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When he arrived for his first year at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Parker Peterson thought his hobby of coding and developing video games would just be a fun way to pass some time between classes.
Peterson taught himself code during high school, and his longtime love of video games helped him land on pursuing software engineering in college.
“One day during my first semester, I was sitting at the library working on a game. The guy I was sitting next to leaned over and asked, ‘Hey, are you working on a game over there?’” Peterson said. “I said yes, and he told me I should check out Game Development Club. I was like, ‘There’s a game development club?’”
That was all the info he needed to attend a meeting. Now the treasurer (and incoming president) for UNL Game Development Club, the student organization has allowed Peterson to totally immerse himself in his favorite activity and work alongside other Huskers interested in creating games.
“It's great to be able to work with other students, especially because game development requires a lot of different talents,” he said. “Some students in the club are interested in sound design; some are illustrators interested in art design — there’s so much more than just coding that goes into it and being able to discuss these things with students who are specialized in these areas is really great.”
Each semester, members pitch ideas for games and break off into teams to develop them. The games range from simple fishing games to “dungeon crawlers” where developers create elaborate puzzles for players to solve.
The level of detail, naturally, requires a lot of teamwork.
“Being in Game Dev Club has really helped me with my engineering leadership skills,” Peterson said.
“Obviously there are a lot of coding principles involved, which I’m also practicing in my software engineering classes, but having this environment where we’re working on ideas together, helping each other with the coding and explaining our work to other people is really good prep for my career.”
