I am the Senior Game Artist at Kodable. When designing games, I have to be ready to throw everything I have at the idea one minute and throw it all away the next. Everything starts and stays rough for a while until we discuss as a team what approach we want to move forward with. There is no going into a corner for a week and coming back with the perfect plan or design. We have to animate simulated correct and incorrect trials, paper prototype, user test, and converse with the dev team to make sure what we’re doing is achievable by the due date. All of that, and of course, it needs to be engaging and intuitive to the user. Unlike illustration, where it’s just a static picture, games have a lot of layers, levels, and moving parts. This makes things complicated sometimes. For example, most of our characters are simple fuzzy round balls with pretty simple faces. But we needed a helper character that could emote and go to any area of the screen and point things out with actual arms and hands. The end result was a rigged 2D character with wings, eyelids, eyebrows, arms, hands, and a magic wand. Much more complex than our main characters, but it was easier to develop one special character than changing ALL of our Fuzz Family characters. Also much more friendly and inviting than the usual big white hand that does everything.

I have been a professional game designer for console, computer, and handheld games for over 22 years.

As I wrote in my 2010 book “Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design”: “…making video games is the best job in the world. It can be thrilling, frustrating, rewarding, nerve-wracking, hectic, boring, vomit-inducing, and just plain fun.”

Just like every job, it will lose its luster, you might even grow to dislike it but you should still remember from time to time to pull the blinders off from your eyes, poke your head up, take a look around and remind yourself that you are making games for a living… and thank your lucky stars because there are a million and one way worse ways to make a living.

I became a game designer because I wanted to “pay it forward.”

I will never forget my first video game experience: playing Duck Hunt on a friend’s Nintendo when I was four- or five-years-old. Once I got my own NES a couple of years later, it was over for me- I was a gamer for life!

Video games have gotten me through some really tough years. They did more than just distract me from problems I felt too overwhelmed to solve at the time; they gave me a space in which I could feel powerful at a time when life made me feel powerless. Playing video games, either alone or with friends, gave me the emotional support I needed to survive some pretty miserable years in my life.

When I discovered at college that I could steer my studies toward a career designing games, I went all-in. I am grateful for the video games that have had a deeply positive impact on my life, and I want to bring those experiences to others.

That’s why I am so passionate about working on mobile games for audiences that don’t traditionally consider themselves “gamers.” I think everyone’s life could be improved by playing games, and anyone can become a gamer if they just find the right game for them!