Louanna, Esmaya and Chris
The Engineer – Louanna
Louanna is the nuts and bolts person to this business, in charge of day to day operations. Born into a family of self-employed individuals, she is a serial entrepreneur, starting and running three businesses over the past twenty years, two of which are still running. Light Therapy Options, created to help the DIY light therapy folks, is completely web driven. From 2000 to 2009, Louanna also helped her mother, Kathryn Kalisz, start and run her own business, SciArt LLC, which ran until Kathryn’s death in 2010.
The Entrepreneur in Training – Esmaya
Esmaya is an honors student, an avid gamer, a budding illustrator, and a huge fan of Doctor Who and manga art. She has been creating her own games since she was three and kicking her parents’ butts at various games since she was five. At age six, she used colored sheets of paper as spaces and converted the house into a life-size rendition of Candy Land. One of her ultimate goals is to create an MMO game for tweeners based on her own world-building ideas.
The Creative Consultant – Chris
No newcomer to the world of gaming, Chris is a 15 year veteran of the gaming and creative industries. He started his career as an animator and designer at Funnybone Interactive, a production house for what is now known as Activision Blizzard. While there, Chris added over a half dozen game titles to his belt for brands such as Fisher Price, Mattel, Math Blaster, and Jump Start. Before the seven years he spent as a salaried designer for The Walt Disney Company at ESPN, he spent six years running his own design studio, handling branding, communications and web and interactive design for a number of clients.
The Goal
Chris was looking for a creative project he could do with his daughter. When Esmaya approached him in 2011 with the thought of making one of her games ‘real’, they began kicking the idea around. With Print on Demand companies like The Game Crafter, it was certainly a possibility. Esmaya is always full of ideas, and with experienced help from her parents, both production and business building were within grasp. Once we had five solid game ideas at various stages of prototyping, we realized that this might be something that had legs.
Not wanting to make kid-only or adult-only games, we have adopted the following mission statement:
We create games for both adults and kids that are fun, simple in concept and easy to learn, yet intelligent, putting the brain to work.
This means that we are designing games that anyone can play. Kids with kids, adults with adults, and adults with kids. Our games will all be of the highest quality and appropriate and enjoyable to all ages.