All my life I enjoyed playing video games, even today I am still an avid gamer! Currently, I am working as a programmer at 21-6 Productions. I have worked on projects ranging from tools for Rock Band to speed up the development of songs, educational games and websites, and other various prototypes. I am currently working on a new social music discovery game for Facebook and the iPad, Rockstar Rising. Rockstar Rising is currently set to launch at SXSW in March!

How did I get here? Here is my story:

The thought of being a part of making video games really didn’t come to mind until my freshman year in high school. During that time I was playing a game called SOCOM: US Navy Seals and discovered how to make my own cheat codes using a Playstation 2 disassembler to reverse engineer the game code. I was successful at making codes for: being able to rejoin a room after being banned from it; when you killed someone you earned a kill, but you also earned a bomb plant or hostage rescued; one shot kill with any weapon to any part of the body; and when you shot someone it would cast a vote against them, to ban them from the room.

Shortly after my SOCOM hacking days, I picked up a book on Visual Basic and began teaching myself some programming. VB didn’t keep me very entertained so I dropped it and started looking for something else. Between my sophomore and junior years I attended a two week game workshop at DigiPen where I created my very first video game! Though there wasn’t a whole lot to the development process (a lot of drag and drop) it was still a lot of fun and a big accomplishment. During my senior year I started teaching myself C# and became in love with programming. There is just so much you can do when you write you own applications.

Once I graduated from high school, I spent a year at a community college. I used this time to get some core classes out of the way, but also used it to research game schools across the country. My ultimate goal was to attend DigiPen, but I was also looking at Full Sail and Denver University. After a campus visit to Full Sail during spring break in 2007, I was sold and began the registration process to attend in the fall! After two tough years, I graduated Full Sail with my degree in game development and I have begun my search to start my career in the industry.

After I graduated Full Sail, I spent about a year looking for a job. During my job search I volunteered my time at my high school where they now have a game development course. While I was there I helped students understand the code they wrote, and the errors they came across. I even helped form the curriculum and teach the class. I really enjoyed my time volunteering and found it really rewarding, and I might consider teaching later on in life. I also spent this time brushing up on network programming, and learning new skills with Unity.

Now I am working full time as a game developer and realizing that all my hard work paid off. I get to live out the dream of working in a career I love!