Tristan Begin, a 2019 Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Game Design graduate, started making games as an 11-year-old. Dedicating himself to a future in the game industry at such a young age, he devoted most of his free time growing up to making dozens of personal game projects, going so far as to start a game design club at his high school in Michigan that’s still in operation today. Given all that prep, Begin started his DigiPen student career off with a bang. His first game, Mika, created on a five-person team, won DigiPen’s Best Freshman Game award. He pulled the feat off again as the creative director on the 11-person project Utomah, which won DigiPen’s Best Sophomore Game award.
Begin made an unusual decision for his final DigiPen game project. With his senior game, typically the most intensive and high-polish project DigiPen students work on, he decided to go solo, mounting a one-man development campaign for his action platformer, Aftermoor. Set in a strange realm of the dead, the game finds players hooking onto enemy projectiles and ramming them back into baddies in an attempt to solve the mystery of your circumstances and return your body to the living. Begin is responsible for all aspects of the game – programming, design, art, animation, music and sound – a gargantuan effort undertaken so he could experience every element of the development process for himself. That hard work paid off, landing Aftermoor a spot in the Intel University Games Showcase at the 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We sat down with Begin to chat about his one-man project in the video above.