Coming from Iowa with a B.S. in Computer Science, I am now pursuing a Masters in Entertainment Arts and Engineering at the University of Utah. With a solid foundation in CS, I am looking to acquire professional skills in game and systems design.
Coming from Iowa with a B.S. in Computer Science, I am now pursuing a Masters in Entertainment Arts and Engineering at the University of Utah. With a solid foundation in CS, I am looking to acquire professional skills in game and systems design.
To me, learning how someone got into programming is always an interesting topic. As you will later see, Warcraft III is my favorite game, but it also is where my experience with programming began. When I was about nine years old, I began creating custom maps with the World Editor, which allows visual scripting. As I got older and more advanced with this, I realized the limitations of the GUI editor, and explored JASS (the Warcraft scripting language) directly. As I was young and had not experienced anything remotely 'normal' in programming, this exploration ended and I returned to the GUI programming until I reached high school. Coming from a very small high school (graduating class of 42), my options to learn CS were very limited. I actually began programming in an HTML class, where I excelled (relative to my peers who had little interest) and was allowed to experiment on my own. I got into Javascript, something that the class did not cover, and here is where I mark my 'proper' education's begin.
In terms of early projects, the project that I am most proud of is Gods and Follower's, which was my first official release on the Hive Workshop.
It was a solo project of mine which received over 2500 downloads (a big wow to just-graduated me). In reflection, I should have taken criticism better, but overall the feedback was positive.
Throughout my undergrad, I had many opportunities to create interesting projects. Some of my favorites were implementing Huffman encoding (a file compression algorithm) as well as participating in a research class to create
a stream processing engine. On my own time, I looked into Unity and Unreal and began some personal projects during this time - which led me to pursuing grad school.
In grad school, along with general gameplay and engine programming courses, we were placed on teams to rapidly develop and refine prototype games. These games can be found under the Games tab on this site.
Game design has been a fun and interesting pass-time. Creating something that I find fun and hopefully that others can enjoy, feels like one of the realest forms of art. I remember being a child and creating worlds for my friends and I to enjoy - sticks became swords (obviously) and legos often became Pokemon. At some point, I realized that the imagination of play for us as we get older changes significantly. The combination of programming, game design and art, I feel, can recreate those same feelings that many of us had as children.
Throughout grad school I had the opportunity to prototype many, many games. I had a lot of space to help with game design throughout the courses, allow me to 'find the fun' of our prototypes. Beyond the digital
space, I have also worked on two board games and polished them to near completion. Ancient Artifacts, a board game about archeologists and paleontologists competing to uncover interesting relics can be found
in the Games section - and has also been uploaded to the Tabletop Simulator workshop on Steam.
I also find a lot of enjoyment in pushing games to their creative limits. Whether playing Terraria, Minecraft, or Valheim, I am constantly trying to create a meta game (separate from meta-gaming, I promise),
either pitting players against each other in an interesting, changing arena or creating adventure maps which allow my friends to experience a new game entirely within one they're familiar with.
Warcraft III is widely considered to be a classic in the RTS genre. Maybe surprisingly, the RTS aspect of the game is not why it is one of my favorite games. The large customization options present in the game allowed for relative newbies in game development experience to create entirely new games to their heart's content. Because I played Warcraft customs from 8 until 20 years old, along with the charm that some of these custom games have, is why it will probably forever be solidified as my favorite game.
It's hard for me to think of a more quick-to-pitch yet still so complicated game. To me, it feels like Dota has the complexity of a 4X game but it's packed into a tiny box of ~45 minute games. While I'm not typically one to create e-sports competitive level games, the endless possibilities, decisions, and micro-efficiencies that Dota allows feels like a highly impressive feat. It's often joked about that at 3,500 hours into the game, you can still have no idea what you're doing.
Terraria gives the vibe of an arcade cabinet game (in more ways than just aesthetic) while also introducing a multitude of new ideas. While remaining an RPG-esque game, it has almost none of the contemporary "musts" that RPGs had, such as skills and levelling. I think that Terraria is a great example of 'something new from something old' and I think a deep-dive into the design decisions could give (and probably has given) way to something new yet still familiar.