Game Design Student Stories

Video games have always been one of my most cherished passions. It was always my dream to be able to create fun and immersive game experiences that make lasting impressions on players throughout the world. The Game Design major at Champlain was the first step in achieving that dream, and after seeing people have fun playing my games, I can safely say that I've been living the dream with my major!

The Upside-Down Curriculum put me right into the swing of actual game development and design from day one. From my first day at Champlain until the present, I've been learning about how to make game experiences on paper, prototype and iterate on them to receive feedback, and use that feedback to bring designs to life. Without ever having to wait to see if my major was right for me or not, I knew from day one that I was in the right program!

My experience at Champlain has effectively prepared me for a career in the game industry through classes that not only teach design theory and principles, but also require hands-on creation and implementation of ideas and concepts in solo settings and within multidisciplinary teams. The experience I've gained working on games with teammates from different disciplines and walks of life is the real deal, and is quite possibly the closest you can get to actually working in a real game development job!

Being thrown into teams and development processes immediately at the start of my college career helped me confirm that game design was something I actually wanted to commit to.  Without having hands on experience, I feel like we wouldn't have the chance to understand our future careers nearly as well, not to mention we wouldn't be as prepared for professional lives after graduation.

There are too many to choose from! One game I worked on in the spring of my junior year was a survival game called Lymantria Dispar. It offered me a fascinating challenge when it came to developing and implementing a narrative that, while it wasn't the focus of the gameplay, really added to the game and improved replayability. I might have torn my hair out a bit trying to develop a variable narrative based on the order players picked items up in, but I was very proud of my work at the end.

After my sophomore year, I interned at Rooster Teeth as the ScrewAttack Writing intern, which meant I contributed to a bunch of scripts that were being published to their YouTube channel (which is now named DEATH BATTLE!). I was able to write solo pieces even as an intern, and when it came time for me to go back to school they kept me on as a contracted writer, which is something I'm still doing! 


The fall of my junior year, I went abroad to Montreal and interned with Double Stallion as one of two Game Writing Interns. This meant I got to research for their IPs as well as contribute to not only their games' story and flavor, but also help out with their social media by writing tweets! If you happened to follow that company and you saw a bunch of cryptic tweets about the enemies from their gam,  Speed Brawl, taking over the world... that was the interns!

The professors at Champlain all have experience in the industry. They can talk to us and say, "Listen, when I worked at EA..." or "When I was working on Myst, this is how we did things." Plus, since they have been in the industry, they have connections at big companies—your professors can actually help you land a job after graduation.

During my internship at Insomniac Games, I did a lot of hands-on work for the new Spider-Man game for PS4. The work I did mostly involved level design and scripting using Insomniac's visual scripting language. I also attended weekly design meetings, participated in feedback playthroughs for different missions of the game, and worked with several departments in the studio. 

The most rewarding part of my internship was getting to watch the gameplay demo for Spider-Man close the 2017 E3 Sony Conference. I couldn't stop smiling and thinking about the fact that I hadn't even started my senior year of college yet, and a game I'd been working on was one of the most impressive games shown at E3.

Skills I learned in my production classes—like working on a development team, using version control, and becoming familiar with the development cycle—made it easy for me to adjust to Insomniac's way of working. Even beyond the classroom, getting involved with different parts of the college through my work as a Student Ambassador taught me how to be a productive member of a team who communicates when I need help. These are skills that I used every day at my internship. I'm confident that everything I have done at Champlain has prepared me to be a successful part of the game industry.

There's a tremendous sense of community in the Game Studio—which includes Game Programming, Game Art, Game Design, and Game Production. All our majors are challenging and demanding, but we're all in this together, and you really get a sense of that. Everyone supports one another, and we all learn from each other. We game designers have built a strong bond that I'm so happy to be a part of. It really creates a community and support system.

I really appreciate the Upside-Down Curriculum here. I wasn't completely sure about my major when I picked it, and at another school, I would have had to wait two years to find out for sure whether it was for me. But at Champlain, you're working in your major from the get-go. I was reassured that I made the right choice, and that was really important to me.

I've worked as a Resident Assistant for two years now. And that experience has helped me grow so much—not only as a student, but as a person. It has helped me meet a lot of amazing people and hear a lot of different stories, which have, as a whole, opened my eyes. It's a challenging job, but so rewarding. I'm a better person now.