This time A Conversation with… tracked down Diego Pons with Next Level Games, from our 4th graduating class.
Q: Tell me about what you are doing now in the Games Industry
Working at Next Level Games as a game designer, currently doing Core Design.
Initially I was hired as a Presentation Designer, but I’ve had the opportunity to do UI Design, Level Design, Project Pitching, Story, Preproduction and even a bit of Environmental Art.
Luigi’s Mansion 2 : Dark Moon was released March 24, 2013 and right away it took off like a rocket. It was the top selling game in Japan for three weeks in a row. We (myself, Senior Instructor Andrew Laing and Head Of Department Dave Warfield) conducted an interview with VFS Game Design graduates who helped in the creation of this very successful game.
Thanks very much to Diego Pons, Matt McTavish, Cavin Yen, and Jeffrie Wu for their time and for producing such a fun game. And thanks to Doug Tronsgard and Rob Davidson from Next Level Games (NLG) for helping to make this interview happen.
While attending the VFS Game Design program as a student, it became a common joke that all of my projects would somehow become epic. This was even carried over into one of the program’s more unusual offerings: the RPG Lab — a class dedicated to teaching students how to play Dungeons and Dragons. The course continues to this day, maintained through the exemplary dungeon mastering of one Diego Pons, and I’ve been lucky to teach the course alongside him for the past two years. But while Diego has been taking students on a journey that may or may not actually involve dragons, I’ve been offering a change of pace by guiding students through a Shadowrun campaign. Or three. More on that shortly.
