Rune Skovbo Johansen has been part of the development team at Unity Technologies since 2009, working on expanding the feature set of the editor and tightening the workflows and interface. He is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Besides editor work he has developed procedural animation tools, written sections of the Unity documentation, and has been a programmer on several of the official Unity demos.
In general, Rune is passionate about creating solutions that make advanced and cool technology simple to use. He has a creative and cross-disciplinary approach to software development grounded in a Master's degree in Multimedia & Game Programming and an interest since childhood in graphics, animation, and coding.
Rune engages with the game development community online in various forums and blogs and offline through game jams and other events. He has been a speaker at the Game Developers Conference and Unity's own Unite Conference, and has helped organize the Nordic Game Jam.
In his spare time Rune enjoys the outdoor in parks and forests, daily biking, and reading. He also spends time working creatively with graphics and animation, and developing small games. He has a special interest in anything procedural and is persistently trying to find the best way to instruct his computer to generate giant sprawling worlds for him. He writes about his projects at runevision.com.
Mark Backler is a Game Designer who has been working in the games industry for over 5 years. He has worked at EA, Kuju and is currently at Lionhead Studios working on Fable: The Journey. He has worked on numerous games including Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Milo and Kate and the Bafta award winning Fable 2. He can be found on Twitter at @MarkBackler.
David Fugère-Lamarre holds a Computer Engineering degree from the École Polytechnique de Montréal and a Master's degree in Engineering Management from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His video game development experience started in 2004 when he worked for Behaviour Interactive (Artificial Mind & Movement) in Montreal, Canada as a game programmer on various console titles. In 2007 he worked for Phoenix Studio in Lyon, France again as a game programmer for a console title. In 2009 he co-founded Illogika Studios (http://illogika.com/), an independent game development company in Montreal specializing in Unity game development. He also teaches Unity pro training classes at the Centre Nad in Montreal and his involved with local colleges in creating game programming courses.
Bastien Fontaine is a 25 year old French game designer/scripter. He passed a two-year diploma from a university institute of computer science (C++, Java, PHP, SQL, and so on) at Nice, France, then a 3-year diploma on ARIES private school on Game Design/Video game jobs formation. He learned software such as Virtools, Maya, 3DS Max, Photoshop. He finished his studies with a 1-year diploma from "Université Lyon 2" (Gamagora)where he learned Level Design and tools such as Unreal Engine, Unity, Sketch Up, and improved his game design skills.
He worked with Unity at Creative Patterns (Strasbourg, France) to develop for iPhone and at Illogika Studio (Montreal, Canada) to develop for the iPhone too.
He also worked at Illogika Studio with David Fugère-Lamarre, another reviewer of this book.
Steffen Franz is currently the Technical Director at HiveMedia (www.hivemedia.tv) a branded social game company in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also the Lead Engineer on Deadliest Catch—The Social Game, a Facebook game based on Discovery Channel's hit show. Since earning his B.S. in Visual and Game Programming at The Art Institute of California—San Francisco, Steffen has been developing on Unity for over three years, working on titles such as Globworld, a child friendly virtual world, Disney Online TRON Legacy, and Cordy, a 3D platformer for Google's Android mobile platform.
Aaron Grove is an award winning Visual Effects Supervisor with over 10 years experience, creating high-end visual effects for television commercials and music videos in Australia, United Kingdom and United States of America. Aaron's creativity and knowledge of 3D & visual effects (technical and artistic) combined with his passion for games gives him the drive to create and craft visually stunning games. In 2010, Aaron was the Visual Effects Supervisor on the award winning (2010 D&D Yellow Pencil Award) music video Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear. Currently Aaron is the creative director and co-founder of Blowfish Studios which is solely focused on Unity game development. More information can be found at www.blowfishstudios.com.
Ben Lee is a software engineer and has been working in the computer game industry for over 13 years on projects involving EA, Intel, nVidia and 3M. He has extensive experience with designing and programming computer game engines and all other aspects of game software development for a variety of hardware platforms. Most recently Ben co-founded Blowfish Studios(www.blowfishstudios.com) and has since been focused solely on Unity game development.