DEADRA'S PROFILE

I’m so impressed to see so many familiar names in this thread.

I went by Akain back in the day, and I contributed art and sprite work to the site. It was fun to push the limits of what 256 colors and rpgmaker could do. I did some sprites for Wishmoo’s Tabernacle and a project Q was in the early stages of development on, but lost both my personal projects due to hard drives eating dirt. Most of what people saw of my work back then were my early illustrations on GGZ’s site. (Someone in this thread called my budget-Squall sketch “concept art” and bless that compassionate person’s heart for being so generous to a teenage weeb edgelord)

GGZ forums were my first found family, I became involved with the site when I was about 16. I stumbled into it via an IRC chat towards the end of Heresy/launch of GGZ. It was my place to be as creatively cringe as possible because queer Tumblr didn’t exist yet. It was a great space to get away from my own toxic family situation and get to know other creative weirdos passionate about playing and making games and their assets.

I knew there was a lot of behind-the-scenes drama but kept my nose out of it, luckily. I’m really happy to see that a few people went on to work in the industry. It seemed we had a lot of queer and neuro-divergent young people on the forums, as well as a higher-than-normal volume of women at the time, so the insular quality of the site while toxic at times was also beneficially safe as well, a double edged sword.

It’s sad to hear about Wishmoo, I got along well with her and while I could tell she was unstable I didn’t know the extent. I’m glad Q was able to get out of that situation as no kid deserves to go through that.

I remember the community fondly and will always geek out forever more to 2D games.