About me

Turning a life long passion for video games into a career in making them

My path to becoming a game developer hasn’t been a straight forward one. Growing up in Melbourne in the 80’s, I can’t remember a time when there wasn’t some form of video game console in the home. From the good old days of going and making something to eat while waiting for a game to load on the Commodore 64, to repeatedly hiring The Lion King on the SNES (and never quite being able to finish it), to thinking that the graphics of the first Tomb Raider on the PS1 were incredibly realistic, playing games has always been a part of my life. I don’t think it ever really occurred to me that making games was something that someone could do for a living.

Always obsessed with computers growing up, after high school I worked in a couple of computer stores, but this was around the time such stores (which were virtually on every corner) started disappearing, and I fell into other work. I worked in factories and warehouses, delivered pizzas, not sure what I really wanted to pursue. I did 3 years of a Traditional Chinese Medicine degree in Melbourne, eventually graduating with a Diploma in TCM Remedial Massage and then moved to Hobart in 2012 and started working as a massage therapist for a few years, but that wore out the body quickly. I did a Certificate IV in Bookkeeping and had a go at that, but I knew I hadn’t yet found my calling.

Thinking about maybe returning to my interest in computers, I looked into the Bachelor of ICT at the University of Tasmania and found they had a major in Games and Creative Technology. Having never had the faith in myself to try and learn game development on my own, I went in having never written a line of code in my life nor having ever used a game engine. In my first semester, one of my assignments was programming a small game in Java, and I was hooked. During my time at UTas I went on a trip to the US in 2017 to visit PAX Dev and PAX West in Seattle, volunteering on booths at the Australian Indie Roadshow, released a small fan version of the board game Hero Quest which has been downloaded 2000+ times, became involved in the Tasmanian Game Developers Society (now Tasmanian Game Makers), joined Myriad Games Studio as a VFX artist, worked on a commercially released Nintendo Switch game; Squidgies Takeover, tutored multiple programming units and eventually graduated on the Deans Honour Roll in 2019.

After graduating I continued to work with Myriad Games Studio until the release of Where the Snow Settles on Steam and XBox in July 2021, did some contract game development for Giant Margarita, and from January 2021 to October 2022 I worked remotely from Hobart for the Adelaide based games studio Mighty Kingdom as a full time programmer and technical artist. Since October 2022 I have been working remotely as a tech artist and VFX artist for Summerfall Studios.

Although I wish I had taken the leap to learn about game development when I was younger, I’m very glad that I’ve now found a career path I am passionate about and am doing something that I hope to be doing for a long time to come.