About « Writing Portfolio of Courtney Keene

Background

Courtney Keene began pursuing writing as a career path over 10 years ago, originally majoring in Creative Writing with a minor in English before enrolling in Westwood College’s Game Art and Design program in August of 2006. She currently maintains a 3.9 GPA and has been a fixture on the Dean’s List for almost a year and a half. In the spring of 2007 Westwood Online created a Game Design Club for students to organize themselves into teams for portfolio projects. By March a group of students under the collective name of Misfit Studios began conceptual work on Dirty, a post-nuclear FPS/RPG. Courtney joined as a Junior Designer, creating NPC profiles, plot outlines, item descriptions, and various other elements for the game. She also spent nights brainstorming with the rest of the Design team for conceptual development.

In October she began researching various established mod teams. She immediately sought out Rogue Dao Studios, a team of modders working on the Planescape Trilogy mod for Neverwinter Nights 2. She joined the team as a writer/designer on October 4th, slated to work on Purgatorio, the first installment of the Planescape Trilogy. Since then she has invested hundreds of hours into Rogue Dao’s projects, primarily contributing companion dialogue, outlines, descriptions, and various forms of narrative. She has also helped to re-organize the writing team’s assets and has provided editing and other advice for fellow team members.

In December of 2007, Courtney was promoted to Lead Writer and later to Creative Lead in charge of managing the entire design team. In her short time as a Lead she has gained valuable experience in management and the overall process of game development. She has been responsible for turning one of the most disorganized teams on the Rogue Dao staff into the single most organized and most productive team, while bringing the team members closer together as a unit and helping them individually develop their strengths and work out their weaknesses.

In May of 2008 Courtney was hired to work at Nemesis Studios as a writer for their browser-based game Goon World: Shadows of the Depression, and their MMO based off of the same IP.

In addition to working on the Rogue Dao and Nemesis Studios staff, Courtney works part-time in retail as a bookkeeper and attends school full-time via an online interface, maintaining a GPA of 3.9 after two years. As of the May term she has begun tutoring students in the Game Art and Design program. Her interests are extremely varied and include everything from video games to European history. She has a thirst for knowledge and seeks out anything she can in hopes of applying it to her writing and design work. She is self-taught in most areas, training herself to write, draw, and currently to build levels in the Unreal and Crytek editors. In her spare time she is either playing video or pen and paper games, working on personal writing/art projects, or continuing to develop her various demo projects to help improve her portfolio.

After graduating in 2009 she plans to attain a job with a game studio and make her first move out of Florida. Her major career goal is to become a writing team lead and perhaps eventually a creative director, aspiring to organize and mentor fellow writers to help them apply themselves fully and improve the quality of writing in their games.

Courtney is a member of IGDA’s special interest groups for both writers and women and plans to actively promote both areas in the years to come.