My name is Jandê Saavedra Farias, and I am a Graphics Design bachelor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. I worked as an Art Director on Sky Racket, an arcade-inspired game that mixes the action from Shoot ‘em ups with the fun of Block Breakers, as if Gradius and Arkanoid had a colorful, crazy, fun, nonsensical, cartoonish baby. We’re calling it a Shmup Breaker. Sky Racket was heavily inspired by the games we played as kids, from Sega, Nintendo and Arcades, and cartoons, old and new.

Double Dash Studios was founded as a four people ensemble. Kim Kaznowski as our Programmer, Lucas Thiers as our Game Designer and me and Luiza Shimura as Artists. As our scopes and projects grew we added more people, with different skills and background. Double Dash now has 10 people plus a few frequent collaborators. As the team started to expand so did our responsibilities and ways to tackle everyday tasks. Nowadays, the first thing I do when arriving into office is writing my “Daily”, which is basically listing everything I did the day before, what went right and what went wrong, then making a to-do list for the day. We then share each other’s dailies and complete whatever new tasks came up from this conversation. From there on, I start doing my tasks, checking possible emails, talking about main and future projects and doing whatever comes up that might need my input. Nowadays, after we released Sky Racket, it’s a bit rare for me be that much hands on creating art directly, I’m mainly giving feedback to the other artists, looking for references and, well, doing my job as an Art Director. But from time to time something always comes up that allows me to draw or design something.

We’ve been working since 2015 on personal projects, commissioned games and some other more specific art and programming jobs. We’ve worked with some different brands, from international brands like Cartoon Network to more regional companies from Rio de Janeiro and Brazil. We’ve worked with a lot of different genres throughout the years. Counting comissioned, work, gamejams, personal projects, we’ve touched on adventure games, puzzles, puzzle-platformers, run-and-gun platformers, casual mobile, shoot ‘em up, shmup breaker (as we call Sky Racket), runners, arcade-style maze chasers, you name it. It doesn’t matter what we do, we always try to imprint the Double Dash style into the games: maybe through the mechanics, or the art, or even the humor. We really like exploring well established mechanics and applying a new twist to it – that’s how we got to Sky Racket, for example. I think it’s important for the player, or the possible client, to feel the quality and notice our games are thoroughly planned and made with a lot of care.