Ryan Leonski said he doesn’t pay attention to celebrities and instead idolizes game designers, such as Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Zelda series.
“I geek out over game developers, while others geek out over celebrities,” he said.
Leonski, a UNM student and president of the UNM Video Game Developer Club, owns Subliminal Gaming, a game programming company based out of an office in his house. He also teaches a game design course during the summer at UNM Continuing Education in Los Alamos.
Leonski said programmers, such as Miyamoto, have inspired and taught him how to make his own games, including the design of the tutorial portion of a game.
Leonski is programming a computer game called Sky Pets, which will be released Feb. 9, 2013 and will be available to download for free and can be used on computers, Android phones, iOS system products, such as iPod and iPads, and Facebook.
Leonski wouldn’t share anything more about the game, because he said it’s not yet ready to be revealed. He said Sky Cat, another computer game he created in which players have to dodge bricks or knock out other players, was prototyped in an hour and released a week later and was the inspiration for Sky Pets.
Leonski said video game design requires a lot of collaboration with multiple designers, including artists, illustrators, game programmers and sound designers, and an understanding of video technology.
Leonski said his first memory of playing video games was when he was 2 years old and was unable to figure out how to make Luigi, a character in the Nintendo video game series Mario, jump. His interest in video game programming began when he was 8 years old.
Leonski said he settled his frustrations with video game design through video game programming, which allows him to create his own characters and stories. He said game design allows the designer to be creative and express his or her ideas within a structure and that games offer players a sense of agency, which can motivate players to complete the game.
“It’s this sense of discovery, intrigue and to be able to have this great sense of agency,” he said. “If you fail, you’re either able to win the game because you can tell it’s cheating, or you could essentially say ‘OK I purely did something wrong,’” Leonski said.
Leonski said he doesn’t modify games and prefers to build games from scratch so that he can create every aspect of the game on his own. He said he wants his games to be seen as slightly eccentric and magical, similar to characters in Disney movies.
Leonski said the process of creating a game is like having to teach something to walk, because the programmer has to create different aspects and then build on top of them to create an intriguing story.
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Leonski said he enjoys older games and older consoles, such as Super Mario Bros. and Nintendo, because they’re easier to work with, which allows him to use them as guidelines for his own games. He said the first game he ever made was a game similar to Mario but with a stealth aspect reminiscent of the stealth action game Metal Gear Solid. He said he chose to emulate these games because he wanted to learn their programmer’s creation process and see how they designed their games’ tutorials to instruct players.
“The reason I did this is because I wanted to learn from it,” he said. “You had to teach the player to play this game in 10 seconds with as little instruction as possible and allowing them to experiment.”
The video game Sky Cat
is available for $1 on XBOXLive
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