01
JOHN
I am a proud non-binary.
I've never been one to fit into molds. As a kid I was an outcast who wanted to overcome my crippling social anxiety and forced myself to join social clubs in order to overcome that. In my adult years, I sought the healing properties of Ayahuasca to heal my life-long battle with depression, which inadvertently opened up a world of spirituality for me, having been atheist leaning before. It ultimately allowed me to come to terms and accept that I'm non-binary (He/They), which is a new, ongoing, exciting, scary, and crazy phase of my life. I know that seems like barely a change to others (and I prefer it that way), but to me, it's quite profound.
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I ran a video game studio for 10 years and those were some of the best, albeit most stressful years of my creative life. Guncraft was my first big success that allowed me to connect with gamers on a chaotic and lovely new level. Death Tractor was a joke game that honestly deserves a bigger sequel. Elo Hell was an absolutely excellent technological product that showcased my ability to lead a team that could create a AA product on a relative budget. Unfortunately, I made some key design mistakes and was ultimately bogged down by a writing style that was a bit too early 2000's sitcom. It needed more Mythiquest and less Friends. So, we had to shut down. This was for the best. I was burnt out, to be honest. My grey hair will attest to that.
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Now I live in Tulum, Mexico, with my beautiful wife, two dogs (Nova and Poppy), and two cats (Moon and Neo), trade stocks full-time while I get Zero Infinity ready for production, and have made some of the best friends of my entire life. The main thing I miss is sharpening my creative sword, so I'm very motivated to get my project going and I know for a fact Zero Infinity will rock people's worlds.
02
GAMES
Games are my life's work.
I started making games when I was around 12-13 years old. I first began with modding Command and Conquer Red Alert, but ultimately got hooked on Starcraft's map editor, where I made around 100 different maps. Gaming and making games was a way for me to scratch my competitive itch and utilize my creativity.
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Since becoming a professional dev, the tools I've been able to harness to create games have evolved at such a rapid pace it's hard to even keep up. Unreal Engine 5 is a masterpiece of art engine software. Crypto technology is giving us a monumentally important tool for empowering intelligence, through competitive earning. Machine Learning is going to change the way we play with bots as well as each other. We've reached a new era in what games can be and I can't find the joy in making yet another generic shooter royale or open world survival sim.
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I've been studying, deeply, how all of these work and designing games to help realize those technologies in revolutionary ways. Zero Infinity will be my first foray into all this and I'm beyond excited to see how people react to it.
03
AI ART
AI is an obsession for me.
AI Art is a fascinating combination of creativity and raw technology. It gives people who are not good at drawing (ME!) the ability to take the ideas they have for art out of their heads and put them into a real form.
It's easy to discount AI Art as low effort because all it takes is a prompt to create something, but it's really not that easy. Most of the pieces the generators I use create are terrible. It can take me hours of keyword manipulation and rendering option changing to get the concept I'm looking for. For video pieces, I could be ready to do a minute long render, which takes hours, and then when it's done, it's way off from the original mark or brings in artifacts that break the immersion in the piece. For instance, I wanted a piece with spooky dark eyes in the black void, and as the video progressed, it turned into a bunch of children in school uniforms.
AI Art requires flexibility, understanding, and a willingness to iterate. I thoroughly enjoy the process and it's always awe inspiring when something really cool comes out the other end. With regular art, you know how your art will look in the end, within reason. With AI Art, you will never truly know what the machine will produce until it's done and that surprise and joy is half the experience for me.