Ahead of the Game
With one of the first computer science departments in the country and a renowned arts program, the College of Charleston was the perfect university for him to continue his education. S.E. Schoemann, assistant professor of computer science, taught him in two classes, where he emerged as one of her standout students because of his talent and drive to improve. Koch is constantly applying his skills to different art forms like album covers, comic books, oil painting and graphic design, and now has a lucrative side gig making original art for video games like Team Fortress 2.
“David has a strong and distinct sense of visual style that made his work in both games and 3D modeling really stand out,” Schoemann says.
“His digital artwork has a unique and offbeat aesthetic that really brings it to life. In our game class, for example, he made a brilliantly wacky single-player tennis game where the player has to move the court to play. I was happy, but not too surprised, to learn that he had found a way to use his skills outside of the classroom. It’s always great to see talented students forging creative careers that blend their technical expertise with their digital art skills.”
Koch enjoys creative coding classes because they go beyond the set of instructions and tasks typical of traditional coding classes. Instead, he developed his own problems and learned how to solve them, which made him more invested in learning coding.
His favorite class, however, was Game Programming, for which he collaborated with his team of classmates to develop a dueling-themed rhythm game where players battle to keep time with the background music. Koch developed shaders – small programs that influence the way objects in a game appear in various circumstances – for the visuals on the main menu of their game.
“Over the years I have gotten better at tackling new problems,” says Koch. “Throughout my college journey, I have learned to analyze what other people have done in their games and their art. One of the things that I am proudest of in this class is making the 2D image on the main menu of a game rotate, making it appear 3D, kind of like the main menu of the game Minecraft.”
Koch considers himself an artist more than anything else, noting he has dabbled in 10 different arts media.
“I love all of them, and I want to put them to different uses,” he says, adding that he hopes to continue to create art on commission. “I would like to collaborate with artists on large-scale projects, and computing in the arts has added a new dimension to my creative abilities.”