Video game

The Silver Moon

Yianni Varnavelias

Stamford, CT

Advisor: Zhenzhen Qi

Artist Bio

Yianni Varnavelias is a 2D game designer and storyteller from Stamford Connecticut. Growing up, he enjoyed his first video game, New Super Mario Bros for the DS, debuting his creative desire to become a designer for games when he came of age. In between his elementary years to high school he discovered his passion for video games and storytelling with friends and eventually landed in his major for DMD in Video Game Design in the University of Connecticut. Overtime in his college life, he learned the ins and outs of coding and designing correctly for projects in classes in order to prepare himself for the final project in his senior year. In his junior year, he and a couple of classmates were tasked with making a game that used an arcade machine’s button mappings. Looking ahead into the future, Yianni hopes to find a job that best suits his creativity as a game designer in hopes of telling his own stories in his own way to a community, and also hopes he can become a successful designer in his prime.

Artist Statement

When I think of simple game design, I like to look up to indie game designers that made an impact to their community. In this case, Adrienne Bazir, also known as InsertDisc5 on the internet, is the creator of her game In Stars in Time, which features a boy that is constantly looping back in time to figure out why exactly they loop whether they die or get to “the end of the game” or not. The game itself has a lot of twists and also moments that genuinely make my face stretch with a smile, or even furl my brows in anger or sadness.

I would love to integrate this kind of style of storytelling into my own games, with such simple styles that you can only see through artworks like character portraits above the dialogue or even in the overworld with its many characters. Games like In Stars and Time have influenced me as a creator and a writer to be more fluent and verbal to my audience, and hopefully allow me to become more legible for people to understand and enjoy what I create.