Woodland Hills Grad Builds New Career in Games

Brian Babyak made a career change from working in insurance to designing and planning in an industry most young men could only dream of – online games.

As a child, he never thought he’d be able to make games a career. Today, he is enjoying the evolution and process of producing and designing 3D images for “Questinations,” a new application on Facebook.

“Right now I am at a startup created by a guy who has a master’s in business from CMU,” Babyak said. “I met him through Pittsburgh International Game Developers at a meeting. They have meetups and he happened to be looking for someone to do 3D artwork for him and that’s how I met him, got an interview and was hired pretty quickly.”

Babyak of Forest Hills has been working at the company - V-teractive – since last March. The timing was perfect, he said.

“Whenever I had met him the first time he had been at the Art Institute earlier in the day and had received my demo and I just happened to run into him that night,” Babyak said.

A Woodland Hills High School graduate of 1998, Babyak originally studied accounting and business at Thiel College, graduating in 2002.

“I was working at State Farm for three years as a claim specialist and I went to Mechanicsburg with a friend to get my appraiser’s license for auto accidents,” he said. “I happened to bring this game that a couple of my friends and I were working on when we were little and someone said, ‘You really need to make this.’”

Babyak said he began to reevaluate his career, and wanted something he was more passionate about to become his daily work.

“I happened to talk to Jesse Schell, who owns Schell Games here in Pittsburgh and they are really well known for working with Disney,” Babyak said. “Then I decided to go to the Art Institute in 2007.”

Babyak went back to school and studied game art and design, graduating from AI in 2009. Working for a startup company has been a fun challenge for a variety of reasons.

“One of the interesting things is that things are so fluid working for a startup and things are always evolving,” he said.

With “Questinations,” the game is always being tweaked and improved.

“We are still working on additional content and giving it a facelift in the next week or so,” Babyak said. “It’s a hidden object type game and the big draw out there right now is trying to compete with your friends for the high score. We just started implementing high score of the week. My sister happened to win the first week out.”

The basic premise of the game is that participants are looking for objects in various locations around the world, with pictures of Paris or Venice. Babyak’s job is to design and hide objects throughout the picture.

“It’s just like a time killer,” he said. “One of the things I always wanted to do is create something and then watch somebody play and just get that satisfaction that I created something people enjoy.”

Babyak said now, he is lucky to do what he loves every day, which also includes coordinating the work of several designers into one game.

“There is so much planning, back and forth and give and take,” Babyak said. “Since I am producing ‘Questinations’ and also doing the 3D art for it, I get everybody together because there are a whole bunch of disciplines working together.”

Did he ever dream he’d be making the creation of games his own career?

“Obviously not,” he said. “It was just beyond my scope. When you’re 18 you think, how do you even get on a path to doing that? I am just fortunate enough that there schools and people I could talk to and got involved.”

For more information, visit www.brianbabyak.com