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About

Mark Grossnickle, CEO

Hard-working programmer with 6 years of professional experience in interactive media.  Mark was an integral part of Sony Online Entertainments’ development team that launched Wildlife Refuge, a social game on Facebook.  Before Sony, he was the Flash Team Lead at The Basement Design + Motion where he led the technical development of interactive web sites and games on national award winning advertising campaigns for clients such as KFC, Verizon, and Transition Lenses. Mark began his career developing interactive visualizations for live war zone simulations used by the Department of Defense in Afghanistan.  Over the years he has been published in Flash & Flex Magazine, taught as an Adjunct Lecturer at Butler University, and helped Co-Found a non-profit called IndianaUploaded.

Dan Kopycienski, Creative Director

Award winning game designer and entrepreneur at forefront of interactive media and entertainment since 1998 when he founded the interactive design firm Octopi. Creator of PoxNora, an online micro-transactional strategy game that has been online since 2006, generating over $8m in revenue.  Dan has been developing games for over 15 years with over 35 titles to his credit, including online, mobile and social networking games. Most recently designed and led production on 2 social games while Director of Development for Sony Online Entertainment: The Agency Covert Ops and Wildlife Refuge.

Dan has been the recipient of several media awards, and has been published in “In Your Face, The Best of Interactive Interface Design.”

Chris Hill, CTO

Passionate lead developer and artist, Chris has been developing applications and games for over 10 years. Recently led development on two social games for Sony Online Entertainment, The Agency:Covert Ops and Wildlife Refuge. Before Sony, Chris was Director of Interactive at Terralever. Working closely with Facebook on Facebook Applications, Chris developed the first ever Flash application for Facebook, and the first Facebook ActionScript API (now the Adobe API). Chris also worked with Miniclip.com and Microsoft on alpha versions of Silverlight. He advised Microsoft on Silverlight 2 & 3 as a gaming platform. Initially working in interactive media, Chris worked on many high-profile projects for clients such as Red Bull and Adobe. In earlier days, Chris worked as a traditional animator and graphic designer.

Bryan Rypkowski, Art Director and Lead Artist

Bryan has 14 years of experience as a professional artist, working in both traditional and digital media.  He has spent the last  5 years working as both Lead Artist and Art Director for a variety of online games such as PoxNora, The Agency Covert Ops, and Wildlife Refuge.  Bryan has been featured in annuals like EXPOSE and EXOTIQUE,   along with many of the artists who worked under his direction.

John Peterson, Lead Systems Programmer

John has over 20 years of software development and architecture experience in a number of methodologies and languages.  He has been involved with every aspect of the software engineering lifecycle, from conception and design, through implementation and maintenance.  In addition to proficiency in C/C++/C#, John has extensive experience as a database architect and developer with SQL Server and Oracle over the past 10 years.  This combination of expertise has enabled John to successfully develop and deploy enterprise-level solutions, with an emphasis on providing back end (server-side) components.