About

I am David Cannon Drake: writer, programmer, game designer, and founder of Golden Drake Studios. I love exploring the natural and cultural beauty of this world and countless fictional worlds as well as creating my own worlds for others to explore.

This website is a place for me to showcase my indie games and other creative works, post my thoughts on various topics, and occasionally share experiences from my personal and professional life.

As a gamer and game developer, I focus primarily on roleplaying, adventure, open world, strategy, and educational games. Realism, variability, and autonomy are the design qualities I most highly appreciate and strive for. As a reader and writer, my interests center around philosophy of mind, Chinese philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, anthropology, astrobiology, speculative fiction, poetry, history, anarchism, socialism, and forms of democracy. My other hobbies include biking, hiking, video editing, guitar, and iaido.

For those interested in my professional background, please refer to my résumé and portfolio. For those curious about my overall life story, read on.

Early Years

I was born along the beautiful California coast and raised among the red rocks of southern Utah. Much of my youth was spent exploring and investigating nature, getting into mischief with friends, reading a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction, writing and illustrating my own fantasy and science fiction stories, playing various board games, card games, tabletop wargames, pen-and-paper RPGs, and video games, and creating games of my own, including a dinosaur-themed board game and a handful of adventure games developed on our trusty Macintosh SE with the help of HyperCard and the HyperTalk programming language.

It’s also worth mentioning that, though I’m now an atheist, I was raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a.k.a., the LDS Church or Mormon Church).

To the Beautiful Island

After graduating with honors from the general associate of science program at a local college now known as Utah Tech University, I was called to serve for two years as an LDS missionary on the island of Taiwan. I assumed I’d be called to Japan, having studied three years of Japanese and briefly lived with a host family in Nagoya, but the prospect of living in Taiwan and learning Mandarin Chinese excited me just as much, if not more, so I accepted.

Following two months of intensive language training, I found myself among the dense tropical forests and friendly, freedom-loving people of Ilha Formosa (the “Beautiful Island,” as the Portuguese named her). I gradually attained fluency in Chinese (and learned a bit of Taiwanese) and relished my daily exposure to a cultural and natural environment markedly different from that of my childhood. It was wonderful and rewarding in many ways, but also quite trying as I struggled, not only with the general challenges of missionary work and living abroad, but also with my internal conflicts as I attempted, with limited success, to assuage my frequent doubts about LDS teachings and practices.

Happy Valleys

After serving two years with my faith more or less intact, I returned to the US where I began studying computer science, molecular biology, and other subjects at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, an area nicknamed “Happy Valley.” As LDS returned missionaries are wont to do, especially at BYU, I soon rushed headlong into marriage. Mine was of the less successful variety, however, ending in a mercifully amicable divorce almost two years later.

It was at that time I received a brief but welcome respite from Mormon culture as I’d been awarded an internship at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania—another place locally known as “Happy Valley”—as part of the Penn State Astrobiology Summer Program. In addition to taking part in fascinating research and associating with wonderful, like-minded people, I finally found myself drifting more thoroughly away from my religious upbringing. The transformation felt surprisingly natural and liberating, but of course part of me still felt an attachment to the LDS faith, so I continued studying and considering the matter during my last year at BYU.

For a few months I experienced a resurgence of faith, but in the end I left BYU with a bachelor’s degree in biology and the conviction that the religion of my childhood, and much of organized religion in general, was not only false, but also intrinsically harmful in many respects. My objections to the LDS belief system can be summarized simply (and charitably) as follows: the picture of reality it paints is inaccurate. For those curious about the specific premises behind that conclusion, or the various positive and negative effects my emancipation from religion has had on my life, I may touch on these subjects from time to time on my blog.

A Love of Wisdom

I returned to Taiwan to teach science and English at Ivy Collegiate Academy in Taichung while also contemplating my graduate school options. Having left religion behind, I started delving more deeply into philosophy and decided to spend the next two years pursuing a master’s degree in philosophy at National Chengchi University in Taipei. I then returned to the States, taught Chinese for a year at City Academy in Salt Lake City, and, following a brief holiday in Thailand and Cambodia, embarked on a PhD program in philosophy at the University of Utah.

Throughout all this time it felt wonderful to expand my mind in many new directions, associate with a diverse array of intellectuals, and receive praise for some of my thoughts and essays, but I ultimately decided that a career dedicated entirely to philosophy wasn’t the right path for me. Instead, I turned my attention more heavily toward computer science and one of my more hedonistic interests: video game development!

A Love of World-building

Moving to Redmond, Washington, I fulfilled one of my childhood dreams by attending courses in game design and programming at DigiPen Institute of Technology. I highly recommend DigiPen if you can afford it and are interested in any area of game development: the atmosphere is wonderful and the professors and facilities are top-notch.

The only downside is that DigiPen’s quite expensive. So much so, in fact, that when my finances took a turn for the worse, I had to withdraw. Undaunted, I continued then, as I continue now, to devote as much time as possible to the study and practice of game design, software development, and other areas of interest as I pursue all my personal and professional goals. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of doing interesting work for a wide variety of organizations, including the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in Arkansas, and Nintendo of America in the Seattle area where I contributed significantly to QA work on such noteworthy titles as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Now I’m back in Utah, doing freelance work remotely while also continuing to gradually build up my own indie game development company: Golden Drake Studios.

Looking Forward

The course of my life has been a bit unconventional, but I’ve enjoyed the ride, acquired a unique set of skills and knowledge, and reached a point where my varied talents and interests are coalescing in an exciting and satisfying way. I love all the projects I’m working on and look forward to taking part in many more, both independently and as part of various teams.

If you’d like to get in touch or collaborate on a project, feel free to send an email to [email protected] or connect with me through social media, etc. I look forward to hearing from you!