Week 1 EOC: My Voice

I am an artist that tells stories through the art of video game design. I do a heavy amount of brainstorming, drawing, pitching, writing, designing, coding, three-dimensional modeling, texture mapping, presenting, and loving. Creating video games is not a job, but a career; A career that pushed me to my limit and to the right artistic path.

I invested my life in video games for over fourteen years and had been designing and creating video games for more than six years. Through all these years of being involve with video games, I had not only been successfully entertained, but I had also encountered many experiences, such as finding a new way to extend my talent in art, encountering opportunities for work, learning how to properly communicate with others, and finding myself in a place where I have never thought people could be in.

Since childhood, I have always excelled in art. I started it out with pencil and paper, but it was later in life did I found out that art in general is where my talent was. I picked up a paintbrush and the final outcome would give me a shock, because I never knew I was a good painter. I did not even know that I was a painter. So, I moved on with other types of media like markers, color pencils, and pens. Then I found different forms of art like sculpting and molding, until I ran out of ideas on what I could do next. I truly believed that I did it all, but then I found the wonderful art of making video games.

For the longest time I thought my talent in art helped me succeed in video game creating, but in reality making video games helped me excel in all different kind of art. Video games is not just about coding and designing, it actually involves other medias like audio and animations. For independent developers, everything they make has to be original. For my first years of being a video game designer, I had to create my own music on Mac’s GarageBand, master animating in Adobe Flash, use a large variety of game engines such as GameSalad, Unity, and BlueJay, and study programming languages like C++ and Java. All these years of experience I became fluent with the basic game making essentials like Photoshop, Maya, and Unity, but I am also flexible and can use other programs. These are the reasons why I decided to pursue the career of a video game designer. To see the other type of arts the world has to offer.

I fell in love with the complexity of creating video games, because no matter how small and easy a step was, I knew it was all very important. From brainstorming to game testing, I admired every bit of it, especially those little things like character naming. Majority of people think that game designer just throw in a pretty name and give it to a random character, but that is not the case. Video game designers are like parents. Everything we create is like our children. We create them, we work hard on giving birth to them, we nurture them and we love them. Like every great parent a video game designer take their time into giving their creation a name. Everybody in this world was given a name that has meaning, just like video game characters. Even though the gamers and viewers would never notice the tiny significance of the characters’, it is those little things that give us, game designers the joy of creating something.

As a game designer, I have become a very patient person. All video games, with the exceptions of indie games, usually take years to make. Creating a solid idea and design takes months to complete and the rest would take years. Sometimes the team would be a head of schedule and sometimes we would fall behind, but that is an easy fix. A few adjustments just needed to be changed. There would even be times when the deadline was yesterday, but years of being a video game designer prepared me to create good quality games in a short amount of time.

Some of those who are not involved with the gaming industry may think that creating video games are all about fun and games. Yes, it is fun and it literally is a game, but making these video games are hard work, especially when you are working with a team. I had worked with different kinds of people. Some of them just naturally complimented the way I worked and there have been times when I had to work with people who were lazy, out of control, and just was not a pleasure to work with. Fortunately, I like the challenge and through all those challenges I have made it alive and with a bonus of better communication skills. Working with a different team every project made me a better leader and a better worker. I learned how to lead a group of lazy procrastinators to create a high quality project in just a short time, I learned how to work with a messy and unorganized environment, and ever since then, each project was a challenging delight.

Through all these years of creating beautiful games, the best part was not doing what I love, but finding myself in other people. Every game designer feels like there is a piece of themselves in the games they make, but whenever I watch people fall in love with the games I make, I can not help, but find a piece of myself in them. The way the gamers smile and get excited reminds me of how I would smile and get excited about every little outcome that has come from the games I have made. Before I was a creator I was just a fan. I would love playing video games and I would even go to conventions and dress up like the characters I play and love. Now, I am both. I am not just the gamer anymore. I am now the game creator and that is why I do what I do. I stress over how tall or how short a character should be. I would sweat over the colors of a level design. I would even dream about different titles for my games. I do all these hard work, just so I could see myself in others.

Being a video game designer made me become a better artist in all fields. At first I thought I was just a designer who could draw well, but in the end I was actually someone greater. I made my ideas alive through three-dimensional modeling. The pictures in my head would move, because of what I can do and I have discovered that these ideas in my head are different pieces of different versions of me. I am that creepy murderous little girl I imagine from time to time, but I am also that sweet ice cream garden I dream from time to time. I create myself through the arts of video game design. And that is what my career is truly all about.