TEAM MEMBER LIST
JONATHAN LAMB
Project Manager, Lead Designer, Audio Engineer
I'm currently going to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design here in Minnesota, where I happened to be born and raised. I decided when I was about 5 or 6 that I was going to make computer games, after playing this old detective game called "Deja Vu" on a Mac Plus that wouldn't let me play the way I wanted to.
In the mean time I've travelled a good bit with my family, dabbled in a few instruments (piano, guitar, vocals, sitar, and now a bodhran), pursued theatre in school and amateur dinner theatre, started martial arts training a couple years ago (www.mizunagaredojo.com), and practiced a wee bit of drawing and sculpture at college. I'm also obviously into gaming (both on the PC and pen & paper), and then there's the nature-loving side of me that would like to run off into the wild.
I like to get around and experiment with a little of everything, and have philosophically become most interested in seeing how systems of play emerge in daily life and various disciplines. I think the idea of games has a negative stigma these days, and would like to be part of developing it as a unique artistic medium. My focus in college has been on "experience design" and project management. Technically I have some proficiency in various 2D and 3D applications, but my forte is in sound effects engineering (one of the only things I can imagine myself doing other than making games).
PAUL REED
Lead Programmer, Assistant Designer
I'm a senior computer science major attending the University of South Dakota with career aspirations of either AI or gaming (or both). My first and biggest passion in life is computer games of nearly all types, so I consider myself a bit of an expert when it comes to what has and has not been done with games. The first experience I had with creating a game took place when I was about 8 and involved using a simple game creation application that ran on my commodore 128. Since then I've always dreamed of creating bigger and better games, and as I grew older and began to understand the actual processes behind making a video game started to make some of my ideas real.
The majority of my video game collection consists of either first person shooters, role-playing games, or real time strategy games and so most of my game creation aspirations involve one of those genres. Ideally I would like to help create games that have a high level of emersion not just due to pretty graphics, but through adaptive, active and random AI, non-static game worlds, and realistic world physics and properties. In my spare time I also enjoy playing and writing music (choral and piano), traveling, coding, physics, and role-playing. So you could say that I tend to enjoy a bit of pretty much everything. I would love to travel Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, and plan on playing RPG's until the kids in the local club kick me out for being too old.
JUSTIN FITZSIMMONS
Programmer
Hello all, my name is Justin Fitzsimmons. I am a coder with a decent amount of familiarity of the doom3 SDK. I am currently heading up the Sapphire Scar coding team, but unfortuneatly the project is nearly dormant. I plan on staying in contact with them, and hopefully the project will pick up some more members and we'll get going again. In the interim, I am pleased to put some work into the Ground Zero mod.
JENNIFER JERMANTOWICZ
Art Director, Web Designer
When I was in first grade I drew a very in depth comic with Darkwing Duck, and ever since then I have been obsessed with the narrative in art. Lo and behold I am now a Junior at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design studying comic art. And yes, that means comic books, graphic novels or whatever you wish to refer to them as. If you want to be fancy you can say Sequential Art, but all the other comic people will make fun of you.
I also have a very deep interest in concept and production design, from story boarding to the creation of characters and settings. I think this mainly stems from my obsession with Star Wars when I was younger and the related art books which I hoarded. And now that I am older I am very seriously interested in having this be part of my career after college.
As far as my gaming experience goes, I wasn't too involved as a kid, due to my family's dedication to Apple and a lack of any other gaming system. But I still got through Myst and Riven with much frustrated swearing. Now I play a lot of rpg games as well as dabbling in some pen and paper games.
pasaii.com / deviantart / e-mail
RETO KAUL
Environmental Concept Artist
I'm from Switzerland. I'm 18 years old and just finished college. Before I can go to university though, I have to do military service for 21 weeks *choke* (it's obligatory here).
I've been interested in game development for quite some years now. I think I started programming little 3d-games (with DirectX) when I was fourteen. But about a year ago, I accidentally discovered an article in a magazine about a swiss digital artist who made his career in Hollywood. There were also some of his paintings. These pictures impressed me so much that I got the strong desire to be able to do such things, too. So I bought a Wacom board and started painting like a maniac.
Beside art I'm still interested in programming, but also many other things: table-tennis (in club), soccer, running, piano, didgeridoo etc.
KIMMO LEMETTI
Environmental Concept Artist
Biography coming soon...
gotmorr.com / deviantart / e-mail
JAYME HAYES
Concept Artist
Greetings and Salutations, users of the internet. I'm Jayme, I'm a cancer, and enjoy thai food, good conversation, and coffee. I have no feelings on long romantic walks on the beach since I've spent my entire life in a landlocked state and romance really isn't my bag.
I'm a comic art major at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and as far as my work with the Ground Zero project goes, I guess I'm a character and random model designer. Never done something like this before, so I'm not quite sure how it goes, but I'm having a great time figuring it out.
Other stuff of interest about me, hm. I'm currently the worlds most frustrating age, in at 20 years old. My hobbies include reading, working on personal comic-related projects, tending my little garden and cooking, and generally being a geek in general. I also play the cello rather badly, and train in a vairied and sundry slew of martial arts when I find them available. If it's any interest to anyone, I play a lvl 60 Tauren Druid on Llane. Moocows, Forever. What? I said I was a geek. leave me alone...
OWEN SHEPHERD
3D Environmental Modeller
I live in Manchester Ingerland, as Sheriff John Burnell says.
I am a Fine art graduate. Having finished at the university last year, I thought it would be easy to get a job in games as I had been offered one before I went--but lo and behold three years of hard study and I'm in a worse position than when i started (well career-wise anyway).
So here iam, hired guns stalking across the interweb, willing to sell my soul. I've got a quick mouse hand and a fast draw. ready to take down that bounty.
Ye hah. ride'm cowbot.
MOMERATH
3D Environmental Modeller
Biography coming soon...
ANDREW CHESWORTH
Character Modeller, Animator
Biography coming soon...
BLAISE DOUROS
Composer
I'm Blaise, a Californian by birth and at heart, although I go to school in the unforgiving midwest climates. My special (and often ninja-like) interests include diving 1 meter and 3 meter springboard (you know, like Greg Louganis), Ultimate Frisbee, the occasional video game (believe it or not, I'm not that big of a gamer, even though I love soundtracking for them), and when I can get there, doing gymnastics to remember the days before I got too tall and old to do the pommel horse. Funny story about that one, for anyone interested...I also have only one-and-a-half nipples (another long story) and can wiggle my ears at will.
I'm 6' tall, pretty thin, short brown hair and long brown eyes (...?...). Lots of people tell me I look like Keanu Reeves, so picture him at age 20 and you've got me.
Schooling! I'm a junior music composition major at St. Olaf College, in Northfield MN. I tend to write tonal music, which frustrates my comp teacher to no end, and I would rather listen to any Danny Elfman or John Williams soundtrack than Schoenberg. No one likes atonal music, so why in God's name should I write it?
Oh yeah, the name...Blaise is my middle name, not my first--Daniel is ok, but I was Danny up until however long ago, and I was tired of choruses of that damn celtic song (don't you DARE) being sung at me wherever I went, so I decided my middle name fit me better, and I've been Blaise ever since.
So there you have it--Blaise in a nutshell. Ouch, that would be tight, actually.
blaise douros / c|net music download / e-mail
CHUCK COWDERY
Writer
This project has been, until recently, sort of a pipe dream of Jon, Paul and myself. I'm really glad to see that progress is actually occuring.
I went to the Univeristy of Minnesota for 2 1/2 years, and Anoka Ramsy Community College for 1 1/2 years. My education went across the spectrum, because I wasn't able to fully commit myself to one course of study. With the exception of math and physics, I have taken a ton of different types of courses. They were mostly literature and culture courses, with a smattering of writing in there too.
I'm working on the narrative for GZ, meaning character development, plot, scenarios, dialogue, and background/history of the fictional universe being created.
SIMON (LEV) ROSNER
Concept Artist
I currently reside in Savannah, GA pursuing my MFA in Sequential Art (no not comics ) at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) with a focus on conceptual design. I got my BFA in Game Development also here at SCAD. I got into game dev way back in '98 by accident and was working on and off as a freelance model and texture artist (using 3ds max and photoshop) in the game industry. Breakthrough for me into game design was in 99 during an internship at Lionhead Studios where I worked on Black & White and designed the mouse interaction interface. After that I worked on some other major projects mainly Giants (PS2) and Army Men (PS2) as an external contractor. Before I cam to the states I actually planned to go to Vienna and study archaeology but that never happened. I then joined the swiss military and spent 10 months in special forces. While still huggin dirt and a gun I got accepted at SCAD and that was the hop for me over the ocean. I am greatly involved in the IGDA and started the chapter in switzerland and was running it until last year. Now am in the process of starting the Visual Arts SIG in the IGDA. During my time at SCAD I was involved working as a textures artist at a startup company in Vancouver that died because of money and I ended up working in marketing at Gulfstream General Dynamics.
My interest in conceptual design started about two years ago and I have been getting more and more into it. So I stopped making textures and 3d models, but I still work with photoshop and painter and only use 3d max/maya as a helping reference.
I love anime, music, video games (am an avid collector of game boxes), snowboarding and eating nutella out of the glass.
CHRISTIAN GUTI
Composer
My name is Christian Guti, I am a 20 years old french folk. I've heard about this project on No Mutants Allowed and found it really inspiring. Last year I worked with Coldfire Interactive, a french team developping a post apocalyptic mod for Unreal 2004 called Misleading Lands. I've had a great time there and enjoyed a lot making music for a video game.