December 10, 2025
When he arrived for his first year at Nebraska, Parker thought his hobby of coding and developing video games would just be a fun way to pass some time between classes. A self-taught coder during high school, Parker’s longtime love of video games helped him land on pursuing software engineering.
“One day during my first semester, I was sitting at the library working on a game. The guy I was sitting next to leaned over and asked, ‘Hey, are you working on a game over there?’” Paker recalls. “I said yes, and he told me I should check out Game Development Club. I was like, ‘There’s a game development club?’”
That was all the info Parker needed to attend a meeting. Now the treasurer (and incoming president) for UNL Game Development Club, the student org has allowed Parker to totally immerse himself in his favorite activity and work alongside other Huskers interested in creating games.
“It's great to be able to work with other students, especially because game development requires a lot of different talents. Some students in the club are interested in sound design; some are illustrators interested in art design — there’s so much more than just coding that goes into it and being able to discuss these things with students who are specialized in these areas is really great.”
Each semester, members pitch ideas for games and break off into teams to develop them. The games range from simple fishing games to “dungeon crawlers” where developers create elaborate puzzles for players to solve.
The level of detail, naturally, requires a lot of teamwork.
“Being in Game Dev club has really helped me with my engineering leadership skills,” Parker says. “Obviously there are a lot of coding principles involved, which I’m also practicing in my software engineering classes, but having this environment where we’re working on ideas together, helping each other with the coding and explaining our work to other people is really good prep for my career.”
Parker Peterson is a junior software engineering major from Lincoln, Nebraska.