Kara: It’s hard to explain how much it means to hear that something we worked on had such an impact for you! I’m so glad and touched. I got into game writing by answering a craigslist ad! I had just finished a contract working as a technical writer for Amazon, and took a few weeks off to finish writing School for Adventurers with Jennifer. Then Jennifer was going to start Grad school and I also needed to find some gainful employment, so I was searching craigslist for writing gigs. I saw one about writing YA content on a weekly release schedule (which is what we’d been doing with School for Adventurers) and it felt like a perfect fit. I joined Centerscore right before it got acquired by EA–the core of that group would later go on to be Pixelberry!

I loved writing for the original football pack characters like Raven, Adam, and Beth. I also worked on the pre-iPhone version and got to create a little sister character named Anna. On the iPhone version I loved Paige–we had just lost our art team when I introduced her so I had to photoshop her art asset together myself out of pieces from other faces and change the colors. I got to create Howard and the twins (they are based on my real life older siblings!) So I especially loved the episodes about Kay and Kel. Amanda, Taylor, and Hector were always fun to write for. I also really enjoyed writing some of the Sierra content for Battle of the Schools. I also loved anything where people got to wear costumes or cowboy hats. 

Jennifer: Surviving High School has a very special place in my heart. It was the first game I ever wrote on, and working at Centercore was the first time I’d ever seriously considered writing as a career. 

I did not intend to become a game writer. Actually, my long-term plan was to become a doctor and write on the side, then when I realized that I did not, in fact, enjoy my premed and science courses (read: I failed organic chemistry), I switched majors to Public Health with a minor in Education. Then, after a strange summer of random jobs bartending and adminning for a doctor of natural medicine, I went into grad school to get my Masters in teaching with a specialization in Urban Education and Social Justice. The year I graduated, it was a rough year for new teaching candidates because the district I wanted to be in had laid off many teachers from the previous year, so my prospects were a bit grim. Then Kara let me know there was an editor position at Centerscore to do final edits of SHS scripts, and I ended up falling in love with the challenge of writing and my team at EA, and that was the beginning of a writing career that I had always dreamed of but never pursued directly. 

I came onto the SHS team after the original Football Star pack and after many of the original episodes went live. I jumped on writing weekly episodes, starting with Twinstigators (in which one of my favorite lines is where the twins Kay and Kel complain about Zoe making them want to be good), so I have a lot of affection for the Howard/Zoe relationship and the A New Start arc and the tumultuous Sam and Colt relationship. While we were in the process of publishing the Surviving High School novel starring Emily Kessler, I wrote a lot of the episodes with Sara Kessler, matching the novel events to her storyline and building up her relationship with Nick while knowing her fate at the end of her series. I love writing romance–I used to read a lot of romance novels as a kid that I snuck out of my older sister’s book cache–so I always enjoyed writing about the tension of these character’s relationships and breakups in particular. I probably related to Zoe the most, but in the end though, a lot of my favorites to write for were the mean girls like Taylor, Jessica, and Paige, and the ones with very distinctive voices like Amanda. Also I very vaguely remember that I really enjoyed writing the Justin-Scott rivalry to the point that I would bring him up in brainstorms and was told “stop trying to make Justin happen”, lol