About Arcen (Ar-ken) Games
We are a tiny company (and proud of it!), and it is our mission to deliver an unparalleled experience with our games. We love feedback, and while we can't do everything, we've already implemented l(literally) thousands of features, tweaks, fixes, and balance improvements based on player suggestions. We play all of our own games, so we tend to continue to grow them after release for our own entertainment as much as anyone else's.
Our first released game, AI War, is a cooperative space-based RTS game, but we had no intention of staying in that genre alone. Our second title was a block-based puzzle game with hardcore depth and casual appeal, and our third game is a massive procedural adventure game. AI War has already had three expansion packs and dozens of massive free DLC patches (including an entire game engine upgrade and porting to MacOSX), but we have even more planned for that game despite our focus on other genres in our new titles.
Our staff is into gaming in general -- the modern and the classic, the strategic and the arcade-style -- but the common theme throughout our work is going to be that it is all in 2D, and it will always have some form of cooperative play in addition to single player (and sometimes competitive multiplayer). 2D is where we feel like we can make the largest contribution to the industry, as it lets us explore some territory in terms of scope and scale that simply wouldn't be possible in a 3D game. When it comes to cooperative play, well, that's just something we intensely believe in.
Beyond the above, we're known for our customer-friendly business practices (including our anti-DRM stance), our commitment to substance over form, and our fanatical devotion to support and ongoing quality.
Team Members
Christopher M. Park - Founder, CEO, Lead Programmer, Lead Designer
Forum handle: x4000
Chris founded Arcen Games as a North Carolina Limited Liability Company in March 2009, and began working for the company fulltime in December 2009. He had been working on a game called Alden Ridge since January 2008, and AI War since November 2008. Chris has had a lifelong fascination with games and game design; he made over sixty fan levels for the classic DOS game Demon Stalkers when he was eleven, and then was hooked.
He got into creating content for AOL's Northlands, campaigns for FRUA and Neverwinter Nights, maps for Warcraft II, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake II, and Counter-Strike, and various levels for other titles (GRAAL is one among a half dozen or so). He also coded a number of smaller games over the years, ranging from text adventures in QBASIC to platformers in C#, but never released any of them to the public.
The concept for AI War came about because of Chris's longstanding weekly co-op RTS sessions with his dad and uncle. Tired of the uneven AI and lackluster co-op support in most other titles in the genre, Chris decided to create a game that catered specifically to his play group's interests. His professional background is in architecting and programming high-end enterprise applications (primarily document management, ERP, project management, and financial tracking features).
Pablo Vega - Composer & Lead Sound Designer
Forum handle: PVega8
Pablo joined the Arcen Games team in March 2009 on a part-time basis, and came on board fulltime in December 2009. His melodic, exciting musical scores have really added a lot to our titles. AI War was Pablo's first video game composition, but he was already highly acclaimed as a classical composer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Pablo graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008 where he studied and majored in Music Composition under Allen and Stephen Anderson (no relation). He has been a life long fan of film and video game music and hopes to continue working in the field for the rest of his career.
Pablo's scores for the Arcen titles hit a new high with his work on Tidalis, where he combined new software and hardware with better editing techniques for an even richer sound. Shortly thereafter, during the AI War 4.0 upgrade, Pablo remastered all of the soundtracks for AI War and its expansions with his new tools and techniques.
His ongoing work on the A Valley Without Wind soundtrack is pushing him in yet new directions, as the new work spans many different genres all bound together by chiptunes instrumentation that is paired with realistic or live instrument performances. Everyone at Arcen is quite excited about this, as the result is an awesome sound that we've not heard anywhere else before.
Lars Bull - Game Designer
Forum handle: Fiskbit
Lars joined the Arcen Games team part-time in June 2009, bringing with him puzzle game concepts that led to Tidalis, a project that he was the lead designer for. He got his start with game design doing hobbyist game development for the Nintendo Entertainment System. His work with creating games in such a hardware-constrained environment has left him excited about the possibilities of modern computing power for game design.
Lars graduated from Reed College and the University of Washington with dual Mathematics and Computer Science degrees. An avid gamer, he has hopes of introducing intriguing new ideas into an industry that too often tends toward overused or stale gameplay. He appreciates a wide range of games and intends to visit a variety of genres throughout his career.
He currently works fulltime at an international mega-corporation you've heard of writing clever software. He is still involved in the Tidalis community with Arcen in his off hours, however.
Philippe Chabot - Artist
Forum handle: regnared
Philippe joined the Arcen Games team in July 2009 as a fulltime contractor, and has massively upgraded the AI War visuals between AI War 2.0 and 3.0, as well as doing all the art for The Zenith Remnant. He was also the sole artist on Tidalis (and what an amazing job he did there), and still works with Arcen on things related to that project in particular.
Philippe is a 2D/3D artist and freelancer based in Montreal. In 2006, He studied the 3D Design and Animation for Video Games course at the National Animation & Design Center (NAD center). He's been obsessed about games ever since he laid hands on a Nintendo controller.
He has been working on A Valley Without Wind project as a very part-time contractor, doing things such as the workbenches, the citybuilding graphics, the giant squid boss, among other things. While at the moment this is fairly part-time, Arcen and he hope to work together in the future in a more fulltime capacity again.
Keith LaMothe - Programmer & Game Designer
Forum handle: keith.lamothe
Keith joined the Arcen Games team in January 2010 as a part-time programmer, helping to maintain and extend AI War in the post-3.0 versions, as well as helping with Arcen's other projects. He is an integral part of making sure that AI War continues to evolve and become ever-more-refined at a consistent rate, and was heavily involved with Tidalis in a programming capacity, as well as Light of the Spire in both a programming and a design capacity.
With A Valley Without Wind, Keith has taken on a vastly larger design role, as well as continuing his programming work for the company. He became a fulltime staff member in September 2011.
Notable things you can thank Keith for in AI War: the Fallen Spire Campaign, Modular Ships of any sort, the new UI system in Unity, auto-explore/auto-kiting, the context menu, the concentric circles and x maps, hybrid hives, and a whole host of other stuff. He's even more deeply involved with A Valley Without Wind.
Keith loves software engineering, stories, and games. His most important work is the raising of his children, but he also hopes to contribute to a few truly special games that will stand the test of time and delight many generations to come.
Erik Johnson - PR and Marketing Lead, Content Developer
Forum handle: cupogoodness
Erik joined the Arcen team in January 2011, to head up the company's PR and marketing efforts, as well as to help out with A Valley Without Wind in the areas of dialogue writing, character and region name component lists, interior room map design, "wiring up" of game entities, and so on. He also handles all our social media, trailer creation, and has a big hand in website content definition.
He graduated from Washington State University with a degree in Theater Arts and has since pursued a career as a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles. He has worked in the LAUSD school system, for marketing agency DEI Worldwide, and as a freelancer for various print and online press outlets before discovering a desire to play, share, and create video games for a living. Wearing both the industry journalist and developer hat, he fancies himself an evangelist of indie games in general and the amazing community behind it.
He currently resides in Sherman Oaks with his wife Spring and daughter Gwen where he continues to pursue (and juggle) all his various labors of love.
