FIVE WITH A FALCON: Game Design Prof. Andres Gonzalez, from Game Industry to the Classroom

In this episode of Five with Falcon, Cyrus Mullen (GAME '26) talks with Prof. Andres Gonzalez, a visiting Game Design professor at Fitchburg State University with nearly 20 years of experience in the gaming industry. Transitioning from industry veteran to first-time educator, Andres shares what it’s like to step into the classroom and translate real-world experience into meaningful lessons for students.

Produced by Cyrus Mullen and Filipe Agostinho (GAME '26).  Edited and mixed by Filipe.

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Episode transcript here.

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This episode was produced in COMM 2015 Podcasting during Spring 2026.

Click here to learn more about Perseverantia.  Join us for programming updates on Instagram.  Or reach out with ideas or suggestions at podcasts@fitchburgstate.edu.

Transcript

This transcript was generated by AI robots; there may be mistakes and inaccuracies.

[ Five With theme begins ]

CYRUS MULLEN (host):  Welcome to Five with Falcon. Please introduce yourself.

PROF. ANDRES GONZALEZ:  Hi, my name is Andres Gonzalez and I'm a professor of game design here at Fitchburg State University.

[ Five With theme fades out ]

CYRUS:  Cool. Tell us about your time at Fitchburg State University. What do you do? More specifically, I guess you could say.

PROF. GONZALEZ:  Yeah. So yeah, I'm a visiting professor of game design, I should say. 

So I've been here just over a year. And it's my first time teaching ever. And so I spent almost 20 years in the games industry, you know, building games.  

And I've held any number of design positions throughout my career as a level designer, combat designer, lead combat designer, lead designer, now a game director. And so I've been through all parts of development from start to finish. 

And – I don't know, this opportunity came up for me and I thought it'd be an interesting challenge and kind of a new thing to try.

CYRUS:   That leads into the next question perfectly, like, where do you find your sense of belonging in Fitchburg State? You've only been here for like a year and a half and first time teaching.

PROF. GONZALEZ:   Yeah, mean, honestly, I'm still kind of finding my way through that. 

I think it's with actually you guys, the students. I realize that I have a wealth of experience that not even, not a lot of game developers have because of the titles that I've worked on. And this gives me an opportunity to share that with students who are coming in new and trying to form their opinions about what the industry is and trying to find their way through it. 

And I had to do that on my own and in a very different time. And I've seen the industry evolve and I've held any number of positions, worn all sorts of hats in game development. And I think it gives me a unique perspective that I can share in what works and what doesn't work so that students can – when they leave here – they can enter their professional, whatever their you know, professional endeavors may be, they can enter it with at least as much as I can offer them in terms of experience that I've lived through.

CYRUS:    What's been your greatest accomplishment here?

PROF. GONZALEZ:  I think for me, it was actually the first semester I taught here. It was the advanced game workshop class, which you guys are both in now. And it was my first time running the course and the last day where they had already turned in their projects and we were doing the postmortems and we were just playing through what they had built and – and just wrapping up the course.  

About half of the class stayed behind and one of the students was like, I almost don't want to leave. That to me was very rewarding because it felt like they weren't there just to be in class, like they actually wanted to be there, that they felt that the class obviously was of value to them. And that was, for me, that was the biggest accomplishment so far.

CYRUS:   Yeah, hopefully we can do that for you this semester too. [ laughs ]  And in what ways have you grown here and transformed during your time here?

PROF. GONZALEZ:  I think I've mentored a lot of people throughout the course of my career. I've been the lead and I've had, like, teams of people under me. 

But this is the first time I've had to frame the things that I know in a way that's accessible to people that I can't assume they know anything about it – in a way that lets them access it. So it's actually made me rethink or look at things that I know very well from experience, reframe them in ways that I didn't really expect when I first started here.

Like I knew that I would have to figure out a way to convey some of this knowledge and experience, but I didn't realize that it would have an impact on me, on how I looked at things. So I think that's been the biggest thing so far.

[ Five With a Falcon theme fades in ] 

CYRUS:    Amazing. Thank you for your time and this has been 5 with Falcon. Thank you.

PROF. GONZALEZ:   Yeah, no problem. Thank you.

[ Five With a Falcon theme fades out ] 

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Matt Baier:  You're listening to Perseverantia, the Fitchburg State Podcasting Network.

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