Back in my Exfanding days, I wrote at length about attending Otakon, PAX East, and New York Comic-Con. I've been to other conventions since then—Castle Point Anime Convention and Trekonderoga, off the top of my head—but you'd never know it from this blog. It's been several years since I've posted anything about a convention experience, and my last attempt was essentially a self-reminder to have fun at conventions. I must have internalized my own advice pretty well, because I had a fantastic weekend at AnimeNEXT 2018.

...Wait, didn't I just get back from AnimeNEXT 2019? Apparently I've been sitting on a half-written convention writeup for the past 11-12 months, so I'd better discuss last year before moving on to this year. Here goes.

THURSDAY

I scooted out of work a bit early, picked up my wife, and began the trek to Atlantic City, NJ. My wife and I are relics from the era of putting together mix tapes for car trips, so she had burned a CD for the occasion: an assortment of intro and ending songs from anime series we'd watched together in the last few years. There's nothing like tunes from Bleach, Silver Spoon, Restaurant to Another World, Kill la Kill, Yuri on Ice!!, Himouto! Umaru-chan, Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Valerian and Laureline, Magical Girl Ore, Kakuriyo: Bed and Breakfast for Spirits, Bodacious Space Pirates, Free!, Orange, Little Witch Academia, and the original Devilman to get you pumped for sitting around in traffic. And there's nothing like the preceding list of titles to get you to question our taste in anime.

Our first destination was actually just outside Atlantic City—we had a room reserved at the historic Joseph Pitney House in Absecon. Ever since our honeymoon, my wife and I have been staying at bed and breakfasts instead of hotels whenever we have the opportunity; the food, hospitality, and unique charm are often as memorable as whatever we're in town to see or do, plus we tend to get better prices and quieter neighbors than we would at a hotel. We arrived fairly late in the evening, picked up our room key, visited the always-open snack pantry for some homemade shortbread, and settled into our spacious room.

We missed the window to check in early at the convention, so we didn't have our schedules and program booklets to be able to plan out our first day. Instead, my wife doodled around on her tablet while I read a book (specifically, Live From New York, a fascinating and highly entertaining collection of interviews recalling the first few decades of Saturday Night Live). My wife laughed about how we were spending the first night of our vacation doing exactly what we'd be doing at home. "Yeah," I responded, "but we don't have to worry about cleaning, or cooking, or going to work tomorrow; everything's taken care of, and we can relax without feeling like there's something else we should be doing."

I cannot begin to articulate how comfortable the bed was—once my head hit the pillow, the world beyond the bed ceased to exist. It was magnificent.

FRIDAY

The world beyond the bed reasserted its existence at 5:30 AM. My wife had a different costume planned for each day of the convention, and today's required over 2 hours to prepare. Taking into account when breakfast would be served, how long it might take to find parking at or near the venue, and how long the registration line was likely to be, we resigned ourselves to an unpleasantly early morning. Fortunately, I was cosplaying as "dude attending an anime convention," so I went back to sleep.

Eventually, I left the bed to pursue the "and breakfast" part of the arrangement, and it was delightful. Vanilla yogurt parfait with granola and berries (I'm not big on berries, but I'll eat them if sprinkled sparingly on yogurt parfait), followed by a two-egg omelet and a glass of orange juice—enough to fuel me through the start of the convention.

I get anxious driving around unfamiliar urban areas, what with their endless traffic lights and surprise one-way streets and claustrophobia-inducing architecture right up against the sidewalks, but the drive to the convention center was downright pleasant. There was plenty of parking onsite at the convention center—and as I would later discover, there were several food vendors and even a train station onsite, making this the most convenient convention venue I think I've ever been to.

I remember PAX East being obnoxious because the layout made no sense and there were waiting lines for everything (my wife refers to it as "Line Con"). I remember it taking forever to get around Comic-Con because of the incredible masses of people everywhere. The last Otakon I attended was uncomfortably over capacity, to the point where even the restaurants outside the convention center were overrun by otaku at all hours. As a midsized convention in a well-organized space, AnimeNEXT had none of these problems. The convention never got in the way of the convention, if that makes sense.

AnimeNEXT had the dealers' room, video game room, and concerts on the second floor; all the panels and screenings on the third floor; and all the niche events and novelty rooms (eg, the Cosplay Repair room, which I think is a brilliant idea) on the fourth floor. Escalators were plentiful and logically placed; and the design of the convention center gave every level a good view of the ground floor, where audience-participation events such as a cosplay wrestling tournament would occasionally occur. I also have to credit the building staff—from the folks in the parking garage to the folks at the front desk—for being friendly the entire weekend, and for being incredibly helpful every time I approached them with a question (mostly pertaining to food).

Of course, the first order of business was getting through the registration line. Ahead of us in the lobby was a group with one person cosplaying as Shrek, and someone in the group periodically used their smartphone to play a selection from the Shrek soundtrack to get us pumped for standing around in line. We struck up conversations with other attendees as the line snaked back and forth, commenting on one person's clever "Shyguys Burgers and Fries" t-shirt, praising an excellent Castle Crashers costume, and asking about a superb Stephen Universe cosplay we didn't recognize because we'd never seen Stephen Universe. I swear this was an anime convention.

Oh, but that was just the line to get into the registration line. Once we made it through the big doors into the registration area (which was the size of a basketball court), we split off into the queue for people who preregistered for tickets. There we encountered new cosplayers, such as Blair from Soul Eater, whom I mistook for I-No from Guilty Gear because my brain still thought we were at a video game convention. The hardest part of appreciating convention cosplay is that, as my wife put it, it's like playing one big trivia game all weekend. "Name that character." Which gets harder and harder with every passing year, thanks to new characters I've never heard of and old characters who've slipped my mind.

Case in point: my wife was cosplaying as Ujibe, the coach from Keijo!!!!!!!! (yes, there really are that many exclamation points in the title), and not a single person made any indication that they recognized her. This was a little heartbreaking to me, knowing the effort she had put into this costume. She had painstakingly reviewed clips and screencaps from the show to ensure every detail of her outfit was accurate. She had hand-dyed her shirt in an involved process using tea and tumeric. She had hand-stitched the clover logo on the shirt (never mind that it was rotated 45 degrees; it was late, she was tired). She had spent the morning styling her wig and beauty mark to precise specifications. I was proud of her for what she pulled off.

Granted, Ujibe is a side character in an anime that a lot of people might not admit to watching, on account of its subject matter. (I swear I watched it for the story, but it's about girls in bathing suits hitting each other with their butts.) However, I think my wife hit the nail on the head: she believes people just aren't accustomed to seeing plus-size women cosplaying as plus-size women. If people assumed my wife was pretending to be one of the bajillion characters as scrawny as Sailor Moon, of course they wouldn't recognize her costume. This would account for why one dude thought she was the 4chan mascot.

Anydigression, as soon as we cleared the registration line, we sat down with our schedules and mapped out the first half of our day. I marked up anything that seemed remotely interesting (I wanted backup plans, in case anything was a dud or too full to get into), but I opted to follow my wife around whenever there was any overlap in our interests. Our last Otakon was marred by the logistical frustrations of trying to meet back up with people after going off to do our own things, and I was more concerned about having a fun convention together than getting to do and see everything I wanted most.

Japanese Feminism 101: In our first dynamic panel of the day, we waited about half an hour for the presenter to show up. Around 11:35, one of the convention staff wandered in to see why we were sitting around in an empty room. Apparently, there had been schedule changes since the agenda was printed.

Look, I understand that plans change. But nobody at registration told us about it. Nobody put up a sign. Although we later discovered that the most current room schedule was displayed in a tiny box beside the door, that didn't help anyone trying to plan their day before they got to the room. I asked the staff at the information desk whether they had a list of corrections to the printed agenda. Not only did they seem surprised about there being schedule changes, but they directed me to view the updated schedule online—which is a poor solution for anyone who doesn't have a smartphone or has to deal with roaming data in a place with no public Wi-Fi. We eventually noticed a widescreen monitor rotating all the events and their locations for the next couple hours—not ideal, but better than nothing.

Game the Gamer: With an unexpected hole in our schedule and the dealers' room not yet open to the public, we wandered over to the only event that wasn't already deeply in progress. The premise of "Cutthroat Kitchen, with Wii games" sounded like a decent use of the next hour, but I started to lose interest when too much time was being spent auctioning off more sabotages than I felt were necessary for the first round. I stuck around long enough to see one of the contestants attempt WarioWare: Smooth Moves while handcuffed to a chair; my wife stayed for the whole thing, but I headed out somewhere around when they were trying to get someone to play Smash Bros. with a Wii bowling ball.

Kaibyo: The Supernatural Cats of Japan: I'm sorry I missed the beginning of this, because I'm interested in Japanese mythology and folklore, the presenter (Zack Davisson) was very engaging, and I'm enough of a cat person that my wife and I meow at each other as a form of communication. At least I got there in time to laugh about cats who gain power from wearing silly things on their head, see the tragic portrait of a cat minstrel playing a shamisen (an instrument that would have been partially constructed of cat leather), and learn about the origin of Japan's fondness for catgirls. The Japanese government at one point prohibited artists from drawing or painting people of a certain social variety (eg, prostitutes)—and the artists cleverly got around the issue by creating the exact same art, but with anthropomorphic cats instead of humans.

Lunch: I think I had a barbecue chicken wrap. I'm not a big wrap guy, but that's what they served at Esquires, the food stand in the train station attached to the convention center. I don't know about you, but I don't think of wraps when I hear "Esquires."

Finding Your Anime Voice: I popped in a bit late for what I hoped would be a panel on doing different voices, which would have been helpful for me on Twitch and YouTube with all the dialogue I read aloud while playing games. Unfortunately, the part for which I was present consisted mostly of random audience members trying to speak in a different register (eg, head voice) with minimal coaching. I left after maybe 5 minutes.

Dealers' Room: With an unexpected hole in my schedule and the dealers' room now open to the public, I meandered down to peruse the treasure trove. Geekery in every format was for sale—posters, wall scrolls, books, clothes, figurines, body pillows, DVDs, video games, and so on. Normally, this is where most of my convention budget goes, but I found myself exercising an unexpected amount of self-control.

Much of the merchandise was from new anime series that I hadn't seen or didn't have a special attachment to, so that helped. But I'm also in a different phase of my life than I was the last time I attended a convention with this much for sale. There's very little I actually want anymore—and I'm subscribed to the Star Trek Official Starships Collection, so shelf space in my home is at a premium like never before. I think about all the other ways I could be using my money—bills, charities, clothes that fit.

To that end, one of the few things I bought for myself was a t-shirt mashing up Mega Man and Iron Man. I also picked up a copy of the NES game Faxanadu, which has been on my radar for a while, as well as a RWBY poster. I'm particularly happy with the poster, because I had a similar image as a desktop wallpaper for a while and I love the multi-panel aesthetic.

HIATUS

Then I saved this post as a draft and didn't come back to it for almost a year.

My original intention was to pick up where I left off, using the online schedule for 2018 (with the numerous updates not reflected on my print schedule) to jog my memory and organize my storytelling. However, at the time of this post, I can only find online schedules for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017...and 2019. As much as I want to keep going with the blow-by-blow recap, I recognize that this is a good excuse to scale back the verbosity and focus on the highlights. Nobody needs to hear about the mediocre pizza I ate.

I could regale you with tales of the three minutes I spent at an 18+ panel that I thought would be like Mystery Science Theater 3000 for adults only, but ended up being a YouTuber showing us his skeevy hentai game playthrough videos and creepily talking over his own recorded commentary. I could gush about Anime Burger Time, the BYOB (Bring Your Own Burger) panel where the host chowed down on Johnny Rockets while showing us clips of hamburgers appearing in various anime. I could recount what I recall of the Mazinger Z: Infinity movie, or of the Gaijin Girl: Life in Japan presentation. I could describe the hilarious Bad Anime Bad! panel and invoke the infamous names Garzey's Wing and Titanic: The Legend Goes On.

Instead, I'll attempt to work some untold stories into my writeup of AnimeNEXT 2019, where they'll still be relevant due to how often I found myself thinking back to 2018. If I write in a less comprehensive and detail-oriented format, I may even finish before the 2020 convention. In the meantime, please enjoy some photos from 2018, which we'll pretend are the intended conclusion to this post.

NOTE: If you (you, the reader) are in any of the photos below and don't want to be featured here, or if you'd like to be credited, please let me know (see the main page for contact options) and I'll action your request accordingly.

First up, a couple scenes from the convention in general:

A couple characters I don't recognize, but their costumes looked cool:

Some woman I'm married to, cosplaying as Tamako from Silver Spoon and then Ujibe from Keijo!!!!!!!! in an alternate outfit:

Umaru from Himouto! Umaru-chan, Uno and Nico from Nanbaka, Ryuko from Kill La Kill, and Dark Samus from the Metroid Prime series:

Nora, Ruby, and Yang from RWBY:

Buncha characters from the Phoenix Wright series:

Lastly, some group cosplay from Fullmetal Alchemist, Black Lagoon, and Gurren Lagann:

Ah, but that's not all. Carrying on with a tradition my wife started at the 2011 New York Comic-Con, I purchased a sketchbook and went around collecting doodles from the people at the booths in artist alley (regardless of whether they were an artist or just the person looking after the booth). These weren't formal commissions; rather, I asked for whatever they felt like drawing, if they felt like drawing anything in the first place. No pressure, no restrictions. Surprisingly, only one person drew genitalia.

Here are the sketches I collected—and as with the photos above, please contact me if your art is featured here and you'd like it to be removed or credited:

So there you have it. AnimeNEXT 2018. At least, as much of it as is contained in this post.

Story navigation: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

I'm by no means an artist, but I'd like to think I have some measure of artistic ability. I like to doodle from time to time, I know my way around MS Paint, and I'm pretty decent at modifying and adapting other people's pixel art. At the very least, I'm capable of arranging foreground and background tiles in a manner that's aesthetically tolerable.

Unlike music and programming, I knew for sure I could handle the graphics for OH JOES! on my own. Menu graphics? I could keep those pretty minimal and adapt things as needed from the official Mega Man games. Level graphics? I could mix and match from existing Mega Man tilesets. Object sprites? Almost everything was already in the game engine. Really, all I needed were a title screen logo and an intro cutscene. The former was certainly easy enough:

I can hear you snickering. This, of course, was only a placeholder...though I was seriously tempted for a while to clean it up a little and abandon any semblance of professionalism. OH JOES! was already going to be a ridiculous, tongue-in-cheek romp; why not embrace the absurdity? I eventually tried to design a more traditional logo, using one of the Mega Man arcade game fonts as a template, but nothing looked right. I held onto this logo for basically the entire first year of development.

It wasn't until a fateful Discord conversation that my haphazard MS Paint logo was formally discarded. Someone I knew passed along an image file of the complete English alphabet in the style of the 8-bit Rockman title screen logos. This person couldn't remember who on Discord gave it to them, but they assured me that I had permission to use the graphics in my game. That was good enough for me. The file originator has been duly credited at the end of OH JOES! as "SOMEONE ON DISCORD WHOSE NAME I NEVER GOT." Thank you, anonymous benefactor. Please don't sue.

With the right title font at my disposal, I started piecing together a logo in MS Paint, manually resizing each letter to create the "swoosh" effect we've all come to expect. I was pretty happy with how it turned out:

As far as I was concerned, this was a final product. Now I could turn my attention back to the level graphics, which I had been gradually working on. My policy is to have a general idea in mind of how I want a stage to look, but to use placeholder tiles until I'm confident the level design is unlikely to undergo any radical alterations. More time spent refining the gameplay in its purest form; less time wasted on redecorating rooms.

Although the engine I was using already had dozens of (more or less) complete tilesets from the NES Mega Man games, I wanted to incorporate graphics from Mega Man 9 and 10. Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest 2 (which opened around the same time I was starting to think about this) offered tilesets of all the Robot Master stages from Mega Man 9. After a decent amount of sleuthing, however, I determined that the rest of Mega Man 9 and the entirety of Mega Man 10 were completely unaccounted for anywhere on the Internet. Thus began a side project that would benefit me and the whole fan community.

I launched a campaign to create tilesets for MM9/10, inviting other people to chip in if they felt like it. My plan was to rip tiles from the stages I wanted to use in my game, and then pick up any outstanding tilesets if I still had time, energy, and interest. This turned out to be a fun and satisfying little distraction; I got to use both my eye for detail and my penchant for organization, and I got a good amount of support from the community.

Within 24 hours, I'd produced three (more or less) complete tilesets, with graphics pulled from screenshot maps of the levels—the only things missing were animations for things like water tiles. A couple months later, with everyone's help, both games were almost done. I created my tilesets with flexibility in mind, adding transparencies instead of solid background colors wherever possible, and occasionally offering flipped or rotated tiles for things like spikes that only faced one particular direction in the actual level.

With as neat and tidy as my tilesets for MM9/10 were, you'd think my tilesets for OH JOES! would be pristine. You'd be wrong. The problem with mixing and matching from multiple tilesets is that you don't always know what tiles look good together until you've decorated the whole level...by which point it's a hassle to copy those individual tiles from their source tilesets, paste them and arrange them into a new tileset, and then redecorate the whole level using the new tileset. Consequently, the game's file size is larger than it should be because I am a lazy butt.

Stage 1, despite being only 13 screens long, uses two generic starfield backgrounds and (occasionally modified) tiles from Bomb Man, Knight Man, Plant Man, Star Man, Stone Man, Toad Man, Tomahawk Man, MM3 Wily 4, MM4 Cossack 1, MM4 Wily 2, and MM6 Wily 2. I eventually made an effort to consolidate, but I still ended up with seven different tilesets, 90% of which are tiles I never once considered using. The closest I have to a "main" tileset for Stage 1 is the Bomb Man tileset, with other tiles copy/pasted over the tiles I knew I didn't want to use. Even here, I ended up with a few tiles I didn't use.

I learned my lesson for Stage 3 (which I inexplicably began tiling before Stage 2). I picked just one tileset (in this case, the opening cutscene of MM2) and pasted in whatever additional tiles I thought I might use. I envisioned something like MM3 Wily 1 (visually, my all-time favorite fortress stage), but with a nighttime cityscape for the outdoor portions, a different color palette, and accents from other tilesets to keep it from feeling like a lazy ripoff. The first iteration of the tileset looked like this...

...but I quickly realized that, as much as I love gray and silver, the level was going to need more color. I devised an easy fix for the monochromatic blues: color-code the different gimmick paths. This helped inform the aesthetics for Stage 2, because I just used the generic techno-block graphics from MM2's middle Wily stages and repainted them to match whatever colors Stage 3 used for each gimmick. Pasting new tiles over the ones I wasn't going to use, I came up with this:

I had been looking forward to using more unconventional colors and color combinations in my game. Much to my eternal sadness, the level quickly went from too dull to too bright. Moreover, I determined that the cityscape background was never going to work in a vertically oriented level; it'd look awfully suspicious to see the same ground level at multiple elevations. Grudgingly, I adapted some background tiles from Blade Man's stage and filled in everything after the first two screens with unassuming bricks. I fully intended to throw in a few miscellaneous details to liven up the backgrounds—maybe snaking pipes or gaping holes or wall fixtures of some sort—but nothing ever looked quite right. I tried to compensate by adding accent blocks to the foreground instead. Ultimately, my Stage 3 tileset looked like this:

This proved to be incredibly difficult to work with. Bear in mind that I'm colorblind—at a glance, I can't always tell which tiles are supposed to go together. I frequently found myself making small adjustments to the level architecture, only to have my playtesters report a random purple block in the midst of a blue area, or two different shades of background tile for no good reason. When I got around to decorating Stage 2, I made sure to start with a blank tileset and then paste in only the tiles I wanted to use, arranged in a way where there would be no color confusion.

This one's a lot cleaner, but you can probably tell by the placement of certain tiles that I changed my mind a couple times about how the background should look. After settling on the subdued brick background for Stage 3, I abandoned the subdued  circuitry background for Stage 2 and started gathering tiles that were subtle but varied. One particular element of subtlety was how I would telegraph the length of the stage: at the first checkpoint, there are six red circles in the background; at the next checkpoint, there are five; at the next, four; and so on. I'm fairly certain no one has ever noticed this, let alone found it useful.

As a side note, the "screen" tile used for the pass-through "fake block" gimmick was only supposed to be a placeholder. However, by the time I got around to applying real graphics, I couldn't imagine the blocks looking any other way. They were distinctive (I never wanted the player to guess whether or not a block was solid), and I found them visually appealing both alone and as part of a group. Something similar happened with the Chill Man ice blocks—they were meant to shatter into shards like they do in MM10, but I left in the placeholder explosion animation so long that I eventually couldn't imagine them any other way. I like to pretend they're made of some frozen volatile liquid instead of water.

In order to streamline the tiling process, I decided that each stage's graphics should be governed by a set of rules. There were all the general ones, taught to me by the official Mega Man games: background tiles should always have a shadow on top when placed below a ceiling or platform; bottomless pits should be clearly marked by the background fading to black, etc. Then there were the rules I concocted to prevent me from spending more time than necessary analyzing the aesthetic merits of every single tile combination.

For example: When used specifically as the featured gimmick, ladders were represented with a traditional "hole between the rungs" ladder tile; when used in any other capacity (ie, just to get the player from one screen to the next), they were represented with the charmingly chunky MM1-style ladder tile. In Stage 1, the underground rock tiles had to be contained by pipes and pillars; the player was never allowed to come directly in contact with the rocks. In Stage 2, the foreground tiles had to follow the same repeating pattern across every screen, with every passageway looking like it had been carved out of that pattern. In Stage 3, wall bricks were never allowed to be floor tiles; horizontal pipes had to be used instead, endcapped by blocks that followed their own set of rules, and those pipes generally had to continue extending horizontally until they reached the end of the wall or platform. Obsessive? Yes. But also immensely helpful.

Rules were especially beneficial by the time I got to Stage 4, which effectively utilized five completely different tilesets—one for each set of gimmick paths, and one for the connecting hub areas. I had been somewhat conservative in tiling Stage 2 and Stage 3, trying to keep the focus on the increasingly complex gameplay and not distract too much with the graphics. Now, a little tired of playing it safe (and armed with all the newly ripped tilesets from MM9-10), I pulled out all the stops and put my artistic mettle to the test.

Bold color combinations. Intricate designs. Unnecessary attention to detail, like making sure to use a specific type of square tile behind every Sheep Man block, making it feel like the blocks take out a chunk of the wall when they disappear. It took a great deal of time and effort to decorate this massive stage, but I was very satisfied with the results. I even think the tileset, though not perfect, turned out pretty darn well:

I'm especially pleased with the sunrise effect used in the boss chamber at the end of the game. For one thing, it completes the time-lapse effect I was going for—Regular Joe steals your shield when it's just getting dark, and you're chasing him through the night (seen at the start of Stage 3, which also shows the Bomb Man ball-on-stick buildings from Stage 1 in the distance), finally catching up with him just as the sun rises on a brand new, brighter day. For another thing, the sunrise kinda makes the background look like a Sniper Joe eye, which is the best backdrop for a Joe boss I could've hoped for.

Easily the easiest stage to tile was Dr. Cossack's lab (unofficially, Stage 5). For posterity, here's the tileset for that one—note that the wrench icon was adapted from Mega Man & Bass, my first attempt at converting 16-bit graphics into 8-bit:

It took me 3 months to tile the 300+ screens that comprised the main gameplay. With one major graphical project out of the way, of course I decided to start another one. After successfully adding Break Man as a second playable character, I felt confident about adding an unlockable third character—one who would require custom sprites. I'd been making various graphical modifications throughout the entire development process, from updating Proto Man's sprite to reflect that his Proto Shield was missing, to giving Regular Joe his ridiculous walking animation cycle, to integrating the dome-shaped Quick Laser emitters (which were just random wall decorations from MM10) into existing wall tiles. I was ready for this.

It's always fun to see people's reactions to the secret character (whose identity I will be spoiling momentarily), because it's never whom they expect. For me, it was always obvious. I already had a character involved in the story who (a) deserved more air time, (b) would add some welcome diversity to a franchise dominated by male protagonists, and (c) was perfect "secret character" material. I was inspired by Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, which becomes a completely different game when you unlock Maria, an absurdly powerful little girl who throws cats at her enemies. I thought Kalinka Cossack would follow nicely in Maria's footsteps. Especially if she wielded an oversized bazooka that fired cats.

Although OH JOES! takes place far enough in the Mega Man timeline that Kalinka is a teenager or even a young adult, I wanted to use her classic, younger MM4 look because I like the outfit and think it looks properly absurd when paired with a bazooka. Besides, nothing says her appearance or fashion sense had to change dramatically in the last decade or so.

From scratch, I drew something resembling a bazooka. I consulted reference photos of real-life bazookas, but I ended up going in more of a Worms: Armageddon direction. The only canonical Kalinka sprites I had to work with were two frames of animation from MM4, so I figured out how the bazooka should look in any given pose and then worked Kalinka's sprites around the bazooka. The trickiest part was creating the climbing sprite; I wanted the bazooka to be slung over her shoulder, but I was rubbish at redrawing the bazooka at a 45-degree angle. I may or may not have pasted the horizontal bazooka image into PowerPoint and rotated it to see how it should look. I'm not an artist, but darned if I'm not a problem-solver.

There are very few Mega Man games (official or otherwise) where you get to play as a human instead of a robot. I don't ask for a lot of realism in my Mega Man games, but one thing that's always bothered me is how human characters explode when they run out of health. I refused to let Kalinka explode like Proto Man and Break Man did—that'd just be lazy—so I made sure to give her a unique failure animation that made sense for a human, but without disrupting the lighthearted, family-friendly tone of the game. Hopefully, googly eyeballs and tiny cartoon birds circling overhead did the trick.

The last piece of the graphical puzzle to fall into place was the intro cutscene. Originally, my wife (who's the one with actual artistic talent in this relationship) agreed to do the art; she has a history of sneaking Mega Man–themed doodles into my lunchbox while I'm getting ready for work in the morning, and the cutscene was basically going to be a series of polished doodles. There were two major hurdles: one, she'd never done pixel art before; two, the screen dimensions with which she had to work (256 x 224 pixels, minus space for the dialogue text) imposed a difficult constraint. The project went on the backburner for a while, and when I started pushing to get the game released in early 2018, she was willing to pass the baton to someone with pixel art experience.

Fortunately, I already had volunteers. MJacquelinae, a fellow contestant in Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest 2, had previously reached out to see if I needed any help with the graphics for my game. I took her up on the offer and commissioned the mugshot of Kalinka used on the character select screen. When the intro cutscene went up for grabs, I asked if she'd be interested in tackling that as well. She sent me a rough panel sample that looked promising, but it turned out that her schedule and my timetable for release didn't match up.

I had another offer on the table, this one from a longtime fan of both my YouTube videos and my writing. Based on his art samples and his taste in entertainment, I could tell he knew a thing or two about quality. I asked for one panel as a test run, a generic scene of Proto Man talking with Kalinka. Before the day was over, he sent me this:

I was floored. This was exactly what I was looking for, and I had barely provided any direction. I showed the sample to my wife, and she was jealous of his artistic chops. I officially invited him to join the project, gave him the same copyright spiel I gave my composers, asked him how he'd like to be identified in the credits (he eventually settled on "Phusion"), and outlined what I wanted the cutscene to look like:

From there, we went back and forth—concept sketch, feedback, line art, feedback, full-color pixel art, feedback, updated pixel art. Throughout the process, I paid close attention to the logistics of the scene, making sure that the relative positions of Proto Man, Kalinka, the hanging Proto Shield, and the doorway were always sensible and consistent. Body language was paramount; not only did I want the characters' poses and facial expressions to convey their personalities and fit the tone of the dialogue, but I also wanted to make absolutely certain that Proto Man and Kalinka never looked like they might be flirting.

The whole process went extremely smoothly, and I think it helped that we were constantly communicating and collaborating. Phusion ended up doing much more than the intro cutscene; for starters, he updated the title screen:

After providing feedback on the new logo colors, I commented, "The only thing I might do is flip and rotate it so that the shield is facing upward. Right now the shield looks almost like it's weeping tragically about having been stolen, but I'd like to see it optimistically waiting to be recovered." This is the kind of direction I give people.

Phusion also provided a new Game Over screen to replace the "boring text box" motif I had going. I had to make some programming adjustments to accommodate a static image where there was previously an interactive menu, but I think it was worth it. He turned my months-old concept art, doodled on a tiny notepad...

...into something shockingly close to what I had been picturing in my head:

It's worth mentioning that Phusion was the second person to try adapting my scribbles into actual art. GavinDragon (who also provided cover art for the instruction manual I never ended up making) had previously taken a crack at it. I can't tell you how honored I am to have had anyone freely volunteer their talents for this game, let alone multiple people.

Phusion continued to tweak and tidy the Game Over art as we discussed changes—most notably, Regular Joe's fist. Again, I was looking closely at body language. As I described it, "Even though the player just got a Game Over and has shamed their family for generations, I think I'd like to have Regular Joe with a slightly less aggressive pose. Maybe an open palm, which could be read either as a shrug ('Eh, you didn't make it, oh well') or an invitation to try again. Alternately, a Sonic the Hedgehog-esque pointer finger ('Tsk, tsk. Shame on you.')—though I'm not as sold on that one." You wouldn't believe how much effort it took for us to settle on a suitable gesture. Well, maybe you would.

My favorite piece of art almost didn't make it into the game. Very late in the development process, Phusion surprised me with an old-timey photo of Proto Man and Kalinka, intended for use as a "thanks for playing" tag after the end credits. However, unbeknownst to him, the credits flowed directly into more gameplay. I couldn't come up with a decent way to add the photo without it feeling contrived, and it was too late to redo the whole ending. Thus, this super awesome picture that deserves more visibility was relegated to being a postgame Easter egg for the approximately zero people who close the game via the "QUIT" option on the title screen.

Level design may have been the most fun part of designing OH JOES!, but the graphics were the most satisfying. It's hard to put into words, but there's something deeply gratifying about nurturing a bunch of bland placeholder images into honest-to-goodness art, especially when I've got top-notch help.

Collecting art is a funny thing for me. Geeky memorabilia notwithstanding, there's relatively little in my home that I myself have collected for the sake of putting on display...but I'm my no means an implacable art critic or a hater of the visual arts. I like small souvenirs of the neat places I've visited—a model lighthouse here, a golden trolley there—and I appreciate certain examples of painting and photography as much as anyone. Glass, stone, and metal are materials I find interesting in raw form, let alone crafted into something deliberately for display. There's plenty of art I could collect, but unlike practically anything else I collect, I approach each piece like I'm getting married to it.

Collectables from my favorite fandoms are easy. Do I like it? Can I afford it? Decision made. Putting fictional worlds into tangible form brings my escapist fantasies closer to reality, on top of looking cool. Collecting objects purely for their decorative properties—and perhaps for some sentimental value, depending on the circumstances—is another matter entirely. Art is often an investment. Can I justify spending boo-hah bucks on a painting that fills a space on the wall that could otherwise be covered with a cheap-but-awesome poster? Art is often impractical. I can always pick up my model spaceships and fly them around the house if I want to give them a more practical function as playthings (I'm grown-up enough to admit I still do this sometimes), but swinging around a statue of The Thinker can only end in calamity, if we've learned anything from Phoenix Wright. If all I'm going to do is look at the thing, it's gotta be visually interesting to the point where I can justify paying money to have it in my house and taking up space for the rest of my life.

Suddenly I'm wondering if marriage was the best comparison to use here.

All I'm getting at is that collecting art is, to me, not something I do without careful consideration. I've since turned my attention elsewhere from some of my earlier favorite fandoms, but if you gave me an Inspector Gadget action figure or a Fraggle Rock poster, I'd gladly put them on display—remembering the times when those were big influences makes me happy, and I never really stopped being a fan. I don't know that I'd say the same about some of the more traditional art I've considered over the years; tastes change, and I would be doing myself a disservice to commit to bringing such an investment into my life strictly because I think it's pretty at this particular moment. If I'm going to be serious about collecting art, I want the object of my interest to fascinate me, transform a room by its presence, start compelling conversations, be a suitable companion no matter where my life may lead me, and look nice. But that last part's just a bonus.

Suddenly I think marriage might've been the right comparison after all.