Interview: A2M’s Liza Wood

Nov 30 2009

Interview: A2M’s Liza Wood

Published by Chris Comeau at 12:17 pm under Interview

From GameIndustry.biz (via IGDA Montreal):

Artifical Mind & Movement is one of Montreal’s largest independent game development studios with over 500 members of staff, and a portfolio of licensed titles including Indiana Jones, The Sims, Iron Man and Scene It? Earlier this year, the company also released its own original intellectual property, WET, with publishing partner Bethesda.

Here, A2M’s senior director of development services Liza Wood discusses how WET has acted as a calling card to show off the creative talent of the company, why Canada is a vibrant games development community, and how the Montreal International Games Summit is an essential event for promoting the region.

Q: For those that aren’t too familiar with the business, can you give us a brief overview of Artificial Mind & Movement?

Liza Wood: Artificial Mind & Movement is quite a large independent games developer in Montreal. Part of out business is contract games development where we develop licensed IP. Recent titles include MySims Racing, and Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. The other part of our business is developing original intellectual property like WET, which came out in September.

In my role as senior director of development services, I’m responsible for three areas that are common services to all teams. One is the technology team that builds the technology for our Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 games. The second is the user experience team which design and build all the menus and HUDs for the game, and the last is our outsourcing project manager who co-ordinates all out outsourcing needs.