Mélanie Christin, more commonly known online as Melibellule or Meli, is the co-creator and lead designer of Transformice. She co-founded Atelier 801 with Tigrounette where they share the co-CEO position. Despite her work, she chose to remain mostly anonymous for the early life of Transformice.
Transformice Art
Melibellule has created all the artwork for the game, including (but not limited to) mouse and shaman, all the shop items, mouse animations, shaman items, and artwork on the intro screen and webpage. All her works are done in vector, due to working in Flash. She draws the art with a Wacom Intuos 4M, or Wacom Bamboo 1, depending on her location.
She also is co-game designer of the game, and designs the rules along with Tigrounette.
History
She and Tigrounette only spent three weeks on their spare time while being fully employed to make the very first version of Transformice, so they didn’t need any funds really.
Tig reused a lot of work he also did on his spare time during the years before, so it’s not exactly three weeks total, but they didn’t need any funds to get started. When the game took off they just put a small ad banner next to the game to pay for the increasing server costs. Then they stayed employed for a year before resigning to create the studio, so they didn’t leave right away with empty pockets.
So her advice to aspiring indie developers : don’t go full-in with your savings, always have some spare cash lying somewhere, and set up as many safety nets as you possibly can. [1]
Non-Atelier 801 Art
Some of her art that's unrelated with anime or any games, that are unique.[2]
Trivia
- She has a cat and loves goat cheese.
- She seems to reply to English-speaking individuals when an e-mail is sent to the game's e-mail address. The name section of the e-mail's header reads "Souris Grise", or "Gray Mouse".
- The name "Melibellule" comes from the nickname of Mélanie (Meli), and the word "dragonfly" in French (Libellule)
- Melibellule's title, Fromadmin, is a portmanteau of the French word for cheese, "Fromage", and the word "admin" (short for "administrator").
- Melibellule dislikes being shaman in Transformice, and often says some form of "Oh God" before her turn.
- Melibellule has the ability to draw shapes in the game.
- She lives in Roubaix, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, in France, near the Belgian border.
- She previously worked for Ankama on a project called DOFUS
- Melibellule likes to fix her car.
- Melibellule has a small keep-the-boxes mania which annoys Tigrounette.
- Melibellule has a Transformer tablet on Android and an iPhone. She likes her iPhone better because she finds it more simple for her little head and doesn’t like fiddling with parameters, but her Android tablet is sturdy and lasts like forever, super useful when she needs to read hundreds of PDF pages. [3]
- Melibellule graduated in sciences in high school, then went to a medical university in order to become a physiotherapist. It’s only during this first year of university that she realized it wasn’t what she really wanted to do, and since she was fiddling for a couple years with digital art, she tried a reconversion and went to an art school for two years.
In this art school, they only worked with traditional mediums, and she self-taught herself everything about digital.
She didn’t know she’d pursue an artistic career until she was 19, and she chose so because she started toying with Photoshop at age 17 [4] - Melibellule's dad’s house is south of France [5]
- Melibellule never worked in ordinary software development before. She thinks videogame dev is cooler [6]
- Tigrounette understands written English very well, and spoken English a bit less, but it gets hard for him when it comes to speaking/writing it himself, so either he asks Melibellule to translate his whole posts so it’s accurate, or he asks her for a word of vocabulary or two when the sentence is simple. [7]
- Melibellule reads a lot of English and she thinks she’s getting close to getting completely fluent, and sometimes she even thinks in English and can’t type something in particular in French, but it’s not really weird or uncomfortable for her. [8]
- Melibellule thinks EvilDaedalus' 2010 video, "Meet the mouse" is the best depiction of Transformice that was ever crafted, and she yet to encounter a video half as accurate as this one.
They actually got inspired a lot by it to make the plan of the upcoming Transformice trailer that’s going to be displayed on the Dickfeather's game.
![Forum avatar from 6 February 2016[9][10] to atleast February 13[11]](/wiki/File:3159.jpg "3159.jpg (8 KB)")
External Links
References
- ↑ http://meli-blog.tumblr.com/post/104526202055/where-did-you-get-the-money-to-first-start
- ↑ http://meli-blog.tumblr.com/post/105299831490/i-have-to-ask-do-you-have-any-art-that-isnt-game
- ↑ http://meli-blog.tumblr.com/post/103889167680/are-you-an-android-or-ios-person
- ↑ http://meli-blog.tumblr.com/post/104573120830/at-school-did-you-know-that-you-were-always-going
- ↑ http://meli-blog.tumblr.com/post/98660905270/privyet-meli-i-know-youre-busy-but-will-you
- ↑ http://meli-blog.tumblr.com/post/105471832445/ordinary-software-development-vs-game
- ↑ http://meli-blog.tumblr.com/post/105164074705/does-tig-understand-english-or-do-you-translate
- ↑ http://meli-blog.tumblr.com/post/104868236680/is-it-weird-to-speak-french-all-day-and-then-write
- ↑ http://atelier801.com/topic?f=6&t=814231&p=482#m9626
- ↑ https://twitter.com/Melibellule/status/696042589104050176
- ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20160206181103/http://atelier801.com/profile?pr=Melibellule - http://web.archive.org/web/20160213134044/http://atelier801.com/profile?pr=Melibellule
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