Hello,
I hope you’ve all enjoyed your summer! I recently met with my uncle (and mentor) Dave Schappell, and he’s helping me with advice on how to eventually land a job in my field. His first piece of advice: keep your network updated. So, like Jenson, I plan to send a summary of what I’ve been up to every so often. And with that…welcome to my first update.
To bring people up to speed, I am just starting my sophomore year at UC Irvine, where I am majoring in Game Design. One of the reasons I chose UCI was because they allow freshmen and sophomores to take game design classes. Most other schools don’t allow students to take many classes in their major until junior year, so this was a big pro of UCI. Over the course of my first year, I took classes in almost every area of game design: three programming classes focused on C# and Unity with large group projects, a class about game writing, plus design and art classes among several others. Out of the twelve classes I took my freshman year, 9 were game design classes, which has helped me build a solid foundation and become better prepared for internships.
To show some of the things I did during my first year, I have updated my website with some of my projects, which can be found here: Aidan-hart.com.
Right now I am trying to decide which minor to focus on, or whether it makes sense to double major. I am considering something in computer science or business, but am not yet sure. I still need to figure out what part of the game industry I want to be involved in. As part of that decision, I’m trying to think about what skills will be needed in the future, and how the industry will change with AI.
I do worry about how the industry is changing with AI, and how the industry will evolve in general. From everything I have heard, it seems to be pretty rough in the industry right now. A lot of people at my school do use generative AI to help them code, myself included; our “introduction” programming class was actually pretty brutal and our instructor was far from the best, so it was sort of a wild west where each student had to figure out any way to complete the assignments using all tools available.
I will be reaching out to people in the game design field to interview them, with hopes of finding some advice to help me think through the questions and concerns above. I will also be interested in learning how they started their careers and how they grew professionally. I am curious about their opinions on AI and what they feel like the gaming games industry will look like in 3 - 5 years. If you know anyone I could talk to on these topics, I would really appreciate it if you could please let me know. I hope to interview someone every 2 weeks or so.
Thank you for reading, and for any suggestions you have.
Aidan
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