Photo: Josh Dawson

DATA program instructor Rebekah Barendregt (left) spent the fall school semester teaching Nick Jackson (middle) and Ryan Sampson (right) how to make their own video games as part of a school district-wide academy.

Kamloops-area teenagers have been levelling up their skills as they take part in an intensive semester-long video game making program.

The Digital Arts and Technology Academy is held every fall semester at Valleyview secondary for grade 11 and 12 students across the district and has existed since 2013.

DATA program instructor Rebekah Barendregt said students learn digital art, computer programming, game design and project management through the program.

“After they've all learned all the skills they get to work in groups in those roles, so artist or programmer or producer — kind of the team leader,” Barendregt said.

“They come together in these groups and they make their own game completely from scratch.”

The students have six weeks at the end of the semester to develop their final game before “launch day” where their peers will get to play them.

“I’ve never taught anything like that, where you get to be with a group of people who are as passionate about things as you are, and then you get to explore what it looks like professionally too,” Barendregt said.

She said 19 students partook in the program last semester, some from as far away as Barriere and Logan Lake, and had the chance to speak with video game and animation professionals during a field trip to Vancouver.

The program is full-time and worth four course credits. Students who decide to attend TRU’s computing science program also receive two course credits as well.

Students follow passion

Grade 12 student Nick Jackson said he’s been programming since he was eight-years-old and has always been interested in video games. He decided to enrol in DATA to sharpen his programming skills.

“Seeing something that you’ve put so much time and work into and even more effort to actually work the way you intend it, and not like a bunch of glitches and bugs, is really satisfying,” he said.

For his final project, Jackson alongside two teammates made a two-player horror game in which a player on a computer guides a second-player in a VR headset through a series of puzzles and levels.

The game is called Descent and won the top game award in the class and the audience vote.

“In the game testing, even though people had a hard time understanding what to do in it, they still loved it. Which made me realize this is a really good game,” Jackson said.

Jackson said his dream is to one day work on video games for Valve Software or to develop other software, noting the rise of AI.

Ryan Sampson is in Grade 11 and said they were an avid fan of video games and had been more interested in the artistic side but wanted to learn to code.

“I really like the idea of being able to tell stories the same way an author can, the same way a comic artist can, the same way movies tell stories — now I have this, the same type of idea,” Sampson said.

As part of a team of four, Sampson worked as an environmental artist on a turn-based Japanese role-playing game called Laws of Sorcery.

The player plays as a rebel in a futuristic dystopia that uses outlawed magic to take down major corporations.

“Seeing people enjoy my game and seeing all of the work we put into it finally come to fruition and finally become something really big, it was a really good feeling,” they said.

Sampson said their goal is to study towards a degree in game design to eventually work as an Indie video game developer.

“The game design industry is the biggest entertainment industry, profit wise, and they both have a great future ahead of them,” Barendregt said.