Suddenly I was faced with a truly daunting amount of free time listening to my own thoughts in my apartment. Luckily, I had a powerful tool to help me stay hopeful, stay curious, and keep moving forward. Lizard City was that tool. Up until this point I was using this project as a canvas for practicing my technical skills as an artist. But concept art is an intrinsically emotional form of art. Any concept artist worth their salt knows that communicating the emotion within a character, place, or moment is what makes a project memorable. I continued to use the world of Lizard City to practice world building. As my emotions grew bigger, louder, more vivid, so did the artwork I produced.
With the help of my (amazing) therapist, I learned to make intentional connections between the world I was creating and the emotions I sometimes felt consumed by. Using the language of color, pattern, and shape, I was able to identify and describe these emotions, and through identifying them I was able to move through feelings and develop a sense of self outside of my current distress. These visual descriptions came to life in the City. Parallels between my personal history and experiences inspire the visual themes of every level. The characters who inhabit this labyrinth of tunnels reflect back the experience of living through my experiences. In this game world I created, the tools and skills of managing emotions can be expressed as mechanics; rules, items, constraints and skills that can be mastered.
This structure– Levels inspired by emotion, characters navigating the levels by mastering mechanics and items, all of these parts weaving together to create a story– is the foundation of Game Not Included. This structure gave me the perspective I needed to see my emotional world as a strength, and a story worth telling. With Game Not Included, I want to teach others how to use the powerful tools of world building and concept art to understand and share their own worlds.
