Excerpt

From a young age, Nicholas DiMucci had life all planned out. He would parlay his love of video games into a career designing the next smash hit, guaranteeing him a star on the walk of video-game fame next to names like Shigeru Miyamoto and Cliff Bleszinski. "I remember writing letters to DigiPen when I was in fifth grade—this was when they were in Canada—asking how I could get accepted there when the time came."1

DigiPen Institute of Technology was the perfect training ground for aspiring developers like DiMucci. In 1990, the technical school entered into a partnership with Nintendo of America and offered a post-secondary program designed explicitly for teaching students how to program games. DiMucci and DigiPen seemed a match made in thumb-twiddling heaven. There was just one problem. "I had the completely wrong and stupid notion that you had to be a math genius to be successful, so that always scared me off," he admitted.

Visions of nightmarish equations that filled up entire notebooks shook DiMucci's confidence. The 3D games he played were grounded in equations used to render environments out of complex geometrical shapes, and physics that determined how players moved and the angle at which grenades bounced off of walls.

Convinced he was not cut out for game development, DiMucci shied away from computer science. He pinballed between several majors before settling on film studies at Mercy College in 2004. For a while, DiMucci believed he was on the right track. Between semesters, he attended a six-week workshop at New York Film Academy in 2007 where he wrote, produced, edited, and directed three short films. When he was not behind the camera, he acted in student projects. Reorienting his plans for the future, he set his sights on getting his undergrad degree and continuing his education at a prestigious film school.

DiMucci felt little excitement upon graduating in 2008. Instead, he felt stuck. His degree was not landing him any jobs, and the notion of paying thousands of dollars to attend film school suddenly lost its luster. He began to reconsider making games, but not as a programmer. Drawing on his background in film, he introduced himself to a team of amateur developers who wanted to create a pack of tailor-made levels, known as a modification, for Valve Corporation's Half-Life 2 shooter on PC. Mods were typically released at no charge, but their makers could gain exposure if their mod became popular, potentially leading to employment offers from studios. DiMucci joined the team as a writer and designer. "I wrote the script, wrote dialog, journal entries, [and so forth]. I helped flesh out the initial idea. It's actually a pretty good story that I'd love to visit again one day."

Shortly after he joined, the team drifted apart. Some members lost enthusiasm, while others chose to pursue different projects and passions. Fortunately, there were other avenues into the games industry. DiMucci downloaded the Unreal Development Kit, a free toolset used to build levels for Epic's Unreal series of first-person shooters, and started designing expansive maps for Unreal Tournament III. He instantly felt at home. Level designers stitched together maps by dragging and dropping modular elements such as terrain, monsters, weapons, and buildings assembled room by room — operations that could be performed without delving into trigonometry or physics.

For the first time, achieving his boyhood dream seemed plausible. Reinvigorated, DiMucci applied to The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University, which offered a program dedicated to level design. The Guildhall accepted him, but he ended up turning them down. Moving to Texas seemed too big a step to take. A move to Connecticut, however, held much more potential.

"My then-girlfriend, Sarah—now fiancé—graduated shortly after me and got accepted to the University of New Haven in Connecticut, so I decided to follow her there and pursue a graduate degree in computer science. I had nothing to lose at that point, and felt learning to program would open a lot of doors, and it did."