The Journey So Far…
I’ve always been fascinated with technology as a kid, much to the chagrin of my mom who came home one day when I was young to find that I had taken apart the family computer; its pieces strewn across the floor.
And since the beginning, games have always been a part of me. I grew up with an old Zeos Dos machine playing Commander Keen & Lemmings, but it was Starcraft, Dungeon Seige & Guild Wars that captured my imagination.
I didn’t realize that designing games could be a job until the 7th grade when I took a mini career trip to Idol Minds (now Deck Nine Games) and had my world changed.
I attended Champlain College as a Game Design student in 2008. At the time there were less than 10 colleges in the country that even offered a Game Development Major (Now it’s 400+). And it was there that I found my tribe, the people who understood me & an opportunity to excel.
I graduated in 2012 & co-founded a small Independent Studio called Birnam Wood Games with 3 other graduates from our year. For 3 years we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps to build a company & the space for ourselves to make games. We kickstarted our first game Loc, which quietly failed. We took side jobs, technology opportunities & somehow kept afloat. Our second game, Pathogen, I built as a prototype, which gained traction into a demo that won 2nd Place at a pitch competition and netted us a publisher. Within 8 months we launched on iOS, only to quietly fail once more.
In 2015 I was the first co-founder to leave Birnam Wood Games (which still exists today as Game Theory). 3 years of being a starving Indie is a brutal experience & the company was going to leave traditional game development behind in order to survive. But with those 3 years of Indie experience, I felt that I now had a real chance to stand out as a candidate for game design roles, after all, I had been an entrepreneur and I had shipped 2 games!
100 job applications later, I had a single interview that went poorly.
So I set my sights on Grad School as a way to meet the right people, build the right connections & finally break into the industry. I was accepted at SMU Guildhall but chose to attend the Denius Sam’s Gaming Academy (Now defunct) because it wouldn’t cost anything & it was a huge opportunity to meet some of the biggest names who shaped the industry.
And it was an incredible experience, filled with amazing folks & it did exactly what I hope it would do. It opened the door for me into the industry. Upon graduation, I had 2 job offers, the first at Raven Software which was a junior Game Design project-hire role working on Call of Duty Online, and the other was a 6-month contract at Disney working on games for 4-year-old girls.
I choose Disney, as it took me out West, to the heart of the industry in Los Angeles CA. And sometimes you take a job to get to the next job. My hope was that this would increase my chances of meeting other devs & access to career opportunities.
I worked at Disney for 6 months until my contract expired, where I got a role at Zindagi Games (Now defunct) as a Level Designer for their Match-3 games. On my very first day, the CEO welcomed the new hires while simultaneously announcing that the studio was about to be acquired by Zynga. I put in my notice a month later & returned to Disney in the same role I had left. (From my experience few companies understand the impact of an employee until they leave). I remained at Disney until 2016 when the company began to shut down its gaming operations. The closure of Avalance was the only warning I needed. (A few months later, the whole division I was a part of was also closed)
I joined Insomniac Games in 2016 as a UI Designer. I shipped Feral Rites, an Oculus VR title within the first 6 months before moving on to Marvel’s Spider-Man, which shipped in 2018. I was a part of the City that Never Sleeps DLC development team and did some early prototyping on the UI for Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
However, I was growing restless with living in LA. That year at E3, an extensive gameplay feature for Cyberpunk was being shown & celebrated as the future franchise for CD Projekt Red. I applied for an open position & after several months of conversation, I accepted an offer. In March 2019, I sold everything I had in LA and got on a flight that took me halfway across the world.
My experience at CD Projekt Red was life-changing in so many ways it’s difficult to fully encompass. Looking back on that time, it feels like years of experience & learning were compressed into just a few months. While I’m exceptionally proud of the work I did, much of it surviving into the shipped title, CD Projekt Red wasn’t the right fit for me. Leaving that team, knowing full well the road they had ahead of themselves, might be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. However, ultimately, your life is your own and no one else can live in your exact circumstance.
While in Poland, I started looking & interviewing. And it was through my network, that the opportunity at Santa Monica Studios opened up. I accepted, and by October 2019, I was back in LA less than 30 miles as the crow flies from where I was living. I joined the newly formed UI Team as a Sr. Technical Designer on God of War Ragnarok. Over the course of production, I was promoted to Staff Sr. and Ragnarok shipped in November 2022 to wide critical and commercial acclaim.
Throughout the Spring of 2023, I was a key part of the NG+ development team and in March I had the wonderful opportunity to speak at GDC regarding that development process.
Building this site, this platform to help connect, advise & educate developers is the newest thing, but it’s hardly the last! After all, the journey continues…