Last month, guest speaker Sebastian Grygorczuk, a professor of introductory game design at The STEM Institute of the City College of New York, visited ModIT and Gaming Club members to speak about his career in professional game development.
Gaming Club president Miguel Santos said, “We had a huge turnout thanks to the event being a collaboration between Gaming Club and ModIT. I believe it was a good step to have a guest speaker come in and speak from a career standpoint, seeing as how game development is a versatile field for aspiring people to take on.”
“It’s great to share knowledge,” Professor Grygorczuk said. “It can be very hard to get into the game industry. Starting off as early as high school can be a big potential boost for anyone that’s interested in games, and I’m very glad Miguel invited me.”
During his presentation, Professor Grygorczuk spoke about his career in game development and showed many of his own projects as examples.
There were three main things he said he hoped students took away from the presentation: “one:, do understand that you can just start. If you want to make a game you should just start, you shouldn’t just wait. Two: I hope everyone uses their resources, and three: I hope everyone uses the organizations I mentioned, because one of the hardest parts of getting into the gaming industry is to penetrate that wall of not knowing anyone or knowing where to go.”
Professor Grygorczuk was the first public speaker to visit these clubs this year, and club leaders said they have hopes for future speaker talks.
Junior Anton Rud, Co-President of ModIT, said, “I think that it was a good start to our guest speaker series, because he has a broad range of experience. He also came in person, which is much better than having someone come online. It definitely introduced everyone well.”
Some students told The Classic that listening to the guest speaker was inspirational and acted as an incentive to pursue programming and game development.
“It was very informative and very entertaining, especially for people who want to seek interest in gaming as well as coding,” Senior Zahreef Kabir said.
Miguel said the guest speaker inspired him to incorporate game development curriculum into the Gaming Club. He said, “I’m attempting to teach game development with Bitsy Game Engine, an engine that can be used on a web browser, meaning more accessibility to all of Gaming Club’s members. There isn’t a set date as to when this will be launched, but I’ll continue to seek help from Professor Grygorczuk in fully implementing this project.”
