The Blog of a Future Game Designer

Howdy there!

You can call me Chris... no it's not my first name. But I'd rather have a normal name for people to know me by than something like Draxtarak or something hokey like that.

For a little heads up for the style of reading you will see. It will be all across the board from statements, to me thinking out loud, reviews, rambling, and so on. Don't expect world class witting all the time lol. Anyhow lets get going.

I also encourage any readers to post comments as I can use that for future talking points. In addition to that, I love hearing other other people's opinions and learning something new once in a while.


So lets get this blog rolling!

Right now I am finishing up school and am getting ready to look towards my future career. Now I’m one of those people who had trouble making up their mind on what degree to get until they had so many credits they just got the one they were closest to. In my case that is going to be a B.S. in Public Management. I was originally considering a degree in Computer Science or going to DigiPen and getting a more focused degree there. However, I’ve always hated programming so I decided in the end to go with the more “business” approach since it can branch off in so many ways.

Being a programmer has always been synonymous with game designers, but luckily for me, that has been changing as the times have. Now I’m not saying to you programming is still not a big deal with being a game designer. In fact it is still extremely helpful to go the programming rout. However, we now have tons of various jobs to go with staffs that can reach higher than 80 people (in development alone) for one game. This increase in job types has lead to game design taking on different roles and in many cases straying away from actual programming due to the amount of work you have on your shoulders.

I myself, as evident by this blog, would like to become a game designer and eventually a game producer as well. In fact being a producer takes good advantage of the degree I am getting right now due to the management required. At this moment in time I am trying to find that little crack in the door for me to slip my foot into so I can start my progression up the ladder in the video game industry. Start small think big! I am hoping to get into a company that shares my same excitement for quality entertainment and story telling. Sadly, there are not a “ton” of companies that fit the mold of what I like so we’ll see how that search goes. I actually have a few companies in mind that I would love to work for and I will talk about them in the future. Some of them have games in production that I would absolutely adore to have some part in… then again there are other companies that in my opinion are ruining franchises *cough* Sonic *cough* that I wish I could have a hand in helping as well. That said I'm a long way from "helping" a franchise, because I have a TON to learn and it would be completely arrogant to think I could have a profound effect on anything with almost no experience in the industry. I also know that I'm probably not going to get into my "dream company," which could be a good thing because you never know what could happen elsewhere. Deep down I'm sure most all gaming companies are filled with people who truly want to put out a quality product. It's going to take years for me to learn everything I need to know and get where I want to be, but I'm prepared for the journey.

My eventual goal is to create my own IP (Intellectual Property) which I will use in Video Games, Film, and Books as well... much to the same vein that George Lucas has done with Star Wars and J.K. Rowling has done with Harry Potter. I don't see this happening any time soon and it's going to take a ton of hard work to get there. But this is what I want to do with my life.

“Realistically, you can't quickly write the future you seek. You can only forge it through hard work and maybe it will come out the looking like what you want.” - Me

Here are some of my hobbies and some stuff I’ve done in games so you get a little background into what I do and my interests.


Hobbies:

Video Creation/Editing – Sony Vegas and Particle Illusion
Music Creation – Fruity Loop Studio, Various Plugins, Guitar, and Piano
Video Games – From NES to Current Gen (I am a huge fan of PC gaming)
Writing/Creation – Stories, Characters and Universes.
Art – Drawing and Photoshop
Film – Watching/Analyzing Movies and some TV Shows
Reading – Various things about my hobbies and some books based on franchises I enjoy.
Sports – Football and Baseball
History - From Greek, to Roman, to Aztec, to American... I especially love military history.

Some Past Experiences Involving Video Games:

Been playing games since I had Tetris in my hands at age 4
Wrote for an Online Video Game Magazine (a decent sized one with around 10k-20k in traffic per day when I was there)
Lead/Managed an FPS Team as well as an MMO guild to great success (The MMO was easily the hardest due to the sheer amount of work involved for it to succeed at the level I wanted)


I look forward to blogging more about some of my ideas and thoughts as well as games, film, music, and so forth.

I’ll leave you now with a quote that best describes my view of why people like me love (or in this case would love) to make games.

"Creativity, immersion, story telling, fun, and creating memories that will remind others of an earlier and happy time in their life are what making games are all about." - Me