Class of 2024, Student Managing Editor, College Editorial Team
Aspiring video game designers–and other young professionals across visual media–know the difficulties of breaking into the industry, and that the key to any job application is a compelling portfolio, a collection of projects that demonstrate your hands-on experience in the field.
To help students break into the industry, UChicago’s Office of Career Advancement and the Media, Arts, Data, and Design (MADD) Center teamed up and offered an opportunity for College students and recent graduates to create their own game.
The project, spearheaded by fourth-year student Eren Slifker and recent graduate Isaac Berman, AB ‘23, provided paid summer positions for seven UChicago interns. All of them can now add a completed game titled “At Winter’s End” to their portfolio.
The game was made available on the major gaming platform Steam on Nov. 1, and is the result of a summer’s worth of production work, collaboration and bug-fixes.
The project began with Slifker and Berman speaking to Meredith Daw, director of UChicago’s Office of Career Advancement. Daw had been a guest panelist for a final project in an alternate reality games class in winter 2023 taught by Patrick Jagoda and Heidi Coleman.
Slifker proposed the idea to Daw: a student-led and produced video game project, with Metcalf stipends for student interns.
“It was a very serendipitous situation,” Slifker said.
Once Career Advancement agreed to support the project, Slifker and Berman started an arduous interviewing and hiring process and a series of brainstorming sessions with their new team in preparation for the 10-week sprint to start and finish their game.
This was not Slifker and Berman’s first collaboration: along with UChicago student Bruno Pasquinelli, they created a video game design collaborative in summer 2022 called Slandercast Studio, where they worked on numerous unreleased games throughout 2022 and 2023 and released their first game in May 2023 called “Pedestrian Safety Simulator.”
For this project, however, Slifker and Berman wanted to do something more polished and, importantly, they wanted to release the game on Steam, the largest gaming distribution platform.
With additional funding from Career Advancement’s Humanities UX program, a cohort program that provides funding and mentorship to students interested in the intersection of the humanities and media design, Berman and Slifker recruited seven student interns: narrative designer Thomas Nielsen; artists Nora Jovine, Silvia Martinez and Elle Thompson; engineers Justin Hudgins and Josephine Markin; and “Keeper of the Sound” Braden Hajer.
Slifker and Berman found that collaboration was key to the success of their project. At the start, the whole team decided to create a narrative-focused “cozy game,” which composer and sound designer Braden Hajer described as “about familiarity, knowing the sense of scale.”
The first several weeks culminated in the completion of a “vertical slice,” a short snippet of gameplay that shows how the completed game is expected to look. The rest of the summer was spent completing the world of the game, fine-tuning, and fixing bugs and glitches.
Berman and Slifker credited the mentorship of Ashlyn Sparrow, Senior Research Associate in the Media Arts and Design program, Patrick Jagoda, Faculty Director of the Weston Game Lab and the Media Arts and Design program, and Derrick Fields, an Assistant Professor of Instruction at Northwestern and the founder of Waking Oni Games. They were in constant communication with Sparrow, Jagoda, and Fields, who served as a sort of review board that gave them feedback on the project.
The team ultimately found that the project changed and took shape throughout the summer.
The final product is a narrative-based dice-rolling game that follows a child growing up in a forest of spirits, which the child helps throughout the game.
“We were building off of this initial idea, but very much discovering through the process of design what the game would be” said Slifker. “There were many times throughout that were like, ‘Oh, we have to change so much of this game,’ because we realize this is the way that it should be. It was like discovering what the identity of the game is through that process.”
This project is part of a larger effort within the Media Arts and Design (MAAD) program and Career Advancement to support students interested in video game production.
“The Weston Game Lab exists to support curricular and co-curricular projects in game design, for faculty and students alike. At times, this can include the space and resources of the lab, as well as mentorship from our faculty and staff,” said Jagoda. “There’s no better preparation for a career in game design and media production than developing a game, in a collaborative team, from start to finish, including distribution.” The Weston Game Lab provided funding for the summer's technology costs.
The student team and faculty mentors agreed that hands-on experience is key to learning how to be a video game designer.
“We see experiences like these as a wonderful way for students to creatively apply what they learn in the classroom and explore how they can use their College education to make an impact,” said Ruth Robinson, director of external relations at Career Advancement.
Robinson says UChicago plans to continue supporting opportunities for students interested in a career in video games, including an annual Summer Game Studio in partnership with the MADD center, gaming career treks and a Winter Quarter “Game Jam” competition.
Berman also emphasized how essential these experiences are to helping students build a portfolio of finished games and eventually land a job in the field.
In the future, Berman and Slifker hope to create more games together, and they are proud of the opportunity to have facilitated similar collaborations within the College.
“I think it reinforced to me that I really like making games with Isaac, and I want to make more of them,” said Slifker. “I like creating opportunities for other people to be supported and uplifted, and to be able to create games and get paid for it. We saw a chance to provide a really concrete development, a practical opportunity to a bunch of students. And so we wanted to jump on that right away, because it's something that we would have wanted earlier in our time at the College.”