Hi-res vs. Lo-res Graphics: A Game Design Debate
Presenter Bios
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Steve joined Vicarious Visions in 1999 as a texture artist and is currently the Art Group Manager. In this capacity he supervises and trains over twenty seven artists and animators and oversees onsite art contractors. Steve also has trained offsite contractors and art directs outsourced GBA projects. Steve is actively involved in GDC and has spoken on art processes and artist management (2001-2004). Steve has served as a jury member for the Sketches Jury in Animation as sub chair and the Art and Design Committee Chair for Siggraph 2002 and 2003 and will be on posters for 2005. Steve is actively involved in the gaming community with panels for the Academy of Interactive Arts and Science and IGDA by speaking on portfolio preparations and is scheduled for a talk in New York for IGDA on animation. Steve is heavily involved in recruiting holding portfolio reviews weekly and often travels to schools for presentations, portfolio reviews and interviews and has developed a good report with contacts there. Steve has been influential in hiring most of the artists currently at VV. Steve holds a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Utah in Painting and Drawing and a degree from The Art Institute of Phoenix in Computer Animation and graduated on the Dean's list. Steve started at VV as a texture artist on Polaris Snocross PSX and N64, then as Lead on Blue's Clues Alphabet GBC where he trained other artists, was the lead artist on the many GBA projects and has been involved or overseen art direction many GBA and DS projects. Steve directs and trains through Quality Reviews with the Visual Development Director on all projects throughout the projects cycles and holds weekly training sessions with the Art Group. Prior to the games industry, Steve worked on storyboards and comps for advertising and in the film industry as a freelance artist for two years.
Back To Event OverviewDemetri Detsaridis serves as Game Designer for Gameloft, a leading international developer and publisher of games for mobile phones.
Mr. Detsaridis' career spans four years in the game industry as well as four years of film and television production, with experience as a writer, game designer and producer. In addition to his current position designing games for wireless platforms, he has also worked on PC, PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, GBA and web-based applications. Mr. Detsaridis has been on staff at NBC/Universal Television, ThunderWave, and Pop & Company and most recently served as an Associate Producer at DC Comics.
Mr. Detsaridis holds a B.F.A. in Film and Television from NYU and a Master's in American Studies from George Washington University.
Back To Event OverviewNick Fortugno is a Game Designer at gameLab, where he has been a designer, writer, and project manager on dozens of digital and non-digital game projects, most recently serving as Lead Designer on the downloadable hit Diner Dash. Nick was inducted into role-playing life at the age of five, and has been an avid consumer and producer of role-playing , live-action and game culture ever since. He founded and ran the Seasons of Darkness group, a 5 1/2 year live action project which was featured on Showtime and the game design textbook Rules of Play, and has written for role-playing titles including Silver-Age Sentinels. As a member of the Playground design team, Fortugno (with Frank Lantz and Katie Salen) was a co-creator of the Big Urban Game, a large-scale citywide game for the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, played by thousands of residents as part of the Twin Cities Design Celebration in fall 2003. In his academic guise, Fortugno teaches Game Design and Interactive Narrative Design at Parsons School of Design and holds an adjunct teaching position at Bronx Community College, where he teaches developmental and compositional English.
Back To Event OverviewKeith Halper is the Chief Executive Officer of Kuma Reality Games. Keith is a recognized leader in interactive gaming with dozens of industry awards and key successes with many of the world's most significant brands, including Shrek, Jerry Seinfeld, Tom Clancy and Star Trek.
Keith was President of media services firm, Medium Rare, Inc., where his clients included Viacom, AOL Time Warner, Yahoo and Dennis Publishing's Maxim Magazine. His has also executed key strategic assignments as chief operating officer for internet community pioneer CyberSites, head of corporate and business development for Warburg Pincus-backed Sticky Networks, and key consultative assignments for venture fund TDA Direct Advisors and DIMAC Marketing Partners. Additionally, Keith helped found interactive software giant Simon & Schuster Interactive and while there produced their key products, including Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual, one of the best-selling CD-ROMs of all time.
Keith earned his B.A. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1988. He and his wife Nancy reside in Summit, NJ, with their two sons and two daughters.
Back To Event OverviewMatthew Hawkins hails from the Pacific Northwest, and came to New York City to study cartooning and film production at the School of Visual Arts. Shortly after graduating, Matt first became involved with video games when he was hired by Ubi Soft to be the head game designer for its New York studio. There he designed and developed a number of games for the internet and major gaming consoles, consulted on various other titles in development, and conducted research to forecast future trends in gaming technology and tastes.
Soon after Ubi Soft closed its New York doors, Matt began developing games independently, first for the web and later for cell phones. This led to the creation of PixelJump to produce games, as well as other forms of mobile entertainment. Since then, Matt has been especially involved in titles based upon films and television properties, either as a designer or a consultant. Thus far, clients include with Sony Classics, Paramount, Warner Bros, and Miramax.
Matt is also involved in game journalism, starting out with Nickelodeon Magazine, as both a writer and an interviewer. Today, Matt's writings can in both print and online, and has either contributed to, or continues to write for, Nick Mag, GMR, insert credit, 1-UP MegaZine, the Internet Archive's video game setion, and most recently, Gamasutra.
And most recently, Matt began teaching game design as both instructor and thesis advisor at his alma mater, SVA. The class is a part of his hopes to help foster a stronger, more active game development community in the New York City Area.
Back To Event OverviewDaniel Kitchen is a 23-year veteran of the videogame and interactive multimedia industry. After a career as one of the youngest successful senior designers at Activision, he was Co-founder and Executive Vice President of Product Development for Absolute Entertainment Inc., a publicly held entertainment software development and publishing firm. Since 1979, Mr. Kitchen has been responsible for over 100 commercially successfully games across a variety of platforms.
Back To Event OverviewNick started his Art Career before graduating high school, working for local film companies as a story board artist and as a penciler for independent comic publishers. Following his dream for higher education in art, he sacrificed his Fire Fighting/Football/Teaching/Coaching/Advertising Art/Graphic Design studies in Scottsdale, AZ for a more focused academic pursuit of sequential story telling from the Joe Kubert School in Northern NJ. After a few "gigs" in the illustrators wasteland known as commercial graphic design, he found a job as an interface designer for Hypnotix inc - located in Little Falls, NJ. Before too long it became apparent that the round-about journey Nick took to get into the Game industry served him well, having various skills in Design, Illustration, Texturing, Modeling, Management and Martial Arts he has been able to participate in virtually every major discipline in the industry and on all consoles and PC platforms. Currently, Nick is following through with his role as a "cross-discipline strike force of one", and is fulfilling the duties and responsibilities of a producer/designer with Hypnotix.
A recent Newlywed (March 18th as a matter of fact), Nick separates his free time with working on his new home, playing games, reading comics and training to be a cage fighter.
Somewhat of a newcomer to the Game Dev Networking scene, with only a few speaking engagements under his belt though the IGDA, Nick is trying (unsuccessfully one might say) to avoid making jokes about writing about himself in third person since he seems to be doing it more and more these days.
Back To Event OverviewBrad MacDonald has taken a long, circuitous route to his position as Art Director for Large Animal Games. Over the past 14 years he has worked as political cartoonist, comic book illustrator, animator, product designer, and website developer for clients such as MTV, Nickelodeon, the NFL, Busta Rhymes, CNBC, Tommy Hilfiger and the SciFi channel. The diversity of his clientele allowed him to design for a broad range of audiences and mediums; in addition to video games he has designed, Nascar pit crew uniforms, talking toilet seats, corporate logos, tattoos, comic strips, websites, a Beavis and Butt-head Macy's Day balloon, and just about everything in between.
Since joining Large Animal Games in 2001 Brad has contributed to the design of over 50 games as a Lead Artist or Art Director. The daily challenge of combining illustration, animation, and information design into a seamless game experience keeps him inspired and very busy. The relatively small size of Large Animal and the collaborative nature of video game development combine to make the process even more rewarding as it allows everyone to contribute to the creation of something larger than themselves.
Back To Event OverviewKatie Salen is a designer interested in the connections between game design, interactivity, and play. She wears many hats, including the directorship of the graduate Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design, and works as a designer and consultant on a range of game-related projects for clients such as MSN, SIGGRAPH, the Hewlett Foundation, XMediaLab, the Design Institute, the Director's Guild of America, mememe Productions, and others. Co-author (with Eric Zimmerman) of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a textbook on game design (MIT Press), as well as the forthcoming Rules of Play Reader (MIT Press 2005), she is also member of Playground, a design team focused on large-scale, experimental, real-world games. Katie recently partnered with screenwriter and director Hampton Fancher (Minus Man; Bladerunner) on a project for the XEN division of Microsoft to develop an animated storytelling experience distributed through Xbox Live, and has helped curate programs at the Lincoln Center, Cinematexas, ZKM, Exploding Cinema, and the Walker Art Center on machinima, the practice of creating animated films using game engines. She is a contributing writer for RES magazine, and worked as an animator on Richard Linklater's critically acclaimed animated feature Waking Life, as well as two music videos for the band Zero 7 (In the Waiting Line; Destiny). Despite her many hats, she is a teacher at heart, and has taught game design and interactive design in programs at New York University's Intertelecommunications Program (ITP), the University of Texas, RISD, and N.C. State University.
Back To Event OverviewJason Schreiber has more than a dozen years of experience in the interactive industry and has successfully shipped more than 50 SKUs. He has both run his own game development studio and served as head of production for a small video game publisher. He has shown his flexibility and versatility working on titles ranging in diversity from the original Unreal to the licensed Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen properties. He also lectures at Columbia University for a course in game development.
Back To Event OverviewComposer and sound designer Michael Sweet has won numerous Awards for his continued innovation and exploration of audio including the BDA Promax Award for Best Sound for a Network Package (HBO Zone) the Best Audio Award at the GDC IGF, and nominations for three 2004 GANG awards. Educated at Berklee College of Music, Michael is the creative director of Audiobrain, a unique collection of artists dedicated to breaking boundaries in interactive music. Michael's music and sound design can be found on many award winning games including Cartoon Network, Sesame Workshop, Shockwave, RealArcade, Microsoft, Lego, AOL, MTV, among others. In broadcast Michael's work can be heard in many network identities including HBO, VH1, Comedy Central, CNN, General Motors, NASDAQ and more. As a teacher and communicator, Michael also is a frequent contributor to organizations that pioneer the advancement of interactive audio including the IASIG and lecturing at universities including SVA, Parsons, and NYU.
Of special note, Michael has created music and sound for many of the games created at 2003-2004 GDC's Indie Game Jam. The games created over four days by a small team of professional game developers try to encourage experimentation and innovation in the game industry. The games are shown at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop as part of the Game Developers Conference.
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