REPORTED BY HUMANS SINCE 2009
This is How I Got Here, a series where we chart the career journeys of technologists. Want to tell your story? Get in touch.
At seven years old, Ashley Guchhait already knew she wanted to make video games. The only question was how to get there.
Coming from a traditional arts background as a high school student in Howard County, Guchhait enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) to study interactive arts and expand into digital design. Inspired by games like Pokémon and Animal Crossing, she began developing her debut game Squirrely Roo Rabbit as a senior. In the game, Squirrely Roo teams up with her chameleon friend Cammie to explore new worlds and solve puzzles rooted in color theory.
“A game could function perfectly, but if the experience doesn’t leave an impression, nobody’s going to come back to it.”
She cofounded Boba Studios in 2018 and has been developing Squirrely Roo Rabbit ever since. As her team pushes for a 2028 release, it helps support the work through an Etsy shop that sells plushies and other character merchandise. Boba Studios also received a grant from a MICA venture competition to support its launch.
Guchhait spent seven years on the board of the International Game Developers Association’s DC chapter, where she focused on growing its membership — particularly among women and developers of color.
While Baltimore County is home to several large video game companies, Guchhait prefers the close-knit feel of a smaller team. In this edition of How I Got Here, she shares her passion for indie games and advice on breaking into the field. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
One of the things I really like about MICA’s program — and why I’d recommend that if you want to design video games, you should go to an art school — is that making a video game itself is treated as an art. You’re designing for the player’s experience, which isn’t something you typically get just by taking a computer science course or majoring in CS. The program at MICA really focuses on game design as an art and on crafting the experiences and emotions you want players to feel.
Those are the things that make people enjoy your game — it’s not just about how it works functionally. A game could function perfectly, but if the experience doesn’t leave an impression, nobody’s going to come back to it. That’s one of the things I really like about the program. But at the same time, we did coding every day as part of the curriculum.
The day-to-day varies a lot. We have studio days where we’re just working on the game, which could mean my cofounder and I sitting at our desks in our apartment working on computers, or sketching things out to figure them out. We also have a person who makes music for us, so everything in our game is built by our small team. Sometimes we’ll have a call to do a critique, especially for things like sound.
A lot of the day might be spent at the computer, but there are other tasks too. For example, when we ran a Kickstarter, we had to pack orders, and now we’re slowly transitioning our Etsy shop to our own website. That means pulling merchandise and packing orders when someone places one.
A big part of what we do also involves events. Events serve a couple of purposes. Video games are an interactive medium, so we can’t just launch a game and leave it — people need to experience it and understand how it works. We go to events to make sure the game works smoothly and to give players a fun experience, while also showcasing our work.
We’ve talked a lot with artist circles we’re part of, including indie developers and people in the indie dev publishing industry and things can get pretty predatory. We want to make sure that, in the end, we own our IP and get to decide if another Squirrely Roo game happens.
We don’t want to hand that off to someone else and later be told, “No, you can’t make this anymore; it’s being sold to another team.” That’s something we’ve seen a lot in the indie game world — games we loved in the first one or two installments get sold to another team, and the subsequent titles aren’t the same or don’t maintain the same quality.
If you’re thinking about getting into indie or games in general, I’d ask yourself: What do you want out of it? If it’s about having your voice in games, I’d say just start making them. There aren’t a ton of opportunities to intern as a game designer — usually, the people who founded the studio are the ones directing the game, and even when those roles exist, there are very few of them. The industry’s gotten a little better at teaching game design, but it’s still not where it should be.
One of the best pieces of advice I got back in college was to just do it yourself and figure it out. And yeah, that can feel overwhelming, like, “where do I even start?” But it really is the best way to start putting your voice into something and practicing those skills. Even if you end up joining a bigger team down the line, you’ll already have that portfolio and experience to back you up.
Maria Eberhart is a 2025-2026 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs emerging journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported in part by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation and the Abell Foundation. Learn more about supporting our free and independent journalism.
The hard-to-commercialize and life-saving tech garners federal and VC investment as a part of a National Science Foundation Engine in the state.
At the Quantum World Congress, local and international figureheads discussed how to build the sector during the “Year of Quantum.”
The company hopes the new credential will make it more attractive to employees who value ethics and impact.
At the second Johns Hopkins Innovation Summit, research teams and companies pitched to investors and discussed a challenging funding climate.
It’s time to start seeing the scene as more than just the “meds,” Chariot Solutions chief marketing officer Tracey Welson-Rossman writes.
Gov. Moore and Mayor Scott and more of Baltimore’s boosters spent the economic development organization’s latest annual meeting championing recent momentum and prominent startups.
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
All News
Philadelphia
Pittsburgh
Maryland
DC
Delaware
Omaha
National
Civic Tech, Policy & Government
Entrepreneurship & Business
Workforce & Jobs of the Future
Jobs Board
Preferred Partners
Advertise With Us
Login | Logout
Post a Job
Manage Job Posts
Edit Company Page
Client FAQ
Account Settings
Our Team
Our Services
Strategic Vision
Ethics in Journalism
Privacy Policy
Report an Issue
Contact Us
Sign in by entering the code we sent to , or clicking the magic link in the email.
Read our Privacy Policy here.