College students are often torn between choosing a major that will quell their parents' fears about long-term job prospects and one that will allow them to follow their own career dreams. Fortunately for Falco Girgis, who had long aspired to be a video game developer, he was able to find one that would do both – computer engineering. "I sold it to my parents saying I was going to be an engineer, but many game development companies will hire computer engineering majors," says Girgis, who graduated in 2011 with a bachelor's degree in the field from UAH. "So my computer engineering courses taught me the programming portion and I taught myself the rest." But whatever the rationale, there's no arguing with the success of its outcome. Girgis recently signed a publishing deal with development company WaterMelon for his programming brainchild, Elysian Shadows, a "next-gen" 2D role-playing game that fuses 16-bit classical games like Final Fantasy or Zelda with modern rendering and audio techniques.