Madison Teen Video Game Designer

Since the day his parents brought home a Nintendo 64 at age three, Trey Hale has had a passion for video games.

"I played that thing to death," he said. "Eventually I decided I wanted to make my own games. I've always noticed slight flaws in the games, such as the inability to save as many times I needed or the exclusion of simple special effects. I just wanted to be able to make them better."

His dream has come true at the early age of 17. Currently, Hale is a volunteer tester and designer for an up and coming video game company, Stencyl, which is owned and operated by Jon Chung. Hale has one game fully developed with the company, a second in the test stage, and a third project well underway.

Hale, a homeschooled high school junior, got involved with Stencyl simply by browsing the Internet for more information on coding and new techniques in making animations, all of which he taught himself.

"I was just surfing the Internet one day back when I was still learning the big book of code and I stumbled upon a site named Stencyl. So I made an account there and showed them so of my graphic work and two years later they started up a sub group. I talked to one of the guys in the group about me joining and a month later everyone in the group was granted full access to Stencyl and we all became volunteer testers," Hale said.

Since November 2009, Hale has been living the dream--testing and designing games. "As a tester, I use the program just like I would every day. If I run into a problem with software glitches I sign onto a forum and tell the designer where the problem occurred," he said.

As a designer, Hale works in the company's program Stencyl to write his coding but does all his graphic work in Microsoft Paint. He creates very detailed characters by painting and shading one pixel of an element at a time.

"I've been practicing for about seven years; I just work pixel by pixel," he said. The sprites, or individual frames of each character, Hale creates are incredibly detailed and often use up to five different shades to achieve the perfect color. In a month's time, Hale has managed to draw close to 75 sprites for his newest game, Loco Motive.

In the future, Hale would like to attend Calhoun Community College and learn how to use Photoshop to further advance his career in designing video games. "I'm looking into Calhoun and also looking at moving over from MS Paint into Photoshop and using 3D modeling. MS Paint is great but actually can be limiting at some point. Great for the basic stuff in getting started but I can't make anything look real," he said.

"I've always planned to retail this game Loco Motive and hopefully one of my others, Galaxy Star," Hale said. According to Hale, once Stencyl is fully launched, the company will implement browser based games under which users will be able to pay for and download a game much like itunes today. He hopes his designs will be included in those available for purchase.

This article originally appeared in the Madison Weekly.