David Wessman

David Wessman entered the game industry in 1991 as a tester at Lucasfilm Games, (later known as LucasArts), where he worked on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, LeChuck's Revenge ( Monkey Island 2), and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and its 4 add-on campaign disks. In 1992 and 1993 he was a contract tester for Spectrum Holobyte, (later renamed MicroProse) where he worked on patches and expansions for Falcon 3.0, Tetris Classic for Windows and Chessmeister 5 Billion and 1.

In 1992 he joined Larry Holland's independent development group to work on X-Wing where he led internal testing, wrote documentation and did mission design, eventually becoming the game play and story lead on TIE Fighter and all subsequent products in the series.

From 2000 to 2002 he worked at Stormfront Studios, where he was the lead game designer on Blood Wake, a fast action boat combat game that was published by Microsoft as an Xbox launch title. It became a Platinum Series Hit.

In the summer of 2003 he worked at Starbreeze Studios, where he contributed to the design of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, published by Vivendi-Universal for Xbox and PC. He is also credited with voice work on Knights of the Temple published by TDK Mediactive on PS2, Xbox, GameCube and PC. Also, in 2003 he founded Politically Incorrect Games, LLC to pursue small independent projects.

From December 2003 through April 2005 he was a senior designer at Volition, Inc., where he worked on Saint's Row, an Xbox 360 title published by THQ, and did a small amount of voice over work for The Punisher.

From August 2005 to August 2006 he was a senior designer at Backbone Entertainment where he was one of the lead designers on Death Jr. 2: Root of Evil for the Sony PSP. He was also the uncredited audio lead on that project, (studio policy allowed only one credit.)

From January 2007 to February 2008 he was a senior game designer at the Raleigh, NC location of Destineer Studios where he worked on an unannounced next gen title and a training simulation for the U.S. Intelligence Community as well as consulting on the (as yet unpublished) Six Days in Fallujah.

From May 2008 to May 2013 Mr. Wessman was a professor at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, AZ where he taught over a dozen different courses in game design and development. In addition, he directed multiple student projects involving distributed teams of up to 28 members. In September 2012 he was appointed a Guest Professor at the Jilin Animation Institute in Changchun, China. Previously he taught game design at the Art Institute in California - San Francisco and was a guest lecturer at schools such as the UC Berkeley and E'xpressions College of New Media. Mr. Wessman has also consulted on game design curricula for several schools.

He is currently a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz.

Outstanding student game projects he has been/is involved with include: Aquaphobia: Mutant Brain Sponge Madness, WPB, StarFist, Gravity, and Tellus: Save the Earth (which won the IEEE Committee on Earth Observation's SaveEarthGame competition.)

Not limiting himself to just electronic game development, David also finds time to assist in the development of historical board wargames including When Dragons Fight: If China Invades Taiwan and War of 1812, (which won the Charles S. Roberts award for best magazine wargame in 2001.)

David is a long-standing member of the IGDA and was a founding member of the San Francisco chapter. He has been a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as the Game Developers Conference.