AshleyPinnick
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How to get a coding job at Google with an art degree
I wasn't really aware as a kid that game development was a career that I could have, especially from an artist's perspective." That's Ashley Pinnick, a 28-year-old artist and game developer living in San Francisco. Pinnick is a VR Technical Artist for Google, where she's working on Playground, the company's augmented reality app. But three years ago, she was an art school graduate and self-taught virtual reality developer with an uncertain future at her feet. "I was playing games and I knew that there was art there," Pinnick said. "I just didn't put two and two together."
I lost my friend, but his voice and music live on in my game
The desert shouldn't exist. At the very least, people shouldn't live there. We did, only not by choice. When I decided to develop a virtual reality game based on my simultaneous repulsion and nostalgia for my hometown of Dewey, Arizona, I asked my friend and business partner Cody to score it. Cody and I met almost 10 years ago as young, bored kids who shared a love for punk and hardcore music; kids who also shared a mutual disdain for our desert roots. While I eventually escaped Arizona, moving to California for college and finding an outlet in art, Cody stayed in Phoenix, becoming a fixture in the local music scene, and blossoming into a writer, poet and killer guitar player. I knew he would be the perfect person to make sense of it all: the desolate landscape, the hilarious rednecks, the ramshackle towns and the searing heat. I was ecstatic when he agreed and couldn't wait to get started.
'Citizen Kane' to 'Call of Duty': The rise of video games in universities
Picture an art school. Visualize the hallways of a university dedicated to the arts, the classrooms lined with paint tubes, charcoal sticks and nude models. Imagine the galleries where outgoing seniors present their final projects. Consider the thick-framed glasses that sit atop students' noses as they sketch, sculpt, write and design the things that lurk in their wildest daydreams. Now picture a creation so strange that the school's professors aren't sure how to critique it from an artistic angle, let alone how to assign it a grade. In Pasadena, California, Art Center College of Design graduate Ashley Pinnick faced this problem in her last semester, with her final project: a video game.
