Opaque Space, the newly formed Melbourne-based game studio, has kicked off their HTC Vive X partnership by announcing three new high profile hires.
Jennifer Scheurle, Michael Davies and Stefan Allaki have joined Opaque Space to drive development of the internationally acclaimed VR title ‘Earthlight’, based around the journey of an astronaut named ‘Ana’ and built in collaboration with multiple facilities at NASA.
Jennifer Scheurle, joins the team as the Game Design Lead with over ten released titles across six years of development experience and having been the AIE Sydney Lead Game Design teacher as well as the Spaceship Designer for the independent title Objects in Space. With outstanding experience in physical play and game design, including an alt.ctrl GDC nomination for her spaceship controllers for Objects in Space, Jennifer Scheurle will be responsible for both designing features for consumers on Earthlight as well as developing features for Opaque Space’s work with the NASA Hybrid Reality Lab.
Michael Davies joins the team as Technical Lead after his successful release of award-winning party racer Obliteracers, which saw 16 players engage in brutal racing across multiple platforms. Drawing on a wealth of experience working on AAA titles including Battlefield 4, Need for Speed: Rivals and Dead Space 1 & 3, Michael will be driving the technical development of Earthlight and other titles at Opaque Space. In addition, he will be providing technical support to Opaque Space’s collaborations with NASA laboratories as well as developing new proprietary technologies in the field of Virtual and Augmented Reality.
Stefan Allaki also joins the team as the Lead Game Artist, coming from multiple game development studios covering a variety of titles, including Sims Freeplay, Transformers, Scene-It: Box Office Smash, Vive Pintata: Party Animals and Test Drive Unlimited. With an arsenal of art experience and released titles, Stefan will be responsible for the art development and direction at Opaque Space. Stefan has commenced his role on the commercial arcade release of Earthlight, developing a range of items for multiple laboratories at NASA; including an animated Canadarm and weather visualizations on Earth as seen from space.
Emre Deniz, the Director of Opaque Space said “Earthlight represents a milestone in game development in Australia, signalling the calibre of work that we do locally in emerging technologies. As such we are really excited to have world-class developers join our team and drive our work forward at Opaque Space.”
Opaque Space was nominated as a finalist in the GPU Technology Conference VR Start-Up Showcase and recently completed its first round of testing Earthlight at the NASA Johnson Space Centre in collaboration with the NASA Hybrid Reality Lab.
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