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Hello, world! My name is Lauren Peirson and game design is my passion. I am a rising senior working towards my Bachelor of Science in Game Design at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. I grew up in Los Angeles, CA with a curious mind always wondering how things worked and a love for video games which led me to discover game design when I was in high school. I took a couple classes at my school and at UCLA over the summer and I was hooked. At DePaul I have been expanding that knowledge, taking classes on programming, 3d modeling, animation, game design, game programming, level design, playtesting, puzzle design, and more! I have worked on games in teams of 3-20+ for fun, for classes, and for DePaul Original Game Studio. While studying in Chicago I have also been working as a Game Guide for The Escape Game! In this role I help provide our guests with epic experiences as I introduce them to our rooms and oversee their game, effectively providing live quality assurance to keep their game running smoothly. I provide guests with clues when they ask for help and I have also been able to practice my playtesting skills as I can see where most guests get stuck on certain puzzles and have made suggestions to my managers to improve the games where we can. As I am getting closer to graduation I have been honing my craft and trying to find my place in game design, and this year I have been focusing my efforts on level design and puzzle design. I am endlessly excited to see where I take myself in my career and what awesome stuff I make!
Throughout my entire life, I have loved games – both playing and creating them. On long car rides growing up, I used to come up with games in my head that I could play in my mind while looking out the window. I had a game where I would glide on a snowboard along the power lines I saw as if I was in Subway Surfers, and another where I would imagine a giant knife that I could raise up or down to cut grass on lawns as I drove past, as well as change the shape of the knife to avoid cars and other objects. The different objects I might see on the street would give me different amounts of points or create different reactions when hit, such as trash cans giving bonus points and empty sidewalks not adding anything. Playing with my friends and brother growing up, I would make up games we could play with objects around the house (i.e., laundry bins & stuffed animals) with certain songs that went along with them and had detailed rules for point scoring. I even made a couple of board games in elementary school as class projects.
Seeing as I'd already made quite a few games in my life, it is quite surprising that I never considered making games as my career until I found a bug in the Valorant Ascent map where you hear the wrong sound for the texture of the wall when you hit it with your melee weapon. This made me wonder what video games looked like behind the scenes and why that mistake was there. My lifelong curiosity for how things work turned my love for playing games into a passion for game design and the determination to have a lifelong career of designing the best experiences and possiblities for players everywehre. As a player, I love the creative problem solving in games. As a designer, I strive to create the spaces of possibility for players to experience that creative problem solving in my games.
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