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Open Interview Who Glenn Storm What This is an open interview. Why To help you hear more and see how that fits. Design What Kind Of Designer Are You? It's important to be playfully applying design thinking and principles while aiming high. That allows for more opportunities for innovation as well as a solid foundation to learn more. Foundations are very important, and root causes typically get the most attention. Coming from a character and effects animation background, communicating and influencing audience through movement and change is the most used tool in the toolbox. There's enough technical skills in the toolbox to pursue a particular interest at the intersection of story and play. As a game designer, the contributions are strongest when organizing design ideas and challenges into a navigation tool, like a compass, pointing to a cohesive vision. Following established design practices also helps to appropriately balance interactive systems with a broad base of research, feedback, experience and creative effort. What Is Your Greatest Design Accomplishment? Designing the lightsaber combat system, including boss A.I., for a published Star Wars title. Work & Play Where Do You See Yourself? On large collaborative creative projects, as it was in feature animation productions, but now contributing to high quality game productions that innovate. Contributing to a great group through collaboration and understanding; working smart, working hard. Simplifying, differentiating and innovating. What Kind Of Games Do You Play? Most game design professionals need to play more games than time allows. But thanks to the explosion of casual, indie and mobile games, a variety of genres are available on a regular basis, if only a few minutes at a time. When time allows, nothing beats immersive action adventure titles, especially those with strong narratives and proper storytelling. Thoughts & Experience What Is Your Attitude Towards Team Development? Our first job is to help others achieve their goals, our second job is to achieve our own. What Non-Design Skills Or Education Do You Offer? Some valuable technical, artistic and production skills and experience. Formal education is in Fine Art and Animation, leading to useful skills like storyboarding. A decade of experience as an animator of characters and effects mixes with an old interest in theater to provide writing, acting and direction. Programmed since grade school to make a variety of games and tools from scratch, from BASIC to MEL to UnrealScript to Java. Learning new technologies constantly is expected. Practical production experience from individual consultant to producer for a large collaborative creative project. These skills support the opportunity to work in harmony with artistic, technical and production teams. Highlights What Are Your Strengths? » A natural ability to see broad complexity and to respectfully simplify » A compulsion for drawing upon varied sources to inform current tasks » A drive to create the best that opportunity, information and support will allow » A deep empathy for the audience experience » A loyalty to the people developing it What Makes You Unique? » An adventure game mod toolset for a popular multiplayer engine: Beginning in 2004, an UnrealScript NPC A.I. project Old Skool Monsta Toolz (OSMT) was developed as an entire toolkit for level designers and game modders of Unreal Engine 2.x. Free, lightweight and extensible with over 20 plug-and-play creatures, cinematic sequence controls, and other features that makes UT2004 behave more like story-based adventure games. It allows mappers to mod without scripting, and modders to mod without reinventing the wheel. Multiple mod projects have spawned from this highly rated effort. See: Old Skool Monsta Toolz (OSMT) » A theory of human Experience: Late 2009, sections from a theory surrounding human Experience were published on a Gamasutra blog series, which ran for about a month. The goal was to present the components and dynamics of a system defining Experience, encouraging review through open debate. See: Sentiology? (a Gamasutra blog series) » Artificial intelligence experiments with artificial evolution: In 2010, a set of artificial intelligence experiments from 1998 were reproduced, inspired by ideas found in Kevin Kelly's book Out Of Control. The premise by Kelly is that systems of the future will be more complex than human engineers can implement, that we will eventually need systems to govern system development. The book makes a strong case for artificial evolution, citing computer science experiments that was adapted to a simplified neural network agent, Intelligent Data Array (IDA), a player of a simple game. This Flash version allows the experiment to be presented step-by-step and visitors can play with artificial evolution themselves. See: IDA (Intelligent Data Array) Links Websites Glenn Storm and Family, Hot Iron Productions Profiles LinkedIn, CreativeHeads, Internet Movie DataBase, MobyGames Blogs & Wikis Gamasutra, SuperApe, Online Resume |