Jon Jones is an Art Outsourcing Manager in the games industry, and is
working at an unannounced studio in the Austin area.
Prior to that, he was an Art Production Manager at NCsoft Austin, one
of the most respected and successful video game studios in the world.
He ran an art team composed solely of remote contractors on Dungeon
Runners, a recently released free-to-download, free-to-play casual hack
and slash MMORPG.
Jon Jones first started creating art for games when Wolfenstein 3D was
released. To test his artistic mettle, he replaced all the wall
textures with his own creations. After a great deal of experimenting
with this, he eventually sought out a more mainstream outlet for his
creative urges, the least appalling of which was a series of custom 3D
models for the Quake games. To his amazement, these 3D models gave him
a modicum of credibility that enabled him to join teams working on
several user modifications for various games. This is where Jon's
interest in professional game development truly began to grow.
After a little honing of his artistic skills and a lot of pestering
everyone he knew, Jon inevitably found work as a freelance character
artist working on Gore: The Ultimate Soldier. He continued contracting
solo but eventually landed a position as a fulltime artist at Liquid
Development, a major art studio. Here his responsibilities inexplicably
ranged from interface design and environment art to sales and
marketing. As time passed, Jon finally craved the opportunity to commit
fully to one project and to settle down somewhere sunny, dry and
harrowingly expensive. Ready At Dawn Studios popped up on the radar,
Jon's interest was piqued, and he shipped Daxter for the PSP to
universal critical acclaim with over three million copies sold to date.
After Daxter, Jon's interest in remaining in California waned sharply
as he became embroiled in a very nasty and unexpected divorce that gave
him a strong hankering to get the hell out of dodge. He began searching
for a job elsewhere that would challenge and excite him, and he
discovered NCsoft in sunny, beautiful Austin, Texas beckoning to him.
Jon left Ready At Dawn Studios on good terms, sold off most of his
worldly possessions, and made an epic journey across the country in his
car to begin life anew in Austin, Texas.
Jon arrived in Austin in June of 2006 and started work as an Art
Production Manager at NCsoft Austin. He headed up the art team on
Dungeon Runners, an exciting casual free-to-play MMORPG. Jon was in
charge of the project's art production, art direction, hiring and
managing external contractors, budgeting, scheduling, documentation,
implementation, and a billion other fun, exciting little things.
Unfortunately, NCsoft Austin began having several rounds of layoffs and
cancelled most of their internally developed projects, and Jon and most
of his team were one of the first casualties.
