In my real life I am a professional musician playing mainly the saxophone, but also other instruments like flute, clarinet, piano, guitar (in a decreasing order) and occasionally I sing. And I teach one or two of these instruments to people of various ages.

By my faulty spelling and crappy syntax you probably already arrived at the conclusion that I am neither a native speaker nor a writer. I'm a Kraut.

I get bored a lot.

Because of that I dream a lot and pursue a bunch of hobbies like drawing or slowing down the natural decay of my body. I sometimes fumble around with  amateur graphic design stuff for promoting a concert i.e. and tried to make a comic while being incarcerated like everyone during the pandemic. I like democracy by the way. Glad to see that the native speakers of the english language finally managed to get some leaders that are presentable to the public.

At last we were freed, able to hug all the people we love and lick their faces again and all of the sudden this moron we used to buy ALL of our resources from to get through cold winters did the ONE thing we thought we agreed not to do anymore. Start a WAR. One of these bad ones, where you tell a another country: "Yours is mine now. Get lost!". One year later it seems the Ukrainians still have a say in this. Like „Fuck you!“.

Thanks to Putler the story for my comic was fucked too. I had a female Russian resistance fighter named DARIA DEVIL going against evil Nazis and with all the atrocities and war crimes committed by the Russian army on a daily basis I've lost interest in that story completely.

Getting back to music business and falling in love - unsuccessfully, I concentrated on other projects like turning my guts inside out in writing heartbreaking love songs and finally getting over it.

Then one day I stumbled upon the wonderful Youtube channel of Brandon James Greer about pixel art. Seeing this beautiful art style executed in such an attention to detail and the love for ancient gaming platforms was simply awe-inspiring. I was beamed back to my childhood, when I snuck out of my bedroom at night and illegally played claustrophobic and shockingly brutal ego-shooters on my 386 DX in the basement of my parents house (under the staircase), most of them fresh from the german index, like Wolfenstein 3D or Blood. Until today I can give a fairly accurate impression of the german text line the dying blue soldiers (nasty little submachine gun fuckers) yelled from the (mostly turned down) speakers with a horrible english accent: "Mein Leben!". At least that's what I understood.

Thanks to Greer I was hooked.

And after a couple of tries in Procreate which was ok but not really great for handling pixels a crazy and probably very stupid idea popped up in my head:

DARIA DEVIL is going to be a Ukrainian woman (but still fighting Nazis - we're getting into to the historical details later) and the main character of a 2D platformer!

"Seriously?!", I hear an imaginary legal guardian raising justified concerns. What do you know about making a video game? Did you forgot, that you sucked so badly in school when it came to writing a single line of code in your computer science class, that in LOGO (I think that was the name of the program we used back then) that little bitch of a triangle didn't move an inch to your poor scribblings. Did I forgot, that when my best friend J., a professional iOS developer, is talking about what he is actually doing at work my brain immediately goes to sleep mode to avoid an Overload in Division? (By the way I don‘t know what that means. It just sounded cool and is probably completely wrong.)

And so an utterly stupid journey begins...

- A.