Mason Crochetiere
Technical Designer
Project Timeline
Welcome to the Project Timeline! Here you'll find information and updates about all of my relevant projects and experiences, not just my games. They each demonstrate my skills and interests in a variety of areas.
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The timeline goes from soonest (at the top) to oldest (at the bottom). Most images on this page link to external websites where you can learn more!
Project: HERO 2024
March - August 2024 After the success of Project: HERO as a game concept project last year, I figured it the perfect candidate to take for my… grand machinations. The summary here is that Project: HERO 2024 was an experimental game development studio designed to give as many learning opportunities to up-and-coming game developers as I could gather. As a hero shooter, Project: HERO provided the perfect framework - developers created levels and characters without having the kind of interdependencies that would have made directing 60 people an absolute nightmare. …Not that directing 60 people WASN’T an absolute nightmare. It was, and I learned a lot about people management and my skills as a leader as a result. The project was the kind of learning experience that no one has ever attempted before, and for that I have learned things about game development that I would never have come across by simply following Champlain’s four-year path.
Champlain
Game Academy
July - August 2024 After the Montreal Summer program, I returned to Champlain’s campus to be a Program Mentor for the Champlain Game Academy. This role came from a lot of the same space as my time in the Resident Advisor role: providing guidance to students in the Pre-College Programs while organizing awesome events for them with my game design skills. It’s always awesome to support people and to watch them grow over the course of an educational journey. This was no different, both for all of my program mentees as well as everyone I worked with to bring the program together!
Rock Paper Chisel
March - April 2024 Rock Paper Chisel was my final group project for Game Studio I. Our team of 8 was given 6 weeks to create an educational game for a young audience about stone carving. As always, I acted in a producer, designer, and programmer role. The game we were really excited to land on was something almost entirely experiential - you learn about stone carving by doing it and using the medium of games to its full potential.
Game Architecture Final
March - April 2024 One exciting class I took during Spring ‘24 was Game Architecture. In this game programming class, we learned about the building blocks of a game engine - I literally programmed an update function. That’s wild! Our final project was in a group, where I teamed up with Will Mansfield to create a horizontal shooter where you play as a dragon. Charge fireballs and speed through tailwinds to defeat a boss with intense bullet patterns.
Fiendish Furnishing
Feb 2024 - March 2024 Fiendish Furnishing was my first digital game project for Game Studio I, where I worked with a team of 6 as producer, designer, and gameplay programmer. Summon a demon, then redecorate your house in its honor with themed props that you can decorate for maximum customizability. This project served as my chance to get familiar with the Atlassian Suite and communicating with other game developers in disciplines outside of my own by leading meetings and creating documentation.
Montreal Summer Program
May - June 2024 At the start of this year’s summer, I participated in Champlain Abroad’s Montreal Summer program. One month abroad in Montreal to take two core classes - everything I needed to expand my perspectives even further. With the guidance of the faculty, we studied art and science in the context of the city. Trips to official places like the Biodome and the observatory paired with less corporate opportunities like local restaurants and youth organizations showed me that a nuanced understanding of life is one that needs to be holistically pursued. Top it all off with a voyage to see every delicious ice cream parlor before they all close when I return in the Spring and you’ve got a truly incredible experience.
Champlain Splatoon Esports
Aug 2023 - Sept 2024 One of my greater projects in the 2023-2024 year was the founding of Champlain College Esports’ Splatoon teams. Splatoon has always had a special place in my heart, so I took the opportunity to ignite its standing interest in the community into something greater. We launched with one team - Cerulean - in the fall. The team performed so well in the Collegiate Cephalopod Association’s league that semester that they were pushed to Division 2 (one from the top!) in Spring 2024. We also established a second team that semester and hosted a 50-person bingo event to celebrate the release of the Side Order DLC. Most excitingly, we were given a grant from SGA to bring Cerulean to Riptide - the largest in-person Splatoon tournament in the west!
Elevator Pitch Finalist
Spring 2024 I participated in Champlain College’s annual Elevator Pitch competition this year as an entrepreneur. As always, I took a unique approach to the prompt and used it as a jumping off point to discuss my ambitions for Project: HERO. As a large-scale volunteer game development opportunity, it’s not quite equivalent with a business, but I can talk about it in that frame of reference. Doing so taught me a lot about the true vision of the project, which was impressive enough to make me a finalist for the competition. Then I went on stage the penultimate day and forgot my entire pitch plan despite reviewing it seconds before. Whoops.
Capstone Voice Acting
Spring 2024 In the Spring ‘24 semester I had the opportunity to be a voice actor for multiple games created by this year’s graduating seniors as a part of Game Studio III. I play the noble Warrior in Mid-Death Crisis and the timid Sniff in Molementum. It was awesome to have the opportunity to interface with more advanced developers and learn more about their process - I even got to go on stage during the Senior Show with Molementum!
Champlain College Year 2
Aug 2023 - May 2024 My sophomore year at Champlain College has been an interesting one. This year, I've taken a lot more time to focus on my abilities as a leader in the production space while still focusing on honing my design skills. I took Game Technology II and Principles of Game Design, and am in progress taking Level Design and Game Architecture. When it comes to leadership, I took Intro to the Game Industry last semester, which put me in the shoes of a producer-slash-businessperson to learn about game pitches and the rest of the industry. Most importantly, I am finally in Game Studio I, a class where I get to work interdisciplinarily with my other students to make games. This is where all of my skills in design, programming, and leadership come together - it's the one thing I've been waiting for this whole time.
Resident Advisor
Aug 2023 - Apr 2024 As a resident advisor at Champlain College, I am one of the most important student leaders to the residential experience. Since receiving weeks of formal training, I've worked hard to enforce college policy and create a positive community for residents to live in. I am especially fond of my creative direction in creating events, whether that be hosting make-a-cake nights or using my game design muscles to create a custom TTRPG for a beginner group!
Overwatch Esports Year 2
Jul 2023 - Apr 2024 I maintained a position on Overwatch Baja throughout the 2023-2024 academic year. It is always a delight to work with the team and see each other grow - we advanced an NECC division (From Emergents in 2023 to Challengers in Fall 2023 to Champions in Spring 2024 each semester. We even took home the regional championship in Fall 2023!
Testing Liaison
Nov 2023 Near the end of the fall '23 semester, I had the opportunity to help the developers of Agricosmic test their game at Champlain's main campus, as its developers were studying abroad. I facilitated the test by setting it up, helping them aggregate user data, and by working with the playtesters to ensure the team got all of the information they needed.
​Check the game out here.​
HERO: Voices & Velociraptors
Dec 2023-Jan 2024 Over the winter break, I put a big expansion together for Project: HERO. I mean that by our team size - we went from a team of 7 to a team of over 20! I wanted to see what a larger development environment might look like now, so that I could put together a strong plan for development during Summer 2024. We created two new heroes - Princess Skullcrusher and the Velociwrangler - and added a full suite of voice lines to 4 of the now 5 heroes. Check out the 2024 Summer release of Project: HERO to see all the new content!
Tetris 12
October - December 2023 For my Principles of Game Design class, I created Tetris 12 - a 12 player version of the classic game where players work to master a new economy layered on top of the gameplay. This was a chance for me to flex my technical muscles. Tetris 12 is fully networked using Fishnet Networking and the Playflow Cloud. It also comes with full-fledged AI NPCs to take over if you don't have 12 players.
Project HERO
Jun-Aug 2023 The origins of Project: HERO lie in the summer of 2023. Acting as the product owner and team leader, I organized a group of 6 other peers from my first year at Champlain College to create a single player first-person hero shooter. I guided the team’s creative and programming decisions, and designed and implemented the majority of the core gameplay design and features.
2D Platformer
March 2023 Our big midterm project in Game Technology I was to create a 2D Platformer in Unity. I went all out in developing a game based on physics-based movement, a grappling hook, and short, objective-focused levels that optimized a condensed gameplay experience. I even went back at the start of the summer to double the size of the game, creating new levels and features in just a week!
Resident Advisor Training
Feb-Mar 2023 During the spring semester I took part in Champlain’s Resident Advisor class, a 6-week leadership course designed to prepare prospective RA candidates for the following academic year, where I learned about how to better empathize with others, lead events, and act as a leadership figure on campus. I was resultantly offered a position as an RA for the 2023-2024 year!
Val-l3y Design
2018-2021 My first big experience with focused, iterative game design was the time I spent creating content for a homebrew TTRPG, Val-l3y, during my high school years. I became very familiar with the TTRPG’s core systems and could easily iterate on the designs I or others had made. I created a huge variety of classes, created reworks for classes already in the main rulebook, and led as well as participated in multiple campaigns.
The Legend is Born
2021
Co. Lab Designer
Feb-Apr 2023 During my second semester at Champlain College I was a Co. Lab Designer at the Emergent Media Center. I was taught skills regarding wider human-centered design theory, including empathy maps, design thinking, and the design process, which I used alongside team Horse On A Beach to work on an accessibility project for Champlain College.
Leahy Center Internship
May-Aug 2023 This summer I had the opportunity to intern at the Leahy Center at Champlain College on a cybersecurity project for the United States Secret Service. I worked in a professional environment utilizing my coding skills, version control software, and a variety of standard Agile development methodologies.
Champlain College Year 1
Aug 2022 - May 2023 This academic year was my freshman experience at Champlain College as a Game Design Major. I took a variety of courses that taught me key skills that I can use as a designer, particularly including Visual Communication In Game Design and Game Technology. I also took two programming courses, Intro to Game Design & Game History (each of which staged me as the leader of various team projects), and four Core classes that sought to improve my logical thinking. In addition, I also worked consistently on campus as a Facilities Assistant and helped the Event Center set up spaces for various campus events big and small.
Overwatch Esports Year 1
Aug 2022 - Jun 2023 I was a member of Champlain College Esports’ Overwatch teams during the 2022-2023 academic year. In the Fall semester I competed on their Teal team as a DPS player, then was promoted to play as Baja’s Main Support for the spring semester. CCE Overwatch Baja even went on to win the nationals finals of the NECC’s Emergents division!
Eagle Scout Project
May 2021/2022 In 2021 my career in Scouting hit its apex as I worked to earn my Eagle Rank, one of the highest honors in the program. My Eagle Scout Project was the creation of a food pantry for the Wilbraham Public Library, which took advantage of a previously unused space to support the local community. I earned the rank in October of 2021, and my Eagle ceremony took place in May of 2022.
Monkey Quest Reborn
Oct 2019 - Jan 2021 Back in 2019 I had the opportunity to work on Monkey Quest Reborn, a revival project seeking to recreate the original experience that Monkey Quest had created many years ago before its shutdown. I worked as a developer on the game, eventually shifted to be its lead developer, and completed a variety of core game features prior to the game’s shutdown in 2021. It was my first experience with version control software.