After sitting through three-hour long art classes, working a shift as a RA, and combating the ever-growing brand sponsorship emails, SMU senior Sydney Collings, better known as @symphony_sonata gets to work drawing new concepts or promotional art for her social media.

The creator behind LoveBites, the 2020 runner-up of  Webtoon’s International Short Story Contest, and the lynchian Alice-in-Wonderland point-and-click adventure game, Habromania, is already walking the walk.

“I think it was just since I was like, very, very little I would just spend all my time doing art,” Collings said. “It was this sort of passion in me, I couldn’t have been doing anything but art for the rest of your life, like there wasn’t really another option for me. It just made sense.”

Collings was homeschooled for most of her life, only stopping when she entered high school at the Fort Worth Academy of Fine Art. Finding herself immersed in books at a young age, Collings’ fascination for fairytales and folklore and being the biggest scaredy cat child, like, ever” led her down the rabbit hole of horror artistry she’s known for today.

“I don’t know, maybe it’s just like, because I was freaked out by it, it interested me,” she said. “There is something about the word ‘[horror] genre’ that I feel is almost empowering to sort of create art that used to freak me out.”

At 15-years-old, Collings found her footing in high school when she started her webtoon LoveBites, a post-apocalyptic zombie story. What started as a short story soon grew into a full fledged webtoon with a following. By the time she was entering college, Collings knew she wanted the graphics to move from the digital to the physical. With her loyal followers and family at her back, Collings raised $26 thousand to self-publish her first two graphic novels, LoveBites Book One and Two.

“I was just thinking ‘man, it would be so cool to see this as a real book.’” Collings said. “My older brother and my dad were always supportive of that. They really helped push me towards making that into a graphic novel. There’s the financial part of it. I did want to start to monetize my art and get a leg up before I graduate college.”

James Hart, Director of Social Innovation, Creative, & Arts Entrepreneurship, says that artists like Collings, who act entrepreneurially increase their likelihood of maintaining a career in the arts.

“[A study by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project found that] if you act entrepreneurially within your artistic career, you increase the likelihood of making a living in your medium of artistry by 141% and that’s because you’re creating your own opportunities,” Hart said. “Most professionals are looking for opportunities. You’re the one not asking for opportunities, but giving those opportunities.”

Collings is doing just that. Since self-publishing, Collings has not only sold more than 800 copies of her graphic novels, but has moved on to even greater ambition.

Sitting in art class one day, Collings drew the surrealist horror concept art of her now fully actualized Alice in Wonderland characters. Posting the designs to her Instagram eventually led Collings to Alexis Hoffman. Hoffman, who had stumbled on the concepts, reached out about using them for a fan video game. Instead, teaming up with Hoffman, Collings, the creative director of Habromania, got to work.

“I was trying to get more into the video game side of development, because I’ve been working as a software engineer for the past few years, and I didn’t have a whole lot of ideas for what to do for a video game,” said Hoffman, the technical director for Habromania. “So, I asked if I could just try out making a fan demo for it. And it spiraled from there and ended up being an official project.”

After combing through over 200 applications worldwide, the Over the Garden Wall-esque surrealist horror video game’s development now spans continents. Eight volunteers, along with Collings and Hoffman, work across Texas, Florida, Washington, Canada, France and Australia on the game.

“So there’s the artists, the animators, the programmers, and they upload whatever they’ve been working on, into those channels, and I can also send them like different paths and stuff,” Collings said. “It’s a little hard to get everyone on for meetings, but besides that, I think it’s so cool to have people from so many different places helping out with this.”

While the game hasn’t been released yet, anticipation for the game is already building. One fan wrote on Medium, a website that allows people to publish their opinions, about their excitement for the game.

“Other games that took a dark turn on Alice in Wonderland have existed before such as Pocket Mirror and Alice in Madness but there is something special in Habromania,” the anonymous fan wrote.

While the transition from graphic novels to video game development has been a learning curve for Collings, it’s also been something she’s enjoyed.

“I think it’s more intense than graphic novel stuff, just because I love writing, but it’s not just like writing,” she said. “It’s a lot like ‘how do we make the gameplay interesting?’… I do enjoy doing it, but it was simply very different from writing, like a book or a novel or anything like that.”

Collings hopes to have a free demo of Habromania out at the end of the year. Check out her Instagram and website for more details and updates.