Brianna Lei

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## Biographical Information

### Education

Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interactive Media & Games

## Career Information

### Notable Works

 *Pom Gets Wi-FiButterfly Soup**Butterfly Soup 2*

**Brianna Lei Horgan** is a video game narrator designer and artist. She is the creator of the indie Comedy-RPG *Pom Gets Wi-Fi*, as well as the IGF nominated visual novel *Butterfly Soup*. Since January of 2018, she has been both a Junior Game Writer, as well as a Game Writer at Pixelberry Studios. She is also an art contributor to the game *Lucah: Born of a Dream*.

## Career

### Working on *Butterfly Soup*

Lei was inspired to make *Butterfly Soup* by the sports anime *Free!*, *Oofuri*, and *Haikyuu*. The day she released *Pom Gets Wi-Fi*, Lei was nervous about how it’d be received so she immediately watched four episodes of *Free!* after posting it. She loved it so much that she decided that her next project was going to be similar to *Free!* but with girls. It was her inspiration despite the game not actually being similar to it at all.

*Butterfly Soup*'s plot itself was mostly inspired by the feeling growing up that there weren't any media out there made with herself in mind. She rarely watched teen dramas because the problems the usually white characters faced were completely foreign to her. There were books and TV series with Chinese-American representation like the *Joy Luck Club* or *Jake Long: American Dragon*, but she could never fully relate to them because they didn’t show South and East Asian characters being friends with each other or even interacting. Having such a big aspect of her daily life missing from those stories made them feel unrealistic and fake. So with *Butterfly Soup*, Lei aimed to focus on those relationships.

A few times while making *Butterfly Soup*, Lei thought, “Is it realistic for that mix of people to be friends?“ even though her childhood was literally like that, in real life. She states, "It’s crazy how not seeing it in media can mess with your head."

## Personal Life

Brianna is from the San Francisco Bay Area and lives in Connecticut with her spouse and pet cat. She is in her 20s and has her birthday in spring.

## Trivia

* Brianna introduced her new cat Confettie as her new writing assistant. Brianna described her to have been hard at work deleting countless lines from *Butterfly Soup 2*, making Brianna's monitor grayscale, and turning then computer off.
	+ It was her third time in the shelter before Brianna met her. Brianna states that Confetti's previous owner even declawed her.
* Brianna owned a cat named Burrito. He passed away on the night of July 25, 2020.
* With her own description, Brianna listens to 'weeb music' and 'dumb nerd postrock'.
* Brianna was dragged so hard by playtesters that she had to redraw the blue Taiwanese shaved ice featured in the game.
* Brianna doesn't like the fact that a B+/A- is considered not doing well. During high school, Brianna got 3-4 Bs and it prevented her from getting into UC Berkeley, UCLA, etc.
* Brianna is fine with people shipping among her characters. The only thing that would make her uncomfortable is incest and shipping Diya and Min-seo with male characters.
	+ She is also fine with people of different races cosplaying her characters, as long as stuff like black face/brown face/yellow face isn’t involved.
* Brianna relates to all four of the main *Butterfly Soup* quartet, but more specifically Diya. Similar to Diya running when anxious, Brianna once ran two miles at her school's track before her SAT.
* Before development in *Ren'Py, Butterfly Soup* was created using *Twine.* The change was due to the engine not being suitable for a game as long and picture-heavy as *Butterfly Soup*.
* Brianna would not eat a tiny two-inch man for one hundred million dollars because she would feel awful for him.
* *Butterfly Soup* was created out of Brianna's sheer self-motivation.
* Brianna's favorite scene in *Butterfly Soup* is the “date” in the dog park between Diya and Min-seo in Diya's dream.
* Brianna is from the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically the East Bay.
* Brianna first came up with the game in winter of 2014.
* Brianna graduated high school a year early so her junior year was also senior year.
* Brianna stated that she is quite terrible at balancing school work and personal projects, and could only work on it on breaks.
* Brianna's favorite aspect of working on the game was being able to put specific Asian-American experiences into it.
* Brianna states that it would be pretty cool to eat a Gusher the size of her hand. She doesn't think she can eat it all at once though. She would try to save it, like half.
* Brianna had a lot of trouble naming what is now *Butterfly Soup*. After realizing that she had to change it, Brianna went through this crisis where she couldn’t think of any good names but finally settled on its current name.
* Brianna plays almost every type of video game. She used to be addicted to *Hearthstone* but then transitioned to being addicted to *Overwatch* as a Winston main. Her favorite game of 2017 was *Nier:Automata*. She also loves rhythm and puzzle games, Telltale-style adventure games, and narrative-heavy games in general like *Ace Attorney*, *Persona*, etc.
	+ She tends not to play games that pander to straight white guys because she believes that as soon as a game targets straight white guys, they shift to the blandest art style and most boring stories in the world. An example being *PUBG*. Brianna had to Google it, and even after looking at the brown and tan colored screenshots, she still can’t muster up even one shred of interest in it. She states that their game mechanics are presumably fun, but it ruins the deal for her.
* Brianna was so nervous about applying to the Interactive Media program, she failed to meet all the requirements by only sending them two recommendation letters instead of three because she's super shy and was too scared to ask any more teachers. She is unsure of why she was ultimately admitted but believes that they happened to like her enough to let her in anyway.
* Brianna's friends really did do the Valentine’s Day prank on a friend every year, despite that friend being nothing like Akarsha. Like Noelle, Brianna's best friend had a crush on her literal archnemesis, and simultaneously, like Diya, Brianna had two friends who had no interest in each other at all but were forced to interact because they were both friends with her. After a few years, they got used to each other and eventually became friends too.
* All of Brianna's baseball knowledge comes from the few times she played it during school gym class, movies, and sports anime.
* Most of Brianna's outfit inspiration comes from her Tumblr and Twitter feeds. She does not follow any fashion blogs, they’re all just fandom mutuals who randomly reblog cool clothes sometimes. She used to have trouble deciding what clothes characters should wear, so every time she sees an image of a cool outfit she saves it for reference. She's been doing this since high school and has accumulated enough for both the creation of multiple organized and unorganized folders.
* Brianna states that anyone can feel free to give the characters of *Butterfly Soup* their own last names as none of them do, or ever will.
* Brianna was super nervous right after *Butterfly Soup* came out because she was worried people wouldn’t like it. She put a lot into it, actually teared up writing parts of it, so it was a ridiculous relief to see that people were touched by it.
* Brianna likes her games to follow the opposite of the dead lesbian trope – all lesbians are borderline indestructible and will somehow survive extremely dangerous situations unscathed. They could get hit by a car, poisoned, and fall into an icy river, yet come out with only a mild cold.
* Brianna hates minions with a burning passion.
* Brianna feels that sibling relationships are some of the most entertaining things for her to write.
* When asked about her connection to theater or favorite memories from drama class, Brianna states that she loves watching plays despite never been a theater kid herself. As with favourite moments, she's only done skits in English class and was quite bad at them. At the risk of sounding like some kind of stone-cold killer, Brianna states that her favorite acting experience was when she played Othello and murdered her wife Desdemona, who was played by a guy friend of hers.

## Listicles

Name of publisher, year listed, name of listicle, and placement

## External links

* Brianna Lei on Twitter
* Brianna Lei on Tumblr (Game Development Blog)
* Brianna Lei on Tumblr (Art Blog)
* Brianna Lei on Tumblr (Side Blog)
* Brianna Lei on YouTube
* Brianna Lei on Itch.io
* Brianna Lei on Linkedin
* Brianna Lei on Spotify
* Brianna Lei on Forbes

## Gallery

Brianna's current cat, ConfettiConfettiConfettiConfettiBrianna's late cat, BurritoBurritoBrianna Lei
## References

1. ↑ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1617962540/lucah-a-nightmare-action-rpg-about-finding-oneself/description
2. ↑ https://brianna-lei.tumblr.com/post/163693800899/hi-i-recently-played-butterfly-soups-demo-and
3. ↑ https://brianna-lei.tumblr.com/ButterflySoupFAQ
4. ↑ https://twitter.com/Brii\_U/status/1287261869888004096
5. ↑ https://brianna-lei.tumblr.com/post/166166079834/butterfly-soup-asks-12
6. ↑ https://brianna-lei.tumblr.com/post/166727493239/butterfly-soup-asks-16
7. ↑ https://brianna-lei.tumblr.com/post/166346368104/butterfly-soup-asks-14
8. ↑ https://brianna-lei.tumblr.com/post/165996723949/butterfly-soup-asks-batch-10
9. ↑ https://brianna-lei.tumblr.com/post/165821767019/butterfly-soup-asks-batch-8
10. ↑ https://brianna-lei.tumblr.com/post/165753625584/anonymous-butterfly-soup-asks-batch-6
11. ↑ https://www.pixelberrystudios.com/blog/2018/10/8/high-school-story-class-act
12. ↑ https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/2019/games/#1221501d63ec