INFINITY ONLINE STUDIOS
ROLE
CO-FOUNDER
DESCRIPTION
Co-Founded a small indie game development studio called Infinity Online Studios. The overall team consisted of 18 contractors, and 5 dedicated team members overseeing Game Design, VFX, SFX, Admin, and Finance. Our first project was an open world MMO called Mekria Online.
We leveragedcontractors to expedite the development of key assets to build our first demo to pitch to potential investors. The team developed our first demo that was featured at PAX South 2017. The Demo consisted of one class, and a large scale hyper realistic environment. The core of Mekria revolved around real-time open world PVP with territories that granted the controlling faction key resources. We would use an AI faction to balance out player alliance to prevent one faction from becoming dominant over another through forced PVE against the AI. If players were successful in fending off the assault, they would continue maintain and control cities and territories that they've won.
Classes in Mekria, though mirrored, had access to unique abilities that corresponded to the faction that they selected during character creation. Races are also faction specific, unlocking unique abilities. In order to prevent favoritism to one faction over another, we enabled players to betray their faction, receiving a permanent marker indicating that they have in fact switched sides. This would lock a player into constant PVP against their once allied faction. Player choices had positive and negative impacts on their experience as they made key decisions to support or betray their faction.
Our second project came in the form of an auto insurance solution for determining the damage to vehicles using 'automotive tensil strength' based on the year, make, and model. Our team developed a solution that would use customer photos to deform a 3D vehicle model. This would generate a list of potentially damaged parts and components from a reported car accident. The list could then be used by auto adjusters and automotive repair shops to create a purchase order for parts in advance of the repairs.
YEAR
2016 - 2021
IMPACT
Indie Studio
Product
Mekria Online, Project Impact
MEKRIA | RISE OF KIN
The Approach
Infinity Online Studios LLC. become official in August 2016, with myself and a Co-Founder ready to assemble our core team. My partner had previous experience working for Blizzard Entertainment on World of Warcraft as an artist. I understood the intricacies of running a business and attaining financial support through investor funding. Coupled with my ability to lead large-scale efforts, establishing a vision and a mission, defining strategy, and aligning people to achieve multi-year objectives, we set out to establish the base concept of our game, story and lore, mechanics etc. with the intent to start converting this information into our master game development document. Our approach involved two project development methodologies (agile and waterfall) to develop each feature for Mekria. We would meet with our project manager to ideate and prioritize features for upcoming development. Feature complexity determined which methodology was going to be better suited for development (risks, dependencies, business impact, ROI, branching etc). Once our features were ready to be developed, I would coordinate with contractors to develop technical aspects of the game based on requirements my Co-Founder and I had outlined in our Game Development Doc. Once our demo was complete, we were able to attain a booth at PAX South 2017 through an indie studio partnership. It was during the convention we generated a lot of buzz regarding what we were trying to accomplish with such a small team. We began scheduling meetings with investors trying to establish funding to bring our contractors on as full-time developers and artists. Investors were just as excited about our concept and demo but wanted a mobile game developed upfront. This did not align with our core objective and was repeatedly made a requirement before any agreements could be signed. We decided that we would not move forward with a mobile solution and shut the project down. • Established Infinity Online LLC • Maintained compliance with Texas Comptroller to ensure compliance with annual reporting • Identified and onboarded key leadership to own and maintain 5 areas of development for Mekria • Established Vision and Mission statements, defined objectives and key results, • Engaged project manager to provide requirements, definition of ready, definition of done for each feature of the Mekria project. • Managed and maintained financial aspects of Infinity, engaging with vendors and contractors to oversee development of Mekria Online. • Established development pipeline and integration for 3D assets into UE4 • Implemented Perforce Helix as our version control during the development of Mekria. • Established partnerships with AMD, Nvidia, Spark, Perforce, Amazon • Met with investors to establish seed funding but could not come to an agreement to develop a mobile game. • Successfully developed a demo featuring a single class, hyper-realistic environment, and various mechanics of our game involving crafting and gathering, environment destruction, basic combat, character creation, faction selection, enemy NPC detection, seasons and changing environments.