Alicia Fortier

After graduating from Concordia, what was the professional path you followed and how are you using your degree in your career?

I participated in the Ubisoft Game Lab competition in 2014 with a team of 7 other Concordia students. We created a prototype called Morphlers, a 2v2 Kirby-gone-sour multiplayer arena game. We won best Art Direction at the contest and Ubisoft contacted me afterwards to offer me an internship which turned into my permanent position. My Computation Arts degree is incredibly valuable in my work: it gives me the independence to solve problems on my own and the vocabulary to communicate effectively with both artists and programmers. During the last year of my degree when I knew I wanted to go into games, Computation Arts offered me the flexibility and framing I needed to make a wide variety of interactive projects and experiment. I really resented the fact that the program never taught us how to do things at the beginning of my degree, but I am now self-sufficient and able to tackle subjects I do not understand with the confidence that I will figure them out. You will get out of Computation Arts what you put in, it’s a degree that requires a certain amount of self-determination and perseverance to succeed.

Are there particular designers or professors that have influenced you?

Joey Berzowska believed in me and kept me in the program when I was going through a hard time and almost dropped out.

The first year was really hard, coming from a Fine Arts background I had limited experience with electronics and programming and really felt overwhelmed, but she reassured me and made sure I signed up for the right classes to stay engaged.

David Johnston (Jhave) made me fall in love with the program. I took his class (Networks and Navigation) and realized that I love working with interactivity and that I could develop the technical skills required to make my own projects.

Jason Lewis gave me a lot of independence in my Research Assistant position and Obx Labs and I learned so much from the experience of developing some interactive poetry demoes and by teaching game design and coding in the Skins game workshop.

Jonathan Lessard was supportive of my team in the Game Lab competition and gave us invaluable feedback during the production of our prototype.

Elio Bidinost who ran the Sensor Lab helped me learn electronics and Arduino. I spent so many hours in that lab fiddling with circuits that should work but didn’t, his patience and creativity was motivating and kept me pushing forward.