Blanket Fort Chats: Game Making With Leisha-Marie Riddel

[Courtesy of Leisha-Marie.] “Blanket Fort Chats” is a semi-regular column featuring women and nonbinary game makers talking about the craft of making games. In this week’s post, we feature Leisha-Marie Riddel, an illustrator based in Toronto and the creator of #PROJECTSOLACE.

Miss N: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Leisha-Marie: I graduated from Sheridan College’s Bachelor of Applied Arts Animation Program (aka not a real Bachelor) when the program was in its infancy, so it was still ironing out a lot of the kinks that the program no longer has. I always wanted to be a commercial artist, i.e. working for a company as an artist or generating art for consumption as opposed to creating art for exploratory purposes, and I pursued that from childhood. Unfortunately, because I graduated during the program’s problematic teenage phase, I wasn’t given a lot of…