Hi! My name is Arden, I’m 22 years old and I’m a game developer. I specialize in making visual novels, interactive fiction, and RPGs, and I’m extremely passionate about video games as a storytelling device in general.

Being someone who makes games for a living, especially with a focus on visual novels and dating sims, is my main motivation for learning Japanese. Many visual novels aren’t localized into English (for a wide variety of reasons) and I feel like in order to better do my job (and to have a lot of fun!) learning the language so I’m able to play games and not have to rely on English companies to bring them over is a great thing. I would love to help make visual novels and dating sims have a bigger presence in English-speaking markets, and it’s great that we’re already slowly but surely starting to move in that direction! It would also be wonderful to speak with my Japanese colleagues without having to rely on the help of a translator.

Anyway, thank you for reading! Best of luck with your own learning <3