Dan Fessler Email & Phone Number

San Mateo, Ca, Us

Co-founded and operate an AI-first games studio on a mission to incite the best stories in games.Busy building a new kind of life-sim built on top of the world's first Agentic Game Engine.Funded by a16z's SPEEDRUN, batch 1

San Mateo, Ca, Us

As Chief Visual Officer, I reported directly to the CEO and CCO and collaborated on executive-level planning/strategy for the company. I was responsible for overseeing all things visual for our AAA UGC platform, Core, including all Environment, Character, UI, Marketing, Brand Partnerships, Outsourcing, and First-Party Development.As employee #1 and the founding member of the art department, I've helped scale the company to over 100 employees and directly oversaw a team of over 30 artists, designers, and contractors.I oversaw and directed the production of props, VFX, environment assets, and hundreds of avatars/cosmetics to fulfill our mission to deliver rich self-expression and identity in the Metaverse.I also worked closely with product managers on the design and implementation of creator tools/features to empower an ecosystem of on-platform UGC creators, which included voxel terrain editing, kit-bash modeling, smart-material system, character customization and general UI/UX for the editor. I also directly prototyped an experimental visual programming language written with modern web technologies that compiled to Lua.

San Francisco, California, Us

I was brought into Zynga with the acquisition of A Bit Lucky in 2012 as part of their New IP division. At Zynga I art directed various titles including Solstice Arena, Empires and Allies, Mountain Goat Mountain, and an unreleased iteration of Farmville Next.Later I joined the R&D division which prototyped forward-thinking concepts including VR and experimental social games.

San Mateo, Us

Founding member of the art department Created in-game, concept, and UI art content Aided the hiring of new art talent Managed, directed, and tasked the art team; in-house and outsourced Defined the visual style for all games Developed / streamlined the art pipeline to maintain consistent quality and fast turn-around. Wrote 3ds Max render scripts and Photoshop scripts Designed and prototyped proprietary art and animation tools to improve work-flow and aid future games development

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Created in-game, concept, and UI art content Lead Artist on "Family Guy: Uncensored" for mobile and iPhone Supporting Artist on "Space Monkey" for iPhone Specialized in animation for in-game sprites. Ported all art assets for a wide range of devices and screen resolutions. worked closely with IP owners for licensed game content to maintain consistent quality. Defined visual style of games as Lead.

Paris, Paris, Fr

Created in-game, concept, and UI art content Specialized in tiled backgrounds/scenes for "New York Nights 2" Created polished game mock-ups to pitch prospective titles