By day, Morgan Taylor is the clerk at Lake George’s Town Planning and Zoning Department. But by night, she’s the designer and artist for a video game called Dressed to Kill.
“It’s about a fashionista who wants to be a runway superstar model,” says Taylor. “She can’t break into the industry, so she’s just gone crazy and is killing her way to the top like an assassin.”
Taylor’s been working on Dressed to Kill with a group of friends for over two years. It functions like a card game, where “you start by picking out an outfit, and, you know, the outfit makes the person,” Taylor explains. “The outfit sort of determines what kind of cards you encounter throughout the game.”
This isn’t just a hobby for Taylor. She studied video game design in college, and used to work as a 3D artist for a Virtual Reality company.
Taylor explains that coders build the video game’s ‘brain.’ Basically, when the player does one thing, it knows how to react. Her job is to design what players see.
“I’m sort of in the middle,” she says. “The player will see a button. I would make the button. The player will see, you know, a 2D character. I would draw the 2D character, cut it out so they can use it.”
Taylor’s work blends digital skills and creativity, but she says there are some “tricky bits” and technical constraints when you’re working with video games, “because you have to make sure it can run on whatever the person is trying to access the software on.”
Taylor and her friends have been working on their game since 2023. She spends her evenings and weekends developing it. Her team meets every Tuesday night for a “stand-up,” which is the tech industry’s version of show and tell, where everyone goes around and says what they’ve been working on.
Right now, Taylor says they have a “capital P prototype.” They’re working on developing their “vertical slice,” a demo with basic versions of every system that shows their vision for the game.
In December, they showed Dressed to Kill at the first Lake George Games Expo, which Taylor helped organize. They also have a demo version up on a website called Itch.io, which Taylor describes as a “very laissez-faire, open, ‘just throw your video games on here’ website.”
When the game is complete, Taylor says they’re likely release it first on Steam, which allows people to play on their computers. “Hopefully, you know, if it’s popular,” she says, “we would love to put it on like PlayStation, Switch, that kind of thing.”
Would Taylor ever want to do this kind of thing full-time? That’s a tricky question. It was her original plan, and until last spring, she was doing it!
Taylor’s originally from New Jersey. She moved to Lake George in 2021. And she was working a 9-to-5 doing 3D design remotely.
But after moving here, Taylor wanted to feel more in touch with her community. She ended up leaving her design job to work in town government.
“I was working from home up here, and I would just be sitting there wishing I could do something to help,” Taylor remembers. “Being at the nexus of my community at the planning and zoning department is so exciting, because it’s just so easy to try and build stuff and figure out how to improve things.”
Taylor takes minutes at board meetings and answers zoning questions from the public. She’s also been involved in a feral cat program and organized volunteer ‘weed wrangling.’ She says she’s really proud of the community service she provides at her day job – and how she’s balanced it with her passion for video game design.
“I’ve always liked sort of doing a lot of different stuff,” she says, “and that’s part of what I enjoy about my life right now.”
A few years into living in Lake George, Taylor says she’s excited to be an active member of her community – while getting to scratch that creative itch.
Nora Kenyon contributed to this story.
Major support for North Country at Work comes from the Adirondack Community Foundation.
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