About us
In 2015, as teenagers of 15 and 16 years old, an idea sparked within us to make games for a living. We, Guan and Tyler, decided to unite our individual talents - Guan's artistic brilliance and Tyler's affinity for programming, leading to the birth of "Pixplosion Studios". Our ambition was high, but our youthful inexperience hindered growth beyond early prototypes. Despite our respective aptitudes, we struggled to manifest our ideas into reality.
Our earliest messages suggest our idea for Goldiglocks was conceptualised around 2016, although it's likely the idea sprung even earlier. The game concept kept transforming due to Tyler's programming limitations, leading us in a direction formed more out of necessity than choice. As academic pressures mounted in years 11 and 12, we put our game and our shared dream on hold.
In the subsequent years, we followed separate paths. Tyler continued refining his programming skills, practicing devotedly almost daily, while Guan pursued his passion for art in his spare time while obtaining his university degree. The distance between us grew, and our once shared dream of game development was left on the backburner.
However, years later, Tyler found himself contemplating Goldiglocks once again, but the absence of Guan's presence in the process made it feel incomplete. Months later, a chance encounter at a convention led to a shared lunch, and a rekindling of our shared dream. Now, with our respective talents more refined, we felt a renewed commitment to make Goldiglocks a reality.
This is the birth of Nerdigris.
Our Team
Tyler a.k.a "Sphex"
I've been making silly games on and off since high school in 2013. We started using Gamemaker in IT class, which led to me getting the software on my laptop for home use. During those years, we rarely had internet; at most, we had it for three months out of the year, as the bill usually went unpaid. During this time, I was always just on my laptop making silly games for no one to see, with all self-created sprites (as horrible as they were), and no use of tutorials, as I didn't have access to them. This led to my passion for game development and pixel art, but I never really felt like I could do much more with it.
Around 2020, I got invested in some Discord communities and was introduced to the world of Discord bots. That's when everything really changed for me; it expanded my capabilities as a developer and helped me build a supportive community that follows my work. During this time, I've also dabbled in pixel art, mostly for Pokémon fan games, where I've created a lot of sprites for both Pokémon and Fakemons. Eventually, I was personally invited to work on the Smogon Sprite Project, a project dedicated to continuing the style of Pokémon Black and White's sprites for later generations of the games. This project is used by many fangames, including Pokémon Showdown. This is just another useful skill I can now apply to my passion for game development, and I'm now in a place where I feel much more confident in my ability to make our shared dream a reality.
Guan a.k.a "Bazolo"
Like many other kids, ever since I picked up a pencil and scribbled for the very first time, I’d fallen in love with making lines come to life on a page. And spending days burrowed into a seat, transfixed by the worlds created by my favourite authors, I grew to deeply appreciate just how lucky I was to be in a world so full of creative and imaginative people. I wanted to be like them, and still do.
To that end, I never fully stopped drawing or writing throughout the lulls in life. I’d take breaks and some hiatuses were longer than others, but I always found my way back home eventually. The pencil, it seemed, was to be a lifelong companion.
Speaking of companions, I met Tyler (Sphex) in primary school, and one of the things that helped us bond was a shared love for videogames. I remember thinking it was so cool seeing the fan game concepts that Tyler's dad had made. I think that’s when the production aspect became a concrete possibility for me. To have someone so close to my life be a part of that creative world too, even if tangentially, it made it all real and within reach. Tyler was also my first friend to gift me a reference book for art: Glenn Fabry’s Anatomy for Fantasy Artists: An Illustrator's Guide to Creating Action Figures and Fantastical Forms. We were both around 12 at the time. That book opened my eyes to the rigors of art beyond just freestyle sketching and doodling. It was my first introduction to construction, perspective, anatomy, and composition, and it’s a bloody good one. I still have that book to this day. It sits among many others now but I still find myself pulling it out every now and then. It serves as a constant reminder that there are people who believe in my ability and that inspires me to live up to their estimations – and exceed them.