ABOUT RICK

I started out as an electrical engineer and programmer. Then, in 1990, I fell into video games by accident.

Turns out it was quicksand. The fun kind. I stopped struggling decades ago.

Since then I’ve been a programmer, designer, producer, executive producer, creative director, and studio head, roughly in that order and occasionally all in the same week. My projects have ranged from early PC role-playing and adventure games to Ultima Online, Madden NFL, and a long run of educational games and simulations. If you’re curious about the archaeological record, my MobyGames profile has the whole dig site.

In 2006, I became one of the original five faculty members at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, UCF’s graduate game-development program, where I’m the Production Track Director. I’ve since delivered more than 2,200 lectures on game design, production, scheduling, agile development, and the many inventive ways a promising project can go sideways. I’ve personally field-tested most of them.

Along the way, I’ve helped train more than 300 producers and designers and overseen more than 65 multidisciplinary development teams, most of which survived. In 2024, UCF’s College of Sciences gave me its Outstanding Instruction award, suggesting that at least some of those lectures worked.

Writing has always run alongside the game work, like a second job nobody asked me to take. My books include Cause and Effect Game Design, Write Characters Using Myers-Briggs, and the psychic urban fantasy Gnosis. I also built an online character-building tool for writers who want psychologically consistent fictional people, or who just enjoy pressing buttons until an interesting stranger appears.

I’m represented by Michelle Hauck of Storm Literary. Two of my novels are out looking for a publisher and a third is under construction, which means I spend a lot of time living with people who don’t exist and handing them increasingly complicated problems.

Whether I’m writing a novel, designing a game, or teaching a development team, I keep circling back to the same question: what happens when you drop one small, unreasonable complication into a system that was working just fine?

Usually, something interesting. Occasionally, a fire.

Away from the keyboard, I read about quantum physics, economics, true crime, and history. I also play chess, which mostly involves staring at the board while slowly realizing my brilliant plan was not, in fact, brilliant.