About

Hello!

I’m John Odell, a recent Game Design graduate from Champlain College in Burlington, VT. I’m currently seeking work in game development!

I’m from western Massachusetts, the part of Mass where basically nothing happens, so I had a lot of time on my hands growing up, which inevitably (thankfully) led me to play lots and lots and lots of games.

Since before I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with games both of the tabletop and video variety, and I’ve been picking them apart to better understand how they work. I love this stuff— the weird niche between ludology and experience design and software development is right up my alley. I’ve always been doing game design, even before I knew what that was (or that it was a thing that people could, you know, do for money.)

After some dabbles and dalliances with game development as a teen, I was lucky to attend Champlain College, where I went through the Game Studio program to get my bachelor’s in Game Design. During my time there, I had the opportunity to work on a variety of game projects of various shapes and scales in a variety of roles, culminating with my role as design lead on my senior capstone game project, Molementum. I also graduated cum laude and was chosen by my faculty to receive the 2024 Excel Award for Game Design, which was cool!

I picked up lots of knowledge and experience with industry standard tools and methodologies at Champlain, but the stuff that really called my name was the focus on ludology, the psychology of play, and deconstructions of what makes a game fun and rewarding for the end user— the player.

Unfortunately, my time at Champlain began at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and my graduation coincided with the 2023-2024 game industry mass layoffs, neither of which are awesome. But I’m passionate about game dev, and I have enough experience with it to know that despite the crunch, despite the instability, despite whatever stigma or weird idiosyncratic difficulties there might be, this is the thing I’d like to do.

Thanks for reading, and if you’ve made it this far I hope you’ll check out some of my game projects!

Thanks,
John