Experiments in inter-medium semantic enrichment

St George V Dragon is inspired by the biblical telling of a knight killing a monster. 

Grew up catholic, later deconstructed the indoctrinated narratives around good and evil, and recognizing the connection between these narratives of human dominion over the natural world and the ecological debacle we're surviving through right now, it recently occurred to me that the dragon would have had fire. So before this was a game, it was a frame-by-frame animation of the dragon fighting back. 

A big fan of open source, I tracked down the most evoking painting I could find that was compatible with my project  on WikimediaCommons, and I spent a couple of days in a hyper saturated daze on GIMP.  Solid colors, scissor like edges, and stiff frame transitions: this needed to look and feel like a cartoon, to reinforce the non-existent quality of the narrative as a real element. But the presence of movement demanded a resolution:w hat comes after the fire? My personal history with CPTSD came heavily into play. What comes after survival? The chance to enjoy something as simple as a nap under the Sun. The end result was fun-and more importantly, cathartic. The loop of the dragon breathing fire, the fire growing and covering everything in sight,  dying back down, the enemies in the distance going under, the sun rising, the sea shining, the sense of relief and calm that victory carried with it. It was magnetic. 

About a month later, I came across the 20 second game jam, by chance, and thought my JavaScript knowledge should suffice to animate the fireball while handing over control to the User; and that's when the second semantic jump happened: the lose condition would be the actual painting I based the work on, within its real-life museum context. The perfect metaphor. What else encompasses the meaning of failure so fully, to so many lifeforms on this planet, that ending up captive, dead or alive, in display for other's observation and/or surveillance? The complexity of the visual representation of the lose condition happily led me to Godot. 

I'm a front end dev, and this is my first game on a game engine. I spent roughly four weeks working on this, including testing, so while I'm happy with it now, storytelling and game mechanics wise, and I enjoy staying with the dragon under the sun, listening to the birds, feeling the calm, and basically using it as a mental health app, I don't know if the process I underwent creating this will permeate through, and I don't know if the game mechanics and lack of context that's initially required to react/play will make sense, so I'm really curious to see what players' experiences are going to be.