Jon Jones

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.