Stephanie Bazeley is a senior programmer in the gaming industry, with over 10 years of experience. Her job is to take what the designers of a game have created, and turn that into code that works in a computer game. She co-founded gaming company Team Junkfish whilst still at University. Their first game, Monstrum, was a survival horror game and was invented in the living room of their student house. The students were mentored on their University programme at Abertay, taught by Iain Donald. Abertay University has the UK’s oldest university programme for video games and on this course, developers like Stephanie learn C++, one of the harder coding languages.
Monstrum’s success came from using the app Steam, the equivalent of an app store for computer games. At the time, any developer had to get their project green-lit on Steam to have it uploaded – essentially the user community had to agree the game was something they wanted to play. Stephanie and her friends managed to get the game green lit in 2 weeks! The process has since changed, and users now pay $100 to enter a new game. But this means that developers have to be good at marketing and engaging with gaming influencers on Twitch and YouTube, or else the product gets lost in the amounts of new games uploaded every day.
In 2024 Stephanie became lead programmer at Team Junkfish. She has had titles published on PC, consoles, and virtual reality, from PC to tablet.