Ever since I was little, I enjoyed playing video games. I think all of us have a similar story. But the moment that really cemented my passion for games would have to be my formative years of early puberty when I learned about games as an art form. With my dad being an artist, I had a lot of exposure to many different art forms and an instilled appreciation for art. So games being an art form opened up the world of opportunities that games could do. I always enjoyed making my own game ideas in my head, but it was then that those ideas stopped being recreations of popular games I loved and started to become art pieces with an intended meaning and purpose

This was around the time I sought out a lot of Youtubers and creators that would be very foundational for me. Mark Brown (now called Game Makers Toolkit), Turbo Button, Snoman Gaming, Razbuten, Design Doc, Errant Signal, and No Clip. No Clip and Mark Brown, most importantly, shaped my understanding of game development. No Clip gave me an insider perspective on game-making and personifying the actual people who develop them and Mark Brown got me to think like a designer.

As I kept researching game dev, certain names kept coming up as people to look up to. Jonathan Blow, Soren Johnson, Maddy Thorson are some that come to mind. But the 3 people that stick out to me that inspired me would have to be Hugo Martin, Kitty Horror Show, and Scott Benson. 

Hugo Martin is the game and creative director for Doom and Doom Eternal. But more importantly, he helped shape my views of what game design ought to be, sticking to your creative vision and using design to get players to experience your vision. 

Kitty Horror Show is a small itch.io horror game developer that makes some of the most unnerving and thought-provoking horror in general. To me, she represents just the wealth of creative potential that this medium still has left to offer as she pushes the boundary of what's possible in games with each title she releases. 

Scott Benson is the co-creator of Night in the Woods and is probably the most inspirational in getting me into game dev. Prior to schooling, I wasn’t entirely sure that an artist like me could make it in game dev, not being a very technically or mathematically minded person and all. But it was hearing about Scott Benson’s experience of being an artist who never made games before to making one of the biggest indie games of 2017 that convinced me that I could do this. He turned my pipe dream into something feasible. 

Nowadays a lot of my inspiration comes from my professors and peers around me. Practically every game professor has fostered and fueled my passion for game development. Adam Moore went the extra mile in providing extra-curricular resources, Derric Clark in breaking down the actual studio experience, and Hue Henry in getting me to make several projects that I can be proud of. One moment that sticks out to me though was when Matthew Marquit graded my Halo Horror level assignment. It may have seemed like a small comment to him, but what he said about my level pulled me out of my senior slump, made me feel less like some smuck who likes games, and more like an actual game developer (as well as giving me some direction in what I want to do with game development).

Because of the help of my game professors, I’m now no longer just someone who sits on the sidelines looking at what games have to offer, but I’m now a part of multiple communities around game development. 

I’m a member of IGDA and I’m happy to see how IGDA is shaping up to be this year (sadly couldn’t come to many meetings recently due to workload). 

I’ve recently become more involved with the local game jam scene at our school, which sharpened my skills and my vision for what kind of games I’d like to make. 

I’ve attended GDC a few times and made really solid connections, attended many important roundtables, and learned a lot from the summits (made good friends with some other students at Digipen and with a small indie student called Merge Conflict). 

The one micro-community I’d say I’m the most involved in would be the one I made with my peers in the RGB room (room 252). Almost every day of every week, we meet up in that room to work on game homework together, teach each other game concepts, work on game projects together, and discuss future career plans. Many of the people who I work with in this room may even turn out to be my co-workers in the future (an alumni who works with us in the room is planning on making a studio with us).