The Magnificent Seven (and Omeed)

I’ve been writing these design/development articles for a few months now, and I realize that I’ve never officially introduced the members of the R&D team. (By the way, R&D stands for research and development. As in, we read comic books and make games.) If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably picked up references to Mike (our lord and master), Matt (a wicked clever fellow), and Humpherys (who is very tall). But there are at least two or three other people worth mentioning (and a few who aren’t, but I’ll mention them anyway). Today I’m going to go into a little better detail on who does what to who on the Vs. System’s projects. With a couple of exceptions, I’m going to start with the veterans and work my way down to the newer recruits. Note: While pretty much everyone does some design and some development, I’ve categorized everyone according to the part of the process in which they’re more involved.

Mike Hummel
(Vs. System Lead)
Mike probably has the most industry experience out of any of us. He’s been at UDE (Upper Deck Entertainment/United Defenders of Earth) for a couple of years now working on various projects. He was put in charge of the Vs. System in the middle of 2003. In Mike’s own words, before working on Vs. he was:

A General Lay-About
A Professional Slacker
A MUDer Without a Clue
Cross-Armed and Obfuscated
A Mom's Basement, Mountain Dew Loving, Core Demographic
The B5 CCG's World's Social Tournament Champion
A Level 50 Bubble Runie

These days, he spends most of his time reclining in his throne (made out of burnished gold) eating caviar and peeled grapes. He also oversees all of the individual Vs. teams (I’ll go over how the teams are broken up in a bit).

Matt Hyra
(Vs. System Design, Winx Club Lead, Bratz Design)
Matt also has gobs of industry experience. Gobs! He was brought on board in the middle of 2003, so he’s been on Vs. from the beginning. Matt’s a history buff and big fan of the pulp genre. He works out five times a week and can bench press four times his own weight. He also works on the Winx Club and Bratz games, which helps him channel his inner nine-year-old girl. Matt’s the guy you can count on to slap you in the face and say “Get a hold of yourself, man!” when you’ve gone crazy with the Wheat Thins. He also collects Pringle lids and writes the Wicked Clever articles right here on your very own Metagame.com.

Danny Mandel
(Vs. System Design)
Hey that’s me! I joined UDE officially in November of 2003, although I (along with Dave Humpherys) had been contracting a few weeks earlier. Unlike Matt, I pretty much just work on Vs. The funny part is that since I write the design/development articles I end up looking like the figurehead/mouthpiece/lighting rod for the whole team, while in truth I just like to talk about the creative process more than anyone else. So yeah, if there’s something you like, don’t give me too much credit, and if there’s something you don’t like, it’s probably Humpherys’s fault.

Dave “Rainbow” Humpherys
(Vs. System Lead Development, Shaman King Development)
Dave was trained as an assassin from birth and didn’t speak for much of his young life. He recently took on the mantle of Batgirl before joining UDE in early 2004. He spent the last few years making some serious money as a professional card player while finishing his doctorate in biology from MIT. He’s in charge of Vs. development, so when a card is too good or too bad, you should blame him. (When a card’s just right, you should shower Mike, Matt, and me with praise.) Plug Alert: Hump also works on the Shaman King game, which is extremely cool and should be hitting stores late this year.

Brian Hacker
(Vs. System Design, Shaman King Lead)
A professional poker player before joining UDE, “the Hack” made a living parting fools from their money. Now he’s the head honcho on the Shaman King project. He’s also been doing a fair amount of Vs. development, and recently shifted over to design. Brian takes a very empirical approach to design, preferring to test cards in batches as he comes up with them (rather then designing perhaps hundreds of cards at a time and then shifting over to playtesting). He also loves oatmeal.

Dave Smith
(Vs. System Design, Shaman King Design)
The second (and best) Dave on the R&D team, Dave Smith was wandering the streets of Japan offering karaoke lessons or a knife to the gut to anyone stupid enough to get in his way. About five months ago, he stumbled in through the Upper Deck front door in a drunken stupor wearing a raincoat on backwards mumbling “The goats . . . the goats are coming . . .” We hired him immediately. The only trained philosopher of the group, Dave often notices problems outside the standard math/balance issues. No really, that last part was true.

Kevin Tewart
(Yu-Gi-Oh! Grand Poobah, Vs. Consultant)
Kevin started working for Upper Deck right around the same time as Mike—June of 1943. Kevin’s time is pretty much swallowed up by the little kid with the spikey hair. Kevin has far and away the best comic knowledge (both DC and Marvel) of anyone here. While we all hope that someday Kevin will have time to work on Vs. design, for the time being he acts more as a consultant, giving us character background and suggesting appropriate mechanics. He’s also a terrific speller.

Omeed Dariani
(Master of Secret Powers)
A former president of Uganda, Omeed has his finger in about one thousand pies. While he’s not an official member of the Design/Development teams, he does flavor text, card naming, and some development for both Vs. and Shaman King. He also develops new intellectual properties for UDE (for games years down the road), organizes marketing and website info, and yells at us a lot.
 

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

I keep mentioning how there are several Vs. teams. Here’s how everything’s broken down. At first there was just the Vs. Team. This included Mike, Matt, me, and a guy named Ed Fear (who was contracting with us at the time). Design and development duties were handled by everyone, and the game engine itself was still being finalized. After a while, we added Dave Humpherys (who had also been contracting off and on) as the full time lead of Vs. development. Of course, at this point the development “team” was Humpherys plus everyone else. While Brian and Dave Smith were hired to work on Shaman King (at least at first), they slowly began developing Vs. as well, which let Mike, Matt, and I concentrate more on design. As I’m fond of saying, while everyone does everything, everyone has his own specialties.

Recently we’ve started working on multiple sets concurrently. This means we’ve been moving toward a more structured set of teams. We’re currently in the middle design stages of the Superman expansion and just kicking off design of the next Marvel set. The Superman design team is made up of me, Matt, and Mike, and design of the next Marvel set is Brian, Dave Smith, Matt, and Mike. Humpherys is coordinating development for both teams. As you can see, Mike and Matt are lucky enough to be officially on both teams, but then again everyone works on everything. (They wouldn’t dare keep me away from a Marvel expansion!)

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there are several other in-house people involved in the development process, such as Dave Hewitt (Vs. Product Manager) and Hyrum Savage (Vs. Associate Product Manager). We also have a bunch of great TCG minds in-house that work on other projects but also help playtest the new cards (usually on stickers fresh out of the oven).

Okay, that’s all I got. Tune in next week for some babel-ing on the DC set. (And this time I really mean that.)

Send your questions or concerns to dmandel@metagame.com.