Interview with Mars Ashton

05 Feb 2021

Get to Know Who’s Who At GLGX 2021!

In the run up to this year’s event, we are conducting a series of interviews with presenters at Great Lakes Game Expo. We hope to channel from all corners of game development to present you with the best experience possible. So please enjoy getting to know our wonderful speakers!

Who are you?

My name is Mars Ashton. I’m currently an Assistant Professor of Game Design at Lawrence Technological University, a Quality Assurance Tester for Finji, and an Independent Game Developer. I also lead the International Game Developers Association’s Detroit Chapter, judge games as part of the Independent Game Festival. In the past I’ve consulted and coordinated the founding of several game development startups and was doing ghost and technical writing for Intel’s Developer Zone.

What are you presenting at GLGX2021?

I’m showing off my hack-n-shmup Gunsheath and giving a talk on “The Draw of Social Structures in Online Games During A Pandemic”. I hope folks enjoy them!

What got you started in game development?

Legos and the games I played growing up. I’ve always tinkered and tweaked and tried to use games as a means to creatively express myself. A few years back my Mom presented me with boxes from storage full of notebooks I filled with alternate rules for card games, board games I designed, or characters and stories I wrote. I was always looking to games as an outlet. Eventually I got into a 2 year BFA in Game Production and was already modding games like Oblivion or working on homebrew projects like Smash GP in my spare time. A month after I graduated I was given an opportunity to teach a course at ITT. I would teach and work on projects outside of that time, gradually making enough connections to find the opportunities to do so!

What games are you most inspired by?

I’m mostly inspired by the music of certain games, honestly. Soundtracks from games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy Tactics, Parasite Eve, or Fez have fueled my days and nights working on this or that project. I used to go to sleep with a disc player every night so I could day dream about all these things I was cooking up in my mind.

What has been your favorite game to work on?

I built this oddball of a game called Flux in 24 hours for a course I was taking at Michigan State University that was based on a fidget mechanic. You play a courier in a beautifully colorful world riding a motorcycle. You hit keys on a keyboard to make a “flux” number go up, which increases your speed and the volume of the music you’re listening to. The game cycled between three separate tracks, all done by the amazingly talented Dylan Packard, whenever you hit the brakes and restarted your “ride”. I loved the experience and the impact it had on players so much I made new minigames for it. The fidget thing became a typing game, or a rhythm game. I introduced an overworld with characters to meet and cosmetics to earn. I loved being able to just flood the thing with whatever I wanted to do creatively at the time! That might be why it turned out a little disjointed.

What do you think is the most important problem the game industry faces today?

One of the first panels I was on posed a question about getting into the industry and whether or not a job like Quality Assurance was a good stepping stone to do so. Folks in the panel and audience agreed, which completely dismissed the relevance of Quality Assurance as a key role and cast shadow over it as if it was only there for beginners, newbies, or people who couldn’t do anything else. This isn’t the case. This dated mentality and tone of “how things are” has caused a lot of the issues we see ourselves or hear about in the news. A lack of diversity, harassment, production methodologies that accept or encourage crunch or excessive work hours, you name it. As new generations enter the industry and thoughtful leaders work to inform, be more inclusive, and create more safe and healthy working environments I’m hopeful this will change.

Tune in for GLGX 2021 to hear more from Mars and our other presenters! We will be live from the 18th to the 21st of February on Twitch.