Developer introductions: Meet the folks behind DarkSpore I love Maxis…always have.* They aren’t some faceless corporation – no, they are made up of regular-everyday folks.* And best of all, they actually respond to my email when I send them a message!* MaxisCactus published a brief introduction on a few folks (of many) that make up the DarkSpore team.* Check out their bios below: Thomas Vu Lead Producer at Maxis Thomas Vu is an 8-year veteran of the video game industry, producing and designing some of the biggest and most high profile games including Simcity 4, the Sims 2, Warhammer and Spore. He is currently the Lead producer and Cheer Captain of Darkspore, where he wants to continue in the Maxis tradition of making great games that push the expectations of what games can ultimately become. Prior to working at Maxis, Vu collaborating with NASA and the ISS in La Jolla, experimented with genetic recombination at Salk’s Institute in San Diego, and worked on a countless number of start-ups in the internet craze of late 90s. In his spare time, you can find him leaping around with Jax in League of Legends, building marines and siege tanks in Starcraft 2, or killing zombies in Left for Dead. Michael Perry: Executive Producer at Maxis Michael Perry is a 20-year video game industry veteran, during which time he has enjoyed working in a variety of roles on several games with some amazing people. Perry has returned to Maxis to produce Darkspore, the next major game from the studio, after most recently serving as Creative Director on EA’s The Godfather video game. Earlier, Perry programmed several versions of Will Wright’s SimCity, produced and designed the award-winning title SimFarm, and produced Yoot Saito’s award-winning title SimTower. He led the architecture design and development of the groundbreaking Sims Exchange on TheSims.com web site. He also directed the game design of several versions of The Sims for console, including the award-winning The Sims Bustin’ Out. Perry even scored the soundtrack for one game, for which he profusely apologizes and sincerely promises to never do again. Lauren McHugh Software Engineer at Maxis Lauren McHugh currently works on many of the core systems for Darkspore, including an ability system that enables the team to create a wide variety of exciting abilities such as teleporting through a wormhole, summoning pets, or surrounding the player in a plasma column. McHugh also works on areas like physics, animation sequencing, player attributes, UI and game flow. While on the Darkspore project, she’s had the opportunity to improve the player experience in many ways, such as reducing the player’s perception of lag or computing damage in a consistent and intuitive manner. Prior to her role on the game, McHugh developed gameplay for the original Spore game. McHugh joined the team at Maxis directly out of college in 2005. She is an active member of the game developer community, who has volunteered at the Game Developer’s Conference several times, and in 2007 presented on a panel at the conference to describe Spore’s behavior tree AI system. McHugh enjoys playing games, especially MMOs. Her favorite part of these games is cooperating with her friends to overcome challenges, which is why she’s very excited about becoming an avid Darkspore player herself. Malcolm Azania: Writer at Maxis Malcolm Azania is the lead story writer for Darkspore. Azania, under the pen-name Minister Faust, is the award-winning author of From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain, and the critically-acclaimed The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, both published by Del Rey/Ballantine. He was a contributing writer for BioWare’s Mass Effect 2, co-wrote the ME2 downloadable mission for Kasumi, and wrote Gift of the Yeti.
