Author Interview: Laura De Stefani

Laura De Stefani is an All round artist who loves drawing on any support, sculpting and modelling. She likes to travel and go to game-jams. You can follow here here: https://twitter.com/Odris_Den, https://www.instagram.com/odris_den/, https://odris-den.itch.io/. Laura is the author of our cover art/game for February’s issue, “Fill the Void.”

This interview was conducted via e-mail in January of 2019.

sub-Q Magazine: Our theme for 2018 was love. What does love mean to you, and do you think that affected how you approached your game?
Laura De Stefani: Love for me is many things. It’s not just romantic love, but it’s a deep, compelling connection that bounds you to someone else, and makes you want the best for them. Love is the warmth of acceptance, is care, affection, worries sometimes. Love can happen between two strangers, between two friends, or lovers, or relatives. A stranger that stops their car to help you, completely for free, that’s love too.

This definitively influenced the game. The search for love is something we all struggle with: everyone need care and affection. But the very first source of love for you has to be you. Relationships come and go, friends change, validation from the outside world can be lacking, and if these are the only things filling your void, sooner or later you will find yourself empty again, begging, demanding, and basically being miserable.

There are A LOT of absolutely great, smart and loving people that don’t love themselves and are in pain for that. I wrote “Fill the Void” for them.

sub-Q Magazine: All the games for our jam were very short. What challenges did you experience trying to create something in such a constrained space?
Laura De Stefani: Actually, I really enjoy short stuff. I like to do short projects and read and play short games. I had this as a short interactive comic in my mind from the very beginning , so it hasn’t been that hard. I had to trim here and there to fit in the panel limit, and I could have said so much more given more space, but I enjoyed quite much the challenge.

sub-Q Magazine: What’s one thing you wish you’d known when you first started making interactive art?
Laura De Stefani: Something I wish I knew before? That you need a wide set of different skills: yes, there is writing and drawing, but there is also coding and design and teamwork (not in ths case). Usually artists tend to recoil from coding, but knowing how to do a little bit of everything gave me a much wider spectrum of possibilities to do art and to express myself. But I learnt it the hard way.

So, fellow artists: learn a little bit of IT. It’s HUGELY useful.

sub-Q Magazine: If you play a lot of games, what was your favourite new game in 2018? Anything coming out in 2019 you’re excited about?
Laura De Stefani: I loved the first chapter of Deltarune, and I can’t wait to play the next one! I don’t closely follow a lot of game news, but I heard a new Cuphead will be released. Yay!

sub-Q Magazine: What’s next? If you have any upcoming games, artwork, or other projects you want to talk about, let us know!
Laura De Stefani: My next project will be a visual novel spiced up with some minigames, playable on smartphone and tablet. The title for now is “the Pastry Cat”, and it wil be about a young cat that wants to chase his dream of becoming a pastry chef, fighting the stubbornness of his family and the obstacles of the school. 🙂