An Anxious Journey: From the Beginning to Now

A newer version of Clementine drawn by Jackie

The first inklings of inspiration for the game involved an arcade. Taylor actually quite liked this idea for a number of reasons: the environment created a lot of opportunities for interesting visual and narrative storytelling, allowed for many meta and fourth-wall breaking moments, and with its cacophonous sounds and kaleidoscopic wonderland of visual noise, provided just the sensory overload needed to contribute to the primary theme always present in the game, anxiety. Lauren even drew up a sort of mascot of a demented vintage cat of which Taylor was extremely fond, but she ended up scraping most of these ideas largely due to copyright reasons concerning various arcade games.

And so Lauren pitched STAID to her class. The game starred the character Ashanti, who experienced a panic attack while out and about in public and was forced to retreat to the nearest quiet, secure place: a gas station bathroom. From thereon, the game was very abstract. In general, Ashanti’s goal was to proceed through a twisted world to reach the safety of her college dorm room, but there were a few different mini-versions of how she did so. In one version, there were guide characters, one of which was the cat mentioned earlier, another a dog, another a pixelated boy, and so on. At one point, Ashanti proceeded through the actual beating chambers of the heart. Ultimately, STAID lacked direction and clarity, and thus it was incohesive, so it had to change. However, one very important thing still remains from this version of the game, and that is the primary mechanic of the game: the use of the cell phone to resize objects and otherwise navigate the distorted world.

From there, STAID turned into Connection Lost. At this point, Taylor became an official part of the team. Their main focus was character creation and making the story as clear and coherent as possible, which meant gutting most of it. Ashanti morphed into Leylo, and she gained the background of a Somali American citizen born and raised in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota, reflecting the growing population of the area. She also gained a family, a socioeconomic background, new likes, new dislikes, a computer science major, a roommate, homework, due dates, and other things that contributed to her mental state at any given time. She attended college in Wisconsin via the Midwest Student Exchange Program, and was a first-generation student, something to be proud of, but also something that causes some pressure. And it would be this college campus that became the setting for the game, changing from the previous random gas station and intermittent highway and brief campus to a more fleshed-out environment that better reflected Leylo as a character. However, there were still some issues with this version of the game. The setting, while much more concise, was still not concise enough, and more pressingly, it became clear that we would not be able to accomplish all that we had planned for Connection Lost within the time restraints we had to finish the game. At least, if we tried to do it, we would not be able to do it well. So, the game changed yet again.

And so Connection Lost morphed into coping_device, the current version of the game. From the previous version, most of Leylo’s character has been kept, although a few alterations have been made both to better suit the new storyline and to better refine her character. Most importantly, we have eliminated her roommate (Claire) and replaced her with her sister, Sagal, who has a more immediately recognizable, familial connection to Leylo. The size of the setting has been reduce from the entire college campus to the library itself, which provides for more concise and intimate storytelling, allowing us to focus on the character and the message we want to send.

Anxiety is difficult. It is as if you are stuck in a claustrophobic room waiting for the inevitable moment when it implodes with you in the center. All it takes is one friend, one family member, one person to open the door and help you out of that smothering mindset. In coping_device, Leylo finds the inner strength to reach out to two people who help her do just that--a fearsome, shadowy figure who turns out to be a kindly custodian and her loving sister, Sagal, who can empathize with her situation having been a first-generation college student herself. Self-soothing methods are important, useful tools for people with anxiety and other mental health issues to develop, but it is also important to keep the value of human connection in mind. It is not weak to say, “I need help,” or to rely on someone. It is not weak to have anxiety.

-Taylor and Vanessa