Even at 14 years old, Katie Rosell ’20 was ready to leave her mark in the video game world. All you had to do was watch her play. She owned Nintendo 64 the way Super Mario owned the best mustache.
She jumped. She ran. She saved the day. But still, something was missing.
“I started to realize, ‘Wow, I like playing games, but wouldn’t it be even more fun to make my own games?’ It just kind of hit me,” said Rosell, a game design and development major with a concentration in art and a minor in computer science.
But there was more to it than that. “Grand Theft Auto,” “Call of Duty,” the games with the big budgets and the big development teams had male protagonists.
So Rosell set out to leave her mark at her first game design camp in 2012 in suburban Boston.
“I walked into the room the first day,” Rosell said, “and I was the only girl among 38 guys — and they were all older than me.”
Today, Rosell is making her own games and working collaboratively to build more sophisticated projects. She is among the most talented artists in the GDD program and animates her characters by hand as well as with motion capture and 3-D modeling.
In the Motion Analysis Laboratory on the North Haven Campus, Rosell learned how to give life to her characters, including a fisherman. Rosell wore a special motion capture suit with sensors and pretended she was fishing — casting the line, reeling in a fish. Again and again.
The computer picked up her movements and compiled the data as 3-D modeling. Suddenly, her digital fisherman had scored the catch of the day.
“I’ve found that people see what you’re good at. Your talent speaks for itself,” Rosell said. “I just want to keep building my portfolio and getting better.”
She credits Associate Professor Elena Bertozzi, Assistant Professor Jonah Warren and Clinical Professor Juan Garbalosa, the director of the Motion Analysis Laboratory, among her mentors at Quinnipiac.
“In my major, I’ve never encountered people who’ve said, ‘Oh, she’s a girl. She can’t do this.’ I’ve never felt that vibe here,” said Rosell, whose older sister, Erika Rosell, earned her MBA from Quinnipiac in May. “It’s always just been, ‘Are you experienced enough to tackle this problem?’ That’s how the program works — and I love that so much."