Zane Glorioso, sophomore, has dedicated his time to work on becoming a virtual game designer. He draws inspiration from other indie game designers (such as Toby Fox) and from the mistakes of others. When he sees a game that has many flaws, he draws up ways to fix them whenever he can, and later discovered his true passion is in the video game industry. He did not know how to start, but with the help of friends, he was on the road to achieving his goals. 

At the age of 11-12, Zane started to come up with his own game. When asked how he felt about his creation so far, he says, “I could do better, but so far, I’m just learning.” Zane struggles with finding people to help him create these games and trying to come up with new character designs. When he does create characters, he knows they are great.  At the beginning, he did not know how to draw humanoid forms too well, but he worked hard to get to the point he is at now in his craft.

Though we are all online, it has worked to his advantage. He has a lot of time to work on what he loves to do. Zane draws his characters first and uploads them digitally to be worked on and polished. He takes those drawings and recreates them in a retro-style pixelated fashion. Once he has the grid finished, he creates multiple others with different move styles. From there, he creates the animations that lead into his games. 

Zane believes that games need to be more difficult and retro as the early arcade games were. He uses that thought process to his advantage and has so far been creating pixilated games that have a lot of story put into them. His only flaw is drawing his characters for later use. Most of the time he has great ideas but does not know how to put them on paper. He spends hours trying to come up with something, and usually does. When he does not, those are “bad days” to him. Most of his ideas come at night in his dreams, and the next day he will go and write them down.  

“Games are sort of like sandwiches. You have the good stuff inside and the bad on the out. You must make your way through the flawed to get to the gems. You’ll never get to that point if you don’t try first,” Zane believes.  After high school Zane plans to go to college for game design.  His most recent creation is not quite finished yet, but once it is, expect greatness.