Melanie Judd is a graphic designer and illustrator who eats, drinks, and breathes art. From a very young age she has been buried in a sketchbook, capturing life in the form of doodles. She grew up trying her best to render dreams and imagined stories into reality in the only way she knew how. While she can’t remember the first time she picked up the hobby, it really took off in the later years of middle school/early high school. It was here that her interest in art for the purpose of storytelling began to flourish under the influence of many popular icons in animation, comic illustration, and game design.
Game development was always an attractive concept, rooted in a childhood spent designing her own Pokémon and drawing out game levels on lined paper for her classmates. The discovery of flash games and consequently the genre of point-and-click adventure games made this interest all the more approachable for someone with an illustration background. Independent game development companies like Pastel Games and Daedalic Entertainment proceeded to greatly inform a lot of what makes her art style what it is today. While she dabbled very lightly in RPG maker and made small steps towards making her own games, it wasn’t until she was invited to work on a Ludum Dare Game Jam game that this dream was fully realized, thus making Obsolete the first game she had the pleasure to work on. Working with Stellar Door Studios has only opened up more opportunities since then.
When she’s not working on projects for her day job as a designer or making funky artwork for Stellar Door Studios creations, she’s often found catching up on her massive backlog of games, digging into one of many half-finished books, adventuring with her party in an ongoing DnD campaign, or working on her own creative projects.
It is heavily rumored that she is actually sixteen octopi (octopodes) stacked upon one another in a trench coat, leading to both her fascination with the mysteries of the deep, and her ability to produce artwork so quickly.