Gamernation vol.1 May 2014 | Page 8

Developing games: The one-man army

Dean Dodrill owns a middle class house in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, where he lives with his wife. He goes for a walk every morning, visits the park and goes to the grocery store like any other person does. But every single day, he exudes an air of enthusiasm. He has an incredible story that the gamer community needs to hear.

He began his career as an animation artist. He bounced from job to job, game to game helping with everything he possibly could. “Every time I started in a new firm, I was looked down upon,” Dean states. However, he did not let this deter him and always replied with a smile from ear to ear. He was living his dream, not as he had pictured it, but his dream after all.

Game Developer, a job?

Many people, despite their background or education, misuse the term “Game Developer”, or Video Game Developer if you like it old school. Thousands of teens dream of becoming a game dev when they finish high school. Many of these young adults base this decision on the fact that they like playing video games and don’t even know exactly what they are talking about. A game developer isn’t something one person can become, excluding special cases such as Dean’s, who was able to create a game by himself. A game dev is the community of people working in a firm that develops a game. The roles of these people vary broadly between programmers, who are in charge of coding; artists, who come up with innovative ideas on character models and scenes; designers, who dedicate their time and effort in creating a virtual being out of the artist's sketches; testers, who play through the game hundreds of times looking for bugs and glitches, and many more.

After having received countless disrespectful comments from snooty programmers and designers, he finally had enough. “They acted like their job required way more knowledge and skill than what it actually does,” Dean points out with an expression of sadness on his face. He then decided to wipe the slate clean and pursue his dream from a different approach.

He left Epic MegaGames, the firm he was working for, and started his project “Elysium Tail”. He wanted to prove those arrogant game devs wrong and started the development of what eventually became the marvelous game known as Dust: An Elysian Tail. He planned on doing everything, from designing and illustrating every single character in the game to coding all the actions, from simply moving around to incredible acrobacies, your character can perform to writing an astonishly good storyline. After sharing the information about the development of his masterpiece via his twitter and blog, he started receiving messages from completely unknown people willing to aid his cause. He was delighted by the kindness of his “fans” but did not accept their helping hands because his whole goal was to prove a point to those who mistreated him.