Design

As I take my first steps out of traditional schooling and begin work on my career from job to job, I find myself reflecting on the place that I have started and the place I want to be most. These earliest experiences appear to be shaping my understanding of what I would want most out of my future, and where I would be happy to land if I fall short. As a result, my professional career currently has me focusing on two main communities that I intend to work amongst, learn more about, and find opportunities within. The one I have started with, quality assurance, and the community I have dreamed of being a part of, game design. As my circumstances are, however, I only have professional grounding in the former thus far.

 The first of these two communities is quality assurance, or more specifically development software testing. This community is one that I have been part of for nearly a year already thanks to my job with Experis, separate from my path in schooling. My job in engine testing is one I had taken out of necessity, both to earn money while in school while also fulfilling graduation requirements for my UAT studies. Due to the culture of QA as well as the parallels to developer work, I find this opportunity to be one that has given me ground in a potential career for either quality assurance or game design. In the field of quality assurance, I have clear goals of wanting to be a leader, hunting for any opportunity that might allow me to work more directly with game developers, as well as any opportunity that would help me grow as a leader and reliable member of a team. This emphasis on communication, as well as the more guided nature of testing have provided a new outlook to me in regards to QA- namely, I believe that I would be happy, comfortable, and a valuable team member within the field. I am at my strongest when looking for new ways to solve existing problems, working within a small team towards a set goal, or experimenting with prebuilt tools- especially in the field of game development. Testing development software, in turn, helps me to feel like a core contributor to the often overlooked community of QA.

While my start may have been in the field of quality assurance, my ultimate goals for a career are still set within the field of game design. While I have no immediate professional work in the field, this topic is the one that I chose to enroll with UAT for- primarily in the hopes of one day becoming a lead designer. Designing, especially as part of a team, has always been a passion of mine and a strength I continue to try and grow. I am particularly suited to level design, as my projects with existing game tools such as Celeste or Golf-It! will assist in proving- I find myself my strongest when I am able to plan out my vision for a project and focus myself to individual aspects of the project at a time. Simply being a part of a team in one of these roles would have me in the community I want to call my own, though throughout my time in that field I will always be looking for chances to move into a position of game design or leadership.