Michael
Gooch
WHO IS MICHAEL GOOCH?
Michael Gooch is a Game Designer with a knack for wearing many hats and is currently based out of Quebec, Canada.
He got his start making card and board games at 11 years old in the rural hills of New Brunswick. After high school graduation in 2008, he later pursued UOIT’s Game Development & Entrepreneurship program in Oshawa, Ontario. Wanting to broaden his horizons, he switched focus to Psychology and Film at the University of Manitoba.
After completing university in 2013, he traveled to England and Scotland and met with local independent developers, which inspired him to kick start his career in game development once returning to Canada.
From 2014 onward, he spent all his free time in the pursuit of becoming part of and growing within the game industry, completing game jam projects, releasing Gokstad: Norse Strategy and then moving to Montreal in 2017 to continue raising the bar for what he could achieve.
After moving to Montreal, he was hired at Square-Enix and formed a co-operative with Jordan Cogswell called Rusted Delusion Studios, in which they released their first title after a year and four months of development called On The Flip Side.
After working as a scripter for QA automation at Square-Enix for a year, he made his next big career jump, joining the team at Larian Studios working as a Gameplay Scripter on Baldur’s Gate 3.
He continues to grow and refine his craft, leaving his mark on the industry and is always looking for new relationships to foster and opportunities to garner in the fantastic world of game development.
TITLE
Game Designer
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Below is a collection of games I have worked on.
Work History
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2016
2015 - 2016 Michael released his first finished game "Tale of the Eclipse" onto Kongregate. He then started building Gokstad and attended GDC for the first time.
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2018
2017 - 2018 After releasing Gokstad he moved to Montreal, Quebec. He started his career in QA at Square-Enix working on Life is Strange: Before the Storm and Just Cause 4.
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2020
2019 - 2020 He then began development for "On The Flip Side" at the start of 2019. He helped in the task of porting the Tomb Raider Trilogy to Stadia and was promoted to Scripting Senior on Marvels Avengers. On The Flip Side then launched in Q1 of 2020 under Rusted Delusion Studios, but the world got a bit awkward shortly after and told everyone to go home.
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2021
2021 - CURRENT After making games play themselves with the magic of automation for most of 2020, he decided to close out the chapter in his QA career start a new one working at Larian Studios as a Gameplay Scripter.
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20XX
20XX - ???? After losing the great war to the Undefined Ones, humanity has fallen back into the dark ages, using crude machines to connect and upload our brains into one collective conscience, where the now ethereal Michael Gooch continues procrastinating on that one prototype.