Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software

About Me (Duncan Gough)

Who am I?

I'm the CTO at GameLayers, a web games company responsible for building PMOG, a Passively Multiplayer Online Game!

Previously I was a Ruby developer at Cominded and the Lead Developer at 3RD Sense, a play agency based in London (UK) and Sydney (Australia). Over the last couple of years I've been involved in lots of prototyping - game ideas and game servers using Python, PHP, Ruby on Rails and Flash.

I've written about Massively Casual Online Games (MCOs) to outline casual games that are far less involving than current MMORPGs. I also architechted a scaleable framework that has been used to run Chickstop, Playaholics and MOG as well as being put into use to rapidly deploy new applications for agencies that use games to advertise or run competitions, such as this Max Know All music quiz.

As part of my interest in MMOs and passive gaming, I've been lucky enough to build PMOG, a Passively Multiplayer Online Game. You can find out more about PMOG at PassivelyMultiplayer.com and as you can see from the source code to this page, we were using Microformats to create in-game widgets, too.

As a programmer, I use PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and Actionscript so you can tell that I'm a fan of high level, scripting languages. So much so that I designed an instant messaging robot which uses a layer of Bayesian analysis on top of the ALICE framework in order to create a learning chatbot with the ability to guess. Since joining 3RD Sense, I've also created flash games such as WordSlider and Jewel Thief based around the principles of casual gaming - to hit a sweet spot in the audience so that each game appeals to men and women of a wide range of ages.

I've also administered several websites so that they are secure and reliable, able to sustain long periods of high traffic as well as short spikes of viral traffic.

Working as part of the games developer community, I worked with Neodelight to create SecureMedia - a system that provides a great deal of security to flash game publishers. I have also consulted on a number of game ideas for clients and agencies on various platforms (web, tv, mobile) with different ideals (gambling, viral, advergaming).

More recently, I designed and implemented the very first Web 2.0 application for casual games - Millionsofgames which continues to receive a lot of positive praise:

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3560851
http://www.webuser.co.uk/sites/site_review.php?rev_id=2799
http://del.icio.us/url/2b4634ec9983009b69a4dac2f97c89ad
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/19/117249&tid=95

Working at 3rd Sense where the company was split between two very remote locations, and again when contracting for companies in America, I've also gained a great deal of project management experience where face-to-face contact is limited.

Here's a brief guide to where I've been employed over the last few years;

GameLayers
http://www.gamelayers.com
http://www.pmog.com
http://www.passivelymultiplayer.com

Cominded
http://www.cominded.com

Contracting
http://www.bbc.co.uk
http://www.bunchball.com
http://www.bud.com
http://www.musicknows.com
http://www.ecolocal.com

3RD Sense
http://www.3rdsense.com
http://www.playaholics.com
http://www.chickstop.com
http://www.millionsofgames.com

Time Out
http://www.timeout.com
http://eatdrink.timeout.com

UpMyStreet
http://www.upmystreet.com

Selftrade
http://www.selftrade.co.uk

ICL
http://www.icl.com

Portfolio
My portfolio is available here.

C.V.
Available here in .doc and .txt formats.

Suttree is the title of a novel by Cormac McCarthy that I read a few years ago.

Disclaimer
All of the opinions expressed on suttree.com are those of Duncan Gough and do not represent the views of my current employer (Cominded) or of any of my previous employers in any way.

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