Welcome to my blog! As you may have already guessed, my name is Jason Wilson and I’m a game designer from Ontario, Canada. I’ve worked in the games industry for over 16 years. I have had the opportunity to work on everything from big budget console games to small free to play mobile games. However my love for games and interest in game design go much further back than that.
As a kid I loved RPGs! I particularly loved Sega’s Phantasy Star series. Playing those games inspired me to create my own stories and worlds to adventure in. I would draw detailed layouts of dungeons and maps of worlds for me to travel to. Create lists of items that I could find and collect and their prices in gold. I would draw pictures of fiendish monsters to battle along with their combat attributes. With these lists and drawings I would recruit my friends and siblings (or whomever else I could convince) to wander around and play out battles and quests. In retrospect, it was a kind of primitive form of Dungeons & Dragons, even though I would not learn of that game until far later in life.
When I got my first computer and a friend of mine turned me onto QBasic programming, the first thing I wanted to make was an RPG. As I began to build out the world and characters, I know that this was what I wanted to do. I wanted to make games!
My ambitions as a game designer have always been to capture that wonder I felt as a kid. To allow the player to feel like they are the hero in their own story. And maybe, just maybe, inspire the next kid to design their own games too.
So where does this blog come in? With this blog I hope to share with you my passion for games, share whatever insights I may have into the craft of game design, and share my journey to becoming a great game designer. I’ll inevitably talk a lot about the games I play; what I like about them, what I don’t like about them, and most importantly what I think can be learned from them. I’ll also talk about games in other forms, such as board games, card games, or even TV game shows. Lastly I’ll talk about the games I’m making, whether that’s in my day job as a professional game designer, or games that I’ve made in a game jam or in a Thirty Day Trial (more on that in the future).
So stick around and we’ll see where this blog takes us.