When he started writing music, Jonah saw it as a storytelling avenue that he could relate to. After spending years creating stories with chords, he’s now moved on to storytelling with Game Design.
Whether we know it or not, everyone has a story to tell. Jonah, a student in the Game – Design program at Mohawk College, is a natural storyteller. His first medium was music, using songs to tell the stories he wrote, but Jonah had to find a new medium to achieve his storytelling goal: an interactive story. To do that, he turned to video games and the game design industry. “I have a history in music, and I really like writing songs, storytelling and stuff like that. I'm very interested in video games and computers and how all that works. So, I wanted to kind of combine the two and write stories for games and learn how games were designed so that I could make an interactive story.”
To create his own interactive story, Jonah first needed to know how to design a video game. He began researching game design programs and quickly found the Game – Design program at Mohawk College. He decided to follow his passion into the program, and he has been amazed at how much he has learned so quickly. “It's taught me a lot so far and I've only been there for how long two months, and I've learned more than I thought I would in the first two months.”
Since joining, Jonah has been embraced the sense of community that’s a central part of the program. “All of the people I've met are very nice, the professors are very nice. My favorite part would probably be the people. Having that sense of kind of a community definitely makes it feel a lot better, and like this is an inclusive space.”
Jonah’s time in the program has allowed him to engage with and discover the storytelling mediums available through Game Design, going so far as to recreate a game during the programs ‘Design Week.’
As part of a ‘Design Week’ event run through the program, Jonah recently had the chance to share a game with the public that he collaborated on with a group of classmates. “Every semester we do a design week, which is a specific week in our program where all the classes stop and everybody from the Game - Design program, across every year and every semester, gets put into groups and you make games in that week. It's kind of like a little game jam,” said Jonah.
“The game jam is going to be about digital games in the future, but this one was for physical games. So, we made board games, and we each took roles where like we design the game board, or we design the cards, things like that. My biggest job that I had was to put the cards in a printing sheet on the way we were supposed to print them, and then get them printed and cut out to make them into physical cards,” he continued. “At the end of the week, we went to the Central Public Library in Hamilton, and we got to show off the games we made to the general public and to each other, and to see how amazing everyone else’s work was. It was really cool.”
With a collaborative game under his belt, Jonah now has two clear goals for the future: to make his own game, and to make the most of his future internship built into the last semester of the program. “My next step would be to try and make my own game. Right now, all we've done is recreate games or to deconstruct them and stuff like that, which I think is very cool,” said Jonah. “But after I finish school, I want to make something of my own. I’m also looking forward to attending an internship, I've already looked into a bunch of internships and they're very cool. I'm really excited for the last semester of the program to apply to a bunch of internships and to actually get into the industry.”
Looking back on when he was deciding whether to join the program, Jonah was hesitant, asking himself questions such as ‘does game design require programming?’ His advice for those interested in game design is to follow your heart.
“I was nervous about applying to because I wasn't sure if I would need to know these baseline skills, but you learn the fundamentals right from the basics up. So, my advice would be to just do it if you're nervous about not knowing enough. That's why you're going is to learn. So, you shouldn't be afraid of not knowing. That was my situation. I really wanted to know, and I was still nervous, but I went for it. And it was definitely the right move to go for it.”
