Breaking Level 0: An Introduction

Note: Whenever I read things about how people got into the game industry there isn’t anything from the perspective of someone who has just started fighting to break through. "Breaking Level" is meant to give people a glance from the perspective of someone trying to make it into the industry. Below is my orgin story.

I would like to start by giving an introduction into my background, and why I decided to pursue a job as a game designer. I am from a very small town in Oklahoma where people care more about farming than technology. My family is a pretty normal, middle-class, “Bible Belt” family that was fairly strict throughout my school years, I wasn’t even able to play games on the computer unless they were watching. Throughout high school I was the mysterious creature known as the “jocknerd” as my passion for sports, and video games, ruled over all that I did.

So why would I ever consider becoming a game designer? I have always been a bonafide “gamer” even back to the days of playing Wizards and Warriors on the NES at my grandma’s house, but I first came across my passion for game design when I was playing a video game called Habbo Hotel in middle school. I entered a really big room design contest centered around the theme of designing something inspired by PopTarts, and won the entire thing. From that point on I knew, not only did I love designing things, but I was fairly good at it! My love of video games then fell to the back burner of normal “high school drama” until my sophomore year when I injured my knee playing football.  Being in a cast for six months can be particularly boring so when a friend came to me one day and said, “You have no life now. We are going to buy you World of Warcraft,” I obliged. From the first time I started playing WoW I was hooked by the brilliant world, and the ability to feel like you are making an actual impact within a game through prolonged character progression. I would go on to play WoW, on and off, for over five years thinking to myself, “I want to make something that impacts people’s lives as much as this game has mine.”

After graduating high school, all of my friends went off to college, but I decided to take my academic career the only route I had available at the time, which involved earning my Game Design degree online through Full Sail University. Doing this caused me to accept a lot of ridicule from friends and family as they were clueless as to what a game designer was. Countless times people have come to me and said, “So are you going to work for Pixar?”, most of the time I just accept it, and walk away rather than try to explain the many differences between the two professions. This type of rift between people’s knowledge of animation and game design is something that has plagued me. A few times, I have just told people I have a degree in computer sciences to avoid the frustrating conversation that would come when I say video game design.

Once I plunged into college things became even more challenging as my perception of what a game designer does was immediately erased, but that is a discussion for a different day.

I will chronicle my college years on the next post of Breaking Level