ABOUT

Who writes this?

Hi there, I’m David. I’m a digital artist, musician, animator and occasionally game designer. I studied Art & Game Design in SAE Institute (if that means anything to you) and started working in the gaming industry during my last year of college.

I’ve always had a passion for making video games. All the time I spent making shitty Mega Man remakes in Scratch – if you know you know- are some of my fondest memories of game design. But if there’s one thing I love more than making games or playing them, is talking about them and boring my partner for hours on end.

Okay, but why?

During my last year of college I started working as an art intern in a small indie game studio. We made digital adaptations of existing board games, most of the work we did was either commissioned by outside board game publisher or by making deals with said publisher to run a crowdfunding campaigns for the projects. All in the hopes that the 6 months of development that we already had put into the game would actually have a chance to release.

Some of those we did get to finish, but a lot of others we didn’t. And as I was going through the life of becoming an indie developer and finishing my thesis to actually get my degree, I realized that breaking down games into tiny pieces and analyzing them was pretty fun.

I was breaking down games and dissecting them both for my job and for my thesis. One was out of the need to understand a board game better for work, while the other was to write a 40 page essay on why my favorite games are cool as hell and a panel of academics should care abut it.

And in the midst of it all, something grew inside of me. Ew, not that.

Breaking down games, analyzing and finding what works and what doesn’t, it brought back memories of when I was but a child and read the Nintendo Club or Gamers magazines, amazed at how there were actual people living and making money while working on cool games. And reading these magazines gave me a behind the scenes look into what the developers went through to make those games a reality.

So, with what little I have experienced on my own, the boatload I have read on game design and hopefully some other designer experiences, I want to help inspire bit of creativity on the next generation of game designer.

Since universities ask for a Master Degree to be able to teach and those are quite expensive, seeing as I have little to no writing credits, I went for the next best thing: an online blog.

My Mission

While I hope to one day be able to make game journalism and teaching my job, you gotta start somewhere.

My true and only reason for this site is to share and build community with other game designers and just generally anyone interested.

We currently live in a time where it is both the best and the worst time to make your own video game. Yes, there are mass layoffs left and right in the gaming industry. But, the tools to make games are more accesible than ever before.

So, since anyone with a computer and a somewhat reliable internet connection can now make a game and going to college for video games is a hard sell in this economy my mission is this: sharing my knowledge and my passion for games and how they are made, all in the hopes that I’ll make you, the reader, feel inspired to start creating that game you’ve always said you wanted to make.

Or at the very least make you see games with a new perspective. At the end of the day, games were meant to be fun. So let’s have some fun.