A Note from the Artist

Oh hello! Welcome aboard the USS Paper Cranes! I am your captain, Emily Kardamis.

First off, thanks for checking all of this out; I really appreciate it immensely. You all are the best.

Anywho, I'm the person who made this game and did this research and drew a lot of cartoon bunnies to make this all a reality. I'm a digital artist and (soon to be) graduate of Bowling Green State University with a BFA in Digital Art and a minor in Computer Science. Basically, I like making stuff. I know that sounds kind of simple, but I've worked in so many mediums that it's really hard for me to pinpoint what I work in, rather than what I work on.

In sense of the latter, I really consider myself a storyteller more than anything else: that's just how I've always seen the world—through sequence and narrative—so many of my artistic expressions tend to become stories, whether I intend them to or not. This isn't the first time I've explored a story that takes a lot of direct influence from my life: I'm currently working on a comic called Dream State that echoes a lot of similar themes that Paper Cranes talks about. For me, art-making is a big part of the way I communicate and just who I am as a person, and especially with work like this, it's really difficult to separate myself from the work, because it's so innate to my sense of self.

Also: I really, really love video games. They've always been a part of my life, and they're a form of expression and language that I connect to so much, because I associate it with spending time with friends and family, or getting lost in a story totally outside of the world of reality. Video games are probably one of the biggest influences in me deciding to become an artist in general, and in the summer of 2014, I had a realization that I don't just want to play video games—I want to make them. I want to be able to tell stories in an interactive and participatory medium, instead of just a static one.

I've thought a lot about who I am, what I've been through, and who I want to be these past four years, and I feel like that got distilled into Paper Cranes. This is the biggest and most personal project I've ever worked on, and it's kind of weird to finally release it out to the world.

(Also, don't let some of the "pomp and circumstance" fool you, I'm a pretty easy-going person. Also a huge dork. One time I cried while watching a Minecraft documentary.)

Anybutt, on that note, if you want to check out more of my work, you can take a look at my portfolio, my comic (Dream State), another interactive comic I did (After the Fall), and sometimes I write things and post them on the internet too.

Thanks again for checking this out. Really, it means the world to me.

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