He sets his sights on designing video games

“Originally, I was an electrical engineering major. But I realized I didn’t like it, so I decided to change to something I actually enjoy. And I like video games. Not just as entertainment, but as an actual art form. So I’m majoring in game design.

“It’s a two-year program that should, once I finish, allow me to work in the industry. Then, maybe if I get a four-year degree, I can rise up in the ranks. This program seems to mostly focus on the development part, like modeling characters and programming. What I hope to work my way up to is designing the overall way games are built, the more ethereal part of it.”

Any ideas for games you’d like to develop?
“Oh, yeah. Too many. One idea is for a series called Tales Gone Arhye, with Arhye being the name of the setting it takes place in. It would be a fantasy series, with each game being a self-contained story. It’s meant to be an homage to different forms of fantasy. The first game would be sword and sorcery, like Conan the Barbarian, Elric of Melniboné, stuff like that. The second game would be epic fantasy, like Lord of the Rings, the Wheel of Time, and so on and so forth. Just kind of chronicle different time periods in that setting.

“I’ve put a lot of thought into how each culture in the setting would work, and how the characters would interact with one another. Right now, it’s mostly all in my head. The hard part is putting pen to paper. One day.”

— Daniel Western