The people who know me can almost never agree on what my career path is. Am I a writer, a game designer, a musician, a teacher? Even I have trouble giving myself a specific label. Almost everyone seems to decide on one main role they wish to have and follows that path for most of their life, whereas it often seems as though I am piling my plate high with every option at the buffet.
But why should we stick to just one of our passions in our work life? Life has so many choices, and with each of my passions fuelling different aspects of my life, it would feel wrong to choose just one. My main industry would certainly be games, but the joy of games is that it combines a variety of people with different skill sets and allows them to collaborate to create something entertaining and exciting.
I love being a game designer. Fitting the puzzle pieces of different mechanics and levels together and watching them slot together into a developed game is a very satisfying feeling. I've recently been working more as a narrative designer, which, while not involving the more number crunching, systematical side of game design, has allowed me to take inspiration from my methods when writing a novel - building the world, the characters, planning the plot layout - a perfect combination of two of my favourite things.
Stemming from narrative design, I've also been working on dialogue scripts for games, which is definitely a step away from script writing for film and television, which is what I've mainly done in the past. There is so much opportunity - the ability to create dialogue branches and moldable dialogue during gameplay brings me back to my high school hobby of writing text adventures, only now there are a lot more stage directions.
However, I'll be the first to admit that my desire to pursue everything I love in a professional capacity can get overwhelming. Juggling music practise with writing short stories as well as keeping up with game deadlines has more than once made me feel like I'm not all that talented at any of them. The thought that keeps me going is that eventually I won't need to juggle them all separately, because eventually I will have made it into the jobs I'm preparing for and I'll be writing game narratives, or scripts, or even becoming a game designer eventually.
The main skills I want to improve on to keep pushing myself forward would have to include my time management - I need to stop spending hours upon hours without break on a project, only to cold turkey for the next three days, and then repeat until I am completely burnt out! In my projects, I want to keep improving on my game mechanic design and creating unique and interesting stories for enjoyable gameplay experiences. I definitely want to add even more to my music portfolio with some great game soundtracks, which I will likely have for my capstone project and my individual project!
Jack of all trades, master of none; but better than a master of one - although I hope to master at least three in my lifetime!