Former VRChat Chief Creative Officer growing it from two founders and one employee to hundreds over the space of 7.5 years. I worked in many capacities and roles to enable VRChat to become a well known platform in the social VR Space. This includes Biz Dev, Hiring and Sourcing, Inventions with Patents, Team Structure, Exec Strategy, Monetization, Design, Community, Press, Streamers, Safety and Security, Content Building, Creator Tools, Creator Economy, Prototypes, Competitive Analysis, Product Development, Data Science and more. I also worked with the Art Director Mike Murdock and our community to make the trailer. I asked my friend DJ Chris Lake for use of the track -Turn out the lights -

Check out the HBO Max VRChat Community Creator made film. We Met in Virtual Reality here

We were given 3 Months funding and a set of the first OUCLUS TOUCH controllers by Oculus in the Summer of 2015. Our mission was to build a demo for Oculus Connect 2 with the controllers. The vive wands and the hyrda razers were the only other limited controller options out there. We actually used the razers as a stand in at first until we were given the Touch Controllers which we had to go hand carry from Meta (Facebook) back to the studio. Working with a special version of Unreal Engine a small team of Funbits Interactive folks, My Brother (Chris Millar - CEO/Founder of Funbits Interactive) and I we explored various game play controls and ideas. We landed on a fun game demo were you play as a giant robot helping a small crashed space craft pirate vessel. In the demo you get to interact with physics puzzles, interactive characters and battle enemies. All the characters in the demo react to your actions and presence. They would play with you and objects you threw at or gave them or respond to your gestures. Even picking them up!. The demo was shown behind closed doors at Oculus Connect 2 to great success. It was the most advanced touch controller game of it's kind at the time. It was realeased some years later on Steam for people to play with.

Created, implemented and invented techniques for audio for the VR cgi animated film lost. Oculus Story Studio's first VR film. I created all the sound design and spatial audio for the film. I also helped chose the original placeholder music for key moments. I'm also the Hello voice at the end :)

I used Ableton Live and Unreal Engine in my own pipeline to create, organize and quickly re-edit/rem-mix the audio over many changes. I came up with the bio-mechanical audio design of the hand character that's featured in the film. I belive this was the first VR film of it's kind.

Float SF was a leader in the development of cutting edge visual and interactive experiences. Our background as a design and development partner with the Microsoft Kinect team and their team of visual effects and videogame specialists, including Academy Award winners, placed us in a unique position to deliver high visual quality consumer experiences that enabled consumers to interact with brands in new and exciting ways. SQUISHBOT was a deep exploration into a game world and character. If you watch the video you can see the depth of design creativity and exploration along with never before explored User Control Systems and mechanics.

At Float SF, we developed a prototype idea to present to Deadmau5, utilizing the Kinect and avatar systems we had been working on. The concept was to control his avatar in an Unreal Engine environment using the Kinect (or a controller), allowing for the creation of music sequences with his loops and stems. The goal of this demo was to enable the player to create a live performance. Some of the systems initially developed for this project at Float SF later became the foundation for the VRChat Avatar IK input system.

Worked in depth with the VRChat team to develop a system that allowd avatars to interact with each other in a more dynamic way. This included physics simulations, avatar to avatar interactions, avatar to object interactions and more. It also included a system of permissions and privacy controls for users to manage who can interact with them.

Co-Designed the sequel to the game Black and White. I was the Lead Designer on the project. I also did a lot of interviews with the press and talks at conferences. Black and White 2 had creatures with AI that were orignally designed by Dennis Habibs who went on to form and work for Google Deepmind. Black and White 2 was a God Game where you could manipulate the world, it's inhabitants and your creature to gain belief power and therefore influence over the land. It was a massive technical showcase and powerhouse for it's time. The entire game would change depending on if you were good, evil or a mix of those. This meant the land, your creature, the people, their cities and their armies all changed how they looked, responded and behaved. The game went on to become at top seller in the UK and Europe. With decent success in the USA also. After Black and White 2 we created the expasion pack which also sold well. Something of note the Hand of Your God was and is very much like a Virtual Reality or Mixed Reality style hand. So a lot was learned about using a hand and fingers to interact with a UI and the game world that I took with me when I began to work on those styles of interaction in the future.

WarCraft was created by a stellar team of talented folks. We were a small team and all wore a lot of hats. For my part, I was an artist, animator, 3D cinematic creator, game designer, system designer, UI designer, mission designer, story creator and voice actor. I came up with the original Orcs and Humans theming. Mostly because I loved fantasy and sci-fi. And I was a Warhammer, D&D and Magic the Gathering fan. It was originally supposed to be a military style game. I also came up with most of the original story co-created with Allen Adham sitting in front of a blue DOS Editor text file. I designed most of the units, buildings, tech tree, maps and missions. It was one of the most fun games to make and play. I'm proud of what we made and the impact it had on the industry.

After the release of WarCraft the team was tasked with a sequel. One to be in Windows (WC 1 was in DOS), and to be 8 players online or local. Also to have a map editor, four races, land sea and air and much more. One anecdote is the entire team was excited to have the humans be modern day with F-16s and tanks vs the Orcs who would be on dinosaurs and such. Stu Rose, a Blizzard Artist and myself were the two steadfast holdouts that WC2 should simply follow on from where WC1 left off. Which fortunately we won the argument on. After the direction was decided, it was a huge challenge to develop and one the team completed in an insane time of 11 months. I was the Lead Designer on the project but was also involoved in many aspects of production, art, animation, design, story, world building, mission design, map design, voice acting and more. It was one of the most fun games to make and play and a highlight of my career to work with that team to ship it. Not long after shipping we proceeded to make the expansion pack Beyond the Dark Portal with an external team. I was the Lead Designer on that project and helped guide it to completion. I'm proud of what we created and the impact it had on the industry.

I was the Chief Designer at Blizzard while Condor (Eventutally called Blizzard North) was working on Diablo. They had originally pitched it as a turn based rpg that was a rogue like. After we had been working on so many Real Time Strategy games like WarCraft and StarCraft I felt that Diablo also needed to be real time. I was responsible for pushing the project to this format. I also helped add a number of key design elements such as item durability, the hotbar, the click and hold to move mechanic, mouse over area searching for items, monster grouping with a leader and more. The weapon durability idea came from an old Dragon Magazine article called - these are the breaks. The hotbar idea came from playing Quake between builds of StarCraft and Diablo. It suddenly felt missing to switch items.

I'm not in the key credits other than a special thanks because I left Blizzard a year before it was completed and at that time Blizzard had a policy of only adding people to the credits that were still at the company when something shipped. Chris Metzen and James Phinney were the assistant designers on the project working on story and system design respectively. Rob Pardo also joined Blizzard somewhat as my replacement. Chris and James were promoted up to the games Designers and therfore into the credits when I left Blizzard to start my own company. With that said I was the original Lead designer for StarCraft. I was responsible for the design of the game and for getting it into early development. That includes it being isometric, the three races and how they all played differently, the units, buildings and tech trees and more. The races all playing differently is something I had wanted since WarCraft 1 because I was a big fan of the old game Archon which was a cool fantasy chess board like game with an arcade battle system. The units on each side also played differently. I also helped create the original backtory and world. I'm proud of what we created and the impact it had on the industry.

In the early days of Blizzard when it was called Silicon & Synapse we made a number of console games for SNES, Sega, Amiga and PC. I was primarily and artist and animator for those games but also the lead designer. These were games like The Lost Vikings 1 & 2, RPM Racing, Rock n Roll Racing, Blackthorne. I learned a lot back in the day from the good folks at Interplay who would come over and sit in with us to help us learn our craft. The Lost Vikings was also the first game I helped creat and lead the design on. I got myself into deep complex logic puzzle troube with each level design because each of the three characters you had to get to the exit together all had different skills. So logic holes would happen and I'd have to solve them. I ended up getting away from graph paper design to use Deluxe Paint and some coded up tools to make level layouts faster. Rock n Roll Racing would go on to use 3D modelling which we drew over with pixels using Deluxe Paint Animator. The creation of the isometric track view with various angled ramps to be all packed into a 1024 cells of 8x8 pixels was one of the greatest technical art challenges of it's time. I'm proud to have solved challenges like these and to have learned so much from my peers and mentors at the time.