Hello!

My name is Rocco. I am a Game Designer that just recently graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University with a Bachelor of Fine and Applied Arts in Game Design and Development. In addition to my major in the Game Design program, I also completed a minor in User Experience Design. I hope to use these qualifications to land myself a position in an exciting game studio where I can share my endless amount of ideas with others.

Outside of school, several years of experience in the service industry has taught me invaluable lessons in problem solving, teamwork, and simply becoming someone you'd like to be around!

My Itch.io page has a few of the small projects that I've worked on during my time in University. The extra time that I have on my hands now that I'm graduated will be put towards improving my portfolio and honing my craft (I've always wanted to use the word 'hone' in a serious context :P). Hopefully, my next release will follow my design philosophies more accurately.

"What are your design philosophies, Rocco?"

Great question, reader! To put it simply, my design philosophy is to put FUN first. You'll see nowadays that a lot of game studios and game design professors put a huge stress on ensuring that games contain some deeper meaning that nobody really cares about. I personally think that we should leave all that sappy "moral of the story" crap to film and music. Fun should come first! A great example of a 'fun-first' game designer, and someone that I personally look up to is Mr. Edmund McMillen. McMillen is responsible for some of the greatest indie games of all time, including Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac. While you may argue that The Binding of Isaac is a title with deeper meaning due to its correlation to McMillen's real-life experiences, I'd argue that The Binding of Isaac satirizes these happenings in order to prevent sacrificing the FUN of the game, which is a practice that I admire greatly. 

Besides ensuring that fun comes first in my games, I also have a preference in aesthetics when it comes to my games. My father was an avid video game player, just as I am now.  Growing up, I got to play with consoles like the N64 and Gameboy Advanced that my dad had tucked away in storage for most years of his adult life. I was entranced by these older systems and how funky the graphics always looked. Even when the newest and shiniest consoles were released, with ahead-of-their-time graphics and excellent sound design, I always seemed to end up gravitating back to my father's old stuff. I think that's why my second design philosophy is to always show respect to the classics. I would like for my future releases to be aesthetically inspired by the era of games where developers were focused on creating something unique, rather than worrying about if their character models looked realistic enou-

"You wrote that you're a User Experience Designer, too. I don't see any proof of that."

No need to interrupt, I was getting there...

Yes, I specialize in User Experience Design as well! I happen to have an eye for making things look nice, so I decided to work towards completing a minor in UX whilst earning my degree in Game Design. To attest to my skills, you can look towards the art that I created for each of my games, as well as my Itch.io banner! Everything you can see here has been created solely by me in Adobe Photoshop. If that isn't enough to attest for my UX skills, I also know how to wireframe! Click here to check out a Figma prototype that I created for a UX course of mine.

Welp, that's everything! I hope you enjoyed reading through my portfolio (did I mention I also excel at creative writing?). If you'd like to reach out with job opportunities, ideas that you'd like put into motion with my help, or if you just want to chat, you can reference my Itch.io banner for all my socials, as well as my email.

Thanks for playing!