Daniel Aum
Art, video, sound
Born in Los Angeles as the middle son of the Aum family. Attended several different primary schools including a Waldorf education and various public systems. Attended boarding school after age 13 and enjoyed photography and developing film. Found interest in visual arts and filmmaking at Duke University in North Carolina. Also studied filmmaking and editing at the Accademia Dell’Arte in Arezzo, Italy where there was collaboration with theatre actors and dancers and experience in realizing and directing stories on camera.
Emmanuel Eytan
Programming, game design, writing
Emmanuel was born in Paris and has lived in Paris, London, New York, San Francisco and now, Pittsburgh. He loves fiction in all forms: TV, movies, theater, comics, novels and video games. He’s worked as a programmer, mostly in web backend, programming in PHP, but he loves Python and all things Linux.
At the ETC, he is hoping to take part in developing the next big interactive fiction concept.
So far, on the programming side, he’s become familiar with C#, Unity and HTML5 game engines, and he learned how to be a sound designer during his first semester. (He still prefers Python and Unix to Audition.)
He speaks French and English and dabbles in Mandarin Chinese.
Prateek Gudihal
Game design, programming
Prateek was born in India, raised in Florida. He has always immersed himself in various forms of fiction including novels, videogames, and films. From the long nights of playing Starcraft or GoldenEye to board games like Small World or tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, games have always been a part of his life one way or another.
He attended Carnegie Mellon University beginning in 2008 as an undergraduate student in Information Systems with a focus in Computer Science. Now he hopes to combine the knowledge from his undergraduate degree with his passion for all things games at the ETC.
At the ETC, he has acquired experience with C#, Unity, and Panda3d. Armed with a deeper understanding of the mechanics and creativity behind game development he hopes to take his experience at the ETC into a career in the gaming/entertainment industry.
Garrett Kimball
Programming
I grew up with a father who loved computer games. Well before I ever sat down to a keyboard, I used to watch him, entranced by the magic on the screen. The power that games have to enrapture and manipulate emotions was amazing to me, and I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a part of making that magic someday. Subsequently, gaming has always been a big part of my life. I started programming with QBasic on my first DOS machine and spent my undergrad years learning C++ and modern software engineering. Here at the ETC I hope to use those skills to create worlds and experiences that evoke strong emotions from users through game-play, look, and sound.
I believe the video game is a medium of art that offers incredible opportunity for creating meaning and personal introspection, and I would like to create art that makes the world a better place.
Martin Mittner
Art, game design
Martin Mittner is an aspiring game designer and life long artist. He also has some technical background. It is his hope that his understanding of multiple disciplines will help him design immersive and exciting experiences. He is the creator of the board gameSha’rah, and also the designer of a number of mods including: A Civ of Ice and Fire which is a particularly popular Civilization V mod available here on CivFanatics. Martin’s love of game design goes back to his childhood when he and his friends made a number of mods for Jedi Knights and Mysteries of the Sith.
Martin began his undergraduate studies in the media arts at Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn New York. However, he left after completing the media arts and fine arts cores in the hope that he could learn more about business and how to survive as an artist and designer. While at business school he gained an interest in programming and focused much of my studies on Management Information Systems. After his undergrad he worked for a number of companies and started his own design firm with a few associates. This company specialized primarily in web design and development.
Since then he has continued to work in the arts, has worked for many firms all over the world (mostly in user interface design), and has continued to pursue his passion for game design.
Christopher Thompson
Producer
Born in Macon, GA, Chris started tinkering with computers in high school, and started programming in Java and C++ in his first semester of college, when he decided to try some Computer Science courses as electives, and later as a degree. He was drawn to the ETC because its interdisciplinary nature seemed like the perfect environment to grow his game development skills. He hopes to write code for RPGs and/or MMOs.