RASpotlight January 2022 - RetroAchievements/RANews GitHub Wiki

Intro

For this month we have in the spotlight a user that really came on strong in 2021, Nydaxn. Currently, he is the head of the Art Helper Team, Staff, and the creator/father of our RA Mascots: Cheevo and RAChan.

Let's learn about Nydaxn!

StingX2

Where does the name Nydaxn come from?

Nydaxn

For the name Nydaxn - In Kingdom Hearts the villain group does this thing where they take their names from their previous life and rearrange the letters with an 'X' for their new name for their 'new body' so to speak, so it's just me doing that with my name. I wound up just using it whenever I need a username for something or when I have to name characters in games, in a sense it's symbolic of another version of myself.

StingX2

How did you find RetroAchievements, and what prompted you to become involved in any way?

Nydaxn

I was away for a week or so last summer and had a lot of downtime, I wanted to play 'Crystal Warriors' for Game Gear again since I played it non-stop as a kid - I got retroarch on my phone and saw the achievements option and that lead me to RA, and the OCD octopus that lives in my brain got immediately excited looking through all possible achievements I could spend the rest of my life getting, and then frustrated at how most of them were 'Beat X boss damageless', haha. I eventually got over that part.

As for getting more involved, 'Crystal Warriors' had a default Icon for all its badges, and several months had passed without a change, so I thought why not just make them myself - From there, being stuck at home in quarantine gave me an excuse to do the same for more artwork on the site. It helped that there was an entire hub as a to-do list of sets that needed better icons to work from.

StingX2

So what led you to becoming a developer?

Nydaxn

Nothing too special, I was interested in the fact that it was even possible when first joining, and looked more into the coding portion as I played more games. It was pretty fun working on my first set (the first Fire Emblem for the NES) and coming up with ideas for achievements, and I was glad to fill in a missing set for a highly requested game at the time. Though I do feel it takes me a lot of time to go through the whole process of making a set, I wouldn't expect a high frequency of sets from me in the near future. I'll be happy to do the badges for people though. 😁

StingX2

What made you select that game? It should be noted you were a one set wonder!

Nydaxn

Haha thanks - I honesty just looked through the list of most requested games for anything I had already played, I believe it was also the only Fire Emblem without a set at that point - And after an hour or two looking through the code I can see why a few people dropped it. It probably wasn't the most ideal set for a new jr dev to start with and learn from, but I think I was able to get the most I could out of it. I made it my mission to go down the list of every basic and advanced logic tool (at the time) and try to use everything at least once to get the hang of them. I think I was able to use all of them, except for leaderboards which didn't really fit - I hope everyone who requested it and was waiting for it for the past few years get to enjoy playing it!

StingX2

You now lead the Art Helper team, how did you get involved?

Nydaxn

The staff just asked if I wanted to, probably because I was pretty active with helping out with a ton of badges and icons throughout the past year. I used to crank out a few badge sets a week back when I was at home all day, it feels like it was so long ago haha - We could always use more artists on the team and I want to be able to help everyone improve even if they're just starting out with badge creation, so I'm enjoying being able to grow the team and guide some new people - I encourage anyone interested to send me a message if they want to join and help out.

StingX2

What is it like leading the team? is there any direction you want to see it grow?

Nydaxn

Because of my job during the week, my primary focus so far has been getting new members set up and keeping the art-requests and icon gauntlet boards up to date (thanks to all the devs and art-helpers who have been helping me out with this in between!) - I think in the future as we start to accumulate more members we can start doing bigger pushes to clean out and replace the missing/incorrect sized/default badges throughout the site and do another big wave of artwork for the next new console rollout when that comes. I'd like to eventually do some short tutorials or workshops for programs like photoshop if people would be interested, could make it easier for artists to learn a few techniques or easier way of doing things.

StingX2

Without revealing who you work for, what do you do in the real world roughly?

Nydaxn

I'm a 3D animator, and the studio I work for handles a bunch of different clients with various movies and tv shows - I've done some work earlier in the year for Disney Jr, and since it's announced and airing this month, everyone can see some of my work on season 2 of 'Superman and Lois' on the CW starting January 11th (look for any of the DBZ-style fight scenes with Superman, I animated a few of those :D) - We have a few other projects we're working on over the next few years, including a feature film that we're finishing up for 2022, that one I can't talk about yet though, haha.

StingX2

That sounds amazing, you also created the now official mascots Cheevo and RAChan, where did the inspiration for these characters come from?

Nydaxn

RAChan started out as joke, someone brought up that it would be funny for RA to have a cute school girl mascot and came up with the name RAChan - I thought it would be comical to actually draw her, so I roughed out a quick drawing in like an hour and posted it while everyone was still talking about it. I honestly didn't expect it to live any further than that, but people kept bringing her back up and I just kept adding in little bits of lore and additional artwork. Over time her and Cheevo developed a backstory and canon that just keeps building and building. Her design wasn't really based on anything, I just kind of drew her from my head based off of the typical tropes you'd see in that kind of character (the color scheme of course based on RA's colors).

Cheevo's design was based off of a previous character I made years ago, and I just built upon that for a more a updated version with an RA-themed recolor - He was made to be a fairy-like magical creature with big simple expressions for comic relief, someone that can float around and give sassy commentary - He loves earning achievements and being the best and is surprisingly good at videogames despite not having any fingers. I imagine him and RAChan to be roommates and he sleeps in a pile of all of her stuffed animals.

StingX2

Now many users want to know where their RAchan poster is, any comment?

Nydaxn

I probably should have forseen that, having promised it to them haha. I wonder if it will appear sometime in the winter.

StingX2

What kind of games do you play in your free time?

Nydaxn

Mostly RPGs, but my collection is a pretty wide variety of genres - I guess everything but sports games, if I had to sum it up. My top favorite is the Kingdom Hearts series, and I grew up with Zelda and Mario and Pokemon like a lot of other people my age so they've stuck around. Of course as I mentioned earlier, Crystal Warriors took up a lot of my childhood. I lugged around that chunky Game Gear everywhere to play for as long as those 6 AA Batteries would hold up. When it comes to RA, I try to play a lot of the games I missed out on as a kid along with replaying the ones I loved. RA has given me a motivation to go back and do that, despite only having an hour or so a day at most. Achievements help me feel like I'm making some progress, even when time is short.

StingX2

What achievement set on RA did you have the most fun playing?

Nydaxn

Probably 'Royal Stone' for being the first set I mastered, but also 'Legend of Zelda: A link to the Past' because it was a set I could look over once and then just play through in one run from memory - I like not having to look up vague clues or do research for a game and risk spoilers to get an achievement or not miss anything, so that Zelda set was a delight to play through and I was even willing to look past the damageless boss achievements because of it, haha.

StingX2

Is there anything else you'd like to say to the RA community?

Nydaxn

Everyone be kind and play games. 🥳