Ever since I was young, I’ve had a strong fondness for movies and video games. It’s the reason why I wanted to be an animator. Frankly, it’s something I would also love to do with my Computer Science degree.

Although I have experience with all of the work involved in animation, I ended up being most interested in a specialization called “rigging.” Rigging involves building the foundation of making a character or object able to move – not dissimilar to our own skeletons and muscles. The thing about rigging is that there is actually quite a bit of programming involved. Instructions on how to build a skeleton, where to place things, what size they need to be, how they should move – it can all be written as code in any given 3D program.

That is what led me here, to studying Computer Science at OSU. I found out that I really coding. That I love doing all the foundational work to build amazing programs or content. Big or small. I really love building things that people can enjoy, either for a moment, or a few hours, or every day. That’s the stuff that I want to do, whatever format it might be.

I’ve been working with my Capstone group for a couple weeks now. When we were looking through the list of available Capstone projects, the Text Based Adventure Game leapt out to all three of us, so we teamed up. And while there were quite a few projects I would have been thrilled to work on, I admit I’m pretty excited about the one we chose. I’d really like to make a decent game that I can use as a portfolio piece at the end of this term.

We’re through the third week of the term, and so far we’ve been putting time to the design of our game. I have spent a lot of time learning how to craft stories in my previous work, so I feel like this has come in handy. We’re creating a game with a haunted house theme, and I’m looking forward to how it continues to develop.