Meet the Dreamers - Alexis
Much like the birth of a galaxy, the birth of a game begins with an explosion of inspiration. Inspiration expands and is fed by the dreams of innovative game designers, engineers, artists and gamers. At Once Upon a Galaxy, we call these individuals “The Dreamers” and we are excited for you to get to know them!
"It's truly a special process, working on a new game..."
Today we are excited to introduce:
The Galactic Architect, Alexis
Hey everyone, I am the engineering team lead for Once Upon a Galaxy. Engineering can be a complicated term in game design as there are a lot of technical components to making a game such as Galaxy work.
Most commonly in my job, this means I am taking a vague or high-level idea for the game from our other designers and fleshing out the details while I code the first version of it.
Consequently, that means I designed many of our core systems for Galaxy from scratch leaning on my decade of experience as a designer and engineer working on Magic the Gathering, Magic Arena and Magic the Gathering Online.
I'm constantly trying to solve the complex problems that involve both tech and game design. The delicate balancing act of “how do I write an efficient scripting language that will work for hundreds of cards we have now and in the future” and “how do we make this individual card or mechanic more fun”.
Thankfully, those two questions aren’t always opposites and for Galaxy, they have aligned in perfect harmony so far.
A Life Coded into Games
Games have always been a key fixture in my life. When I was six years old, my dad bought a Commodore 64 for the family. At a whopping 64kb of RAM and 16 whole colors, this was a top-of-the-line computer at the time. Back in those days, one of the ways you could get software was via magazines where you had to literally type in the program line by line in order to get it to work.
I was fascinated by the idea that you could just make your own games, if only you knew the right words to type. You can imagine my dad’s chagrin when he ended up having to go purchase a second Commodore 64 because I had claimed the previous one for myself. “I would be making my own games on it,” I told him. I will always remember how he enabled me to spend my childhood learning how to code.
Coming Soon…
I am so excited to be working on Galaxy. This is my first game since my childhood that I’ve worked on from the very beginning. It’s a truly special process, working on a new game and I’ve gotten the chance to touch and shape almost every aspect of the game as both an engineer and a designer as a result. I truly can’t wait to get to see people playing it and I hope it brings them just as much joy as I have been having making it.
Stay tuned for more articles from myself and our engineering team in our Dev Lab series where we will be excited to share some of the inner magic behind the proverbial curtain for Once Upon a Galaxy!
~Alexis
