Winston Powell, Game Developer From Start to Finish

Winston Powell as seen by his friends

It's late on a Sunday night, and the Feb 14th release date for an iPhone game called "A Plant's Life" is fast approaching. Winston Powell, the artist for the two man Retora Games Studio, which created the game recalled the play test that was done earlier in the week and said, "We found a lot of things wrong with the game, and that kind of worried me."

   Powell is a short blonde haired 22-year-old Northfield, Mass. native, who had recently graduated from the University of Advancing Technology in 2011 before being swept away into the world of independent game making in Tempe, Ariz. He works with his business partner Tyler Coleman, in a small apartment creating games contracted from other companies. Powell has been working his way up to this since as early as high school, and has learned a lot along the way. From college, his ideas about game development has vastly changed, and now that he understands the work involved in making a game his goals are very different from what they were before.

In the beginning, Powell had always felt differently about games than most people. "I always appreciated them on a higher level than the average person," Powell said when recalling his childhood. He referred to video games like "Shadow of the Colossus," and how he was more interested in the art of games instead of just how fun they were. It was not until he started going to Pioneer Regional Valley School that he started to think about game development after talking to his long time friend, Iain Barrett-Byrnes. They would often stay after school tinkering with game engines and 3D models and eventually Powell expanded this into making multiplayer maps for his friends in many of the games they would play. "Everyone had Counter-Strike and Garry's Mod, that was a huge part of my social life modding, which is a term for adding your own content such as levels or items to, Counter-Strike and Garry's Mod," Powell said after explaining that a large part of high school was spent playing games with friends.

"He was always making elaborate mansions and other awesome maps for the whole group to play on," said James Hubert, who is one of Powell's high school friends. He explained how he and others, in their group of friends, would be the ones to play and use whatever Powell added to games to test it out for him. Hubert then went on to say that he was not surprised that Powell would go on to pursue game development after graduating from high school. "It just always seemed to be the thing he focused on," Hubert said.

After high school Powell went to the University of Advancing Technology in Arizona to learn how to make games. When asked why it was the school he chose to go to, Powell said that once he learned about the school from a visiting representative to his high school. From the way the man talked about how they teach people to make games, Powell knew it was for him.

When asked if it was a difficult decision to leave Powell said, "At this point in my life, I was displaced and detached from friends and family. I was at the point in my life I was ready to leave." He warmed up quickly after arriving as he found how many more things there were to do in Tempe, Ariz. then there was to do in rural Western Massachusetts.

However, Powell did not leave his hometown completely behind. Powell said, "My mom gets empty nest syndrome." He is always sure to call his mother to fill her in on what is going on with this life, he says it makes it easier for her after both he and his older sister, Dakota Powell, left their childhood home.

Once at the university, Powell found that he had no idea what he wanted to do in game development. Being a game programmer was definitely not his thing, and he found that game designing was a lot more work than he thought, with having to meticulously design every part of a game. He said, "I really had no idea about the different jobs, I didn't realize until after my first semester that I wanted to be an artist." Powell stuck with that realization to eventually become an art director working on games.

It was also where he met Tyler Coleman, his friend and the founder of the Retora Games studio. Mirroring his friendship with Barrett-Byrnes, they both belonged to a game development club working on games in their free time. After working so much together in school, Coleman said, "He was the one artist that was a consistently hard worker, and he continues to impress me with his abilities." Coleman then hired Powell to be the art director for Retora Games once they graduated from college.

Starting off as a small team, there were times when Powell was living with Coleman at his house and even working from there. Describing the time, Coleman said, "It was quite a strange period. In the one month he was there, we had a mouse infestation, multiple parties, and all sorts of crazy things go on." They even went to big game developer conferences and met many top people in the industry, such as Jenova Chen of That Game Company.

Eventually the strange times paid off, and they were able to release their first game in 2011 "Hello Color" on the iPhone platform. This was a great first game for Retora Games and Powell himself. It became a 4-star rated game and was even featured in the iTunes App Store.

Since then Powell has worked on multiple games for Retora Games. Whenever he is able to flex his artistic muscles, he focuses on whatever humor he can get from the art style. "My main goal and main inspiration is trying to make the funniest thing on a sprite, which is an object in a video game, to make someone happy watching it," Powell said after describing what motivates the art he uses in his games. He was able to show this in "Adventure Time Mega Mini-Boss Mission Gauntlet," created for the Adventure Time Game Jam, where he was able to do a two dimensional retro art style mimicking the way games looked in the early 1990's. that was praised by many of the people who played it. The game went on to win third place in the game jam, where everyone was challenged to make a game in two days or less, a fact that Powell is very proud of.

Now that "A Plant's Life" is finally released to the public, Powell's latest work is shown off in "A Plant's Life" and much of the stress he felt earlier has been relieved. He was able to say, " I've been playing it myself, to me in my mind the game was really broken, but now that I've played it I don't see those things anymore. I'm really happy with the way it has turned out personally."