AAAAA game And Rami said the games industry continues to grow towards

Ever-longer sounds of screaming and wailing.

It’s an AHHHH game!

Aaron Nemoyten (23:04)
Yeah, it’s an industry is what’s happening.

Christina (23:09)
That’s true,

Aaron Nemoyten (23:10)
Well, wait, you didn’t answer the question though. What are you excited about right now? Not what aren’t you excited about.

Christina (23:14)
Yeah, you’re right. I was trying

to avoid the question. What am I excited about? I’m excited about…

Not Silksong. Not, I don’t know, not the things that people talk about a lot. I’m excited about game preservation. I’m excited about games that were around when I was a kid that I either played or didn’t have access to, but now they are playable. Like, there’s a game where you’re a dinosaur and you eat dinosaurs and it’s basically a 3D beat-em-up.

but you eat other dinosaurs and humans to replenish health and like

They managed to resurrect it somehow because it ran on really specific PC hardware and stuff. I think game preservation is what I’m most excited good games with good game design, even game design that still holds up and is really modern and really fun, they’ve always been a thing.

And yeah, I’m a retro gamer, I guess. I play a lot of old games and…

That’s what I’m most excited about because also, like the Internet Archive and a bunch of institutions are doing very good preservation work and archival work. And I’m really excited about that.

Aaron Nemoyten (24:31)
Thanks

That’s cool.

I think that we’re at this really weird point in culture where

every form of media is basically saturated to the point that even, you know, youth or teens, teens, you know, historically wanting to seek out the latest, greatest, newest thing. They’re going back and spending a lot of time, you know, absorbing older games, music, not necessarily movies as much, but like older stuff. And and they’re interested in it. And I see this because I spend too much time on TikTok. But like

Christina (25:04)
Yeah.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:08)
I think that it’s cool that we have this thing for video games where they’re looking back and saying like, Oh, you know, everyone says, you know, Chrono Trigger is one of the greatest games ever. I’m going to play Chrono Trigger. And, uh, you know, I see live live streams of people playing Chrono Trigger on Tik TOK for the first time and being like, Oh, this is so cool. And then there’s people talking to them about it on the chat. And, know, as somebody who like played those games,

Christina (25:09)
Uh-huh.

Yeah. Yeah.

call.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:35)
when they first came out when I was a kid and they blew my mind then. And I’m so happy that, you I always thought they held up, but they hold up so well that people can play them for the first time now as grumpy teenagers who are probably really hard on things and go like, this retro game is cool. I’m going to keep playing it.

Christina (25:37)
When they came out.

Aaron Nemoyten (25:56)
Alright, I’m gonna. I think this is a good last question. What is a non game piece of media that inspires you or gets you excited?

Christina (26:08)
Non-game. A piece of media.

Aww.

like anime or books or

Aaron Nemoyten (26:14)
Anything. what inspires you outside of video games.

Christina (26:17)
Oof.

Like, for the past two years I’ve been doing 3D printing. Is that thing?

I think cosplay… No, I was gonna say cosplay

Aaron Nemoyten (26:22)
Well, does that feed back in? Sorry, go ahead.

you feel like those things feed back into the art that you do? Or is it just something that sort of keeps you inspired in general and just, you know, in your life?

Christina (26:33)
No, no, it’s

totally separate and I like it that way. I’ve never monetized like costume building I’m way into carpentry. I’ve never sold like anything I made. I just make things for friends or myself. Like, I’ve made the bed that I sleep on.

And tables and really useful furniture. But yeah, I made an Alphonse Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist, the huge suit of armor. And it looks a lot larger than I am.

Aaron Nemoyten (27:06)
you

Christina (27:09)
meter and 72 centimeters, I don’t know what it is in feet relatively short but the armor looks like fucking huge because his head like is a small head and I wear it as a hat soooo anyway if you search for Castpixel Alphonse Elric Fullmetal Alchemist Cosplay it was world class or whatever

Aaron Nemoyten (27:26)
guys.

Christina (27:37)
Like Adam Savage from Mythbusters came and commented on it at the forum. Yeah, it was really cool.

Aaron Nemoyten (27:42)
That’s so cool.

Christina Antoinette Neofotistou also known as CastPixel. Thank you so much for being on Make Games Drink Coffee. Did you have any coffee today or, I know it’s in the evening for you. Okay.

Christina (27:55)
I don’t drink any coffee. I do not drink coffee.

But I love talking about video games and I love talking with you, Aaron. So thank you.

Aaron Nemoyten (28:04)
thank you so much. Have a great night. know it’s night for you. It’s morning for me, but have a great night and have a great weekend.

Christina (28:11)
Have a great day. Bye bye.