Hi everyone. I’m Sirio Brozzi and am on the art team as a concept artist. I work alongside Kyle. For some background, I’m an Italian born citizen who spent most of my life traveling thanks to my parents’ vocations. I came up to the US to study a game related degree at Digipen in Redmond and graduated in early 2008. I spent most of my free time in college painting and being involved in online communities like Conceptart.org and CGhub which really helped me mature my skills by getting lots of feedback from people who were in the industry at the time. I think all that extra work made a big difference at the end for landing me my first game job.

I joined Runic Games in early 2009 and worked hard to get in sync with the house style. I’ve had the chance to concept and illustrate NPC’s, props, bosses, environments, promo art, and other things. What struck me was the flexibility of the art director and being encouraged to just cut loose and explore new directions and the variety of the work we’ve been assigned. It’s been fun, fast paced and frantic to work on this project and I’m still learning with every passing day. I’ve had a great experience so far, and I look forward to finishing up Torchlight and working on the next project. This team has been really great and I’m quite glad I ended up joining Runic.

Now back to work! There’s lots of painting to be done. :)

Hiya folks!

I’m Travis Baldree, and I’m one of the Engineers at Runic, as well as the President/Project Director and one of the cofounders. I was the Project Director/Lead Engineer for Mythos as well, and the Designer/Programmer/Producer for Fate. I appear to have too many titles. In olden days, I made lots of casual and advertising games you’ve never heard of – most of which were racing games. I squeezed two forgettable space-sims, a Tony Hawk 2 port, and a Need for Speed browser game in there as well. Day to day, I do a little bit of this, that, and the other – the bulk of my time is spent programming or developing content for Torchlight, with another significant portion going to making sure that everyone is coordinated and knows what’s upcoming, and solving day to day problems that help things keep trucking along. I get to sign checks too, which isn’t as exciting as it sounds. Occasionally I dip my toes back into art and do a bit of rigging, a lot of particle work, some asset exporting, and anything the art team lets me slip in under the radar. Don’t worry – they’ll probably revise it later and bring it up to code!

I am incapable of using modern note-taking or scheduling devices, which means I have little piles of paper all over my desk covered in nonsensical squigglies and doodles. My meeting notes look like a toddler’s refrigerator art.

Runic Games is home of the best team I’ve ever worked with, period. They are all amazing and I’m lucky to be here with them, and I can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing. When Torchlight ships, if you like it, it is all due to the incredibly devoted and hardworking guys and gals here.

We’ve just completed our show at PAX, and are all exhausted and invigorated at the same time. It was great fun watching people play the game, gathering feedback, and getting a chance to show what we’ve been up to.

We hope to see you in our alpha and beta tests when our MMO gets further down the line – and we hope you have a blast playing Torchlight not too long from now!

PAX09 – we barely survived! Forty-five appointments in three days with media types, tons of hands-on time with players including a few community members, and one confirmed case of swine flu.

PAX was incredible this year for many reasons – it was the zenith of the con’s popularity with an estimated 70,000 attendees, and we were fortunate to be among them. Showing off Torchlight to everyone who came to play was extremely rewarding. People seemed to connect instantly with the game and get sucked right in – we had people play for an hour straight before we gently kicked them off (and wouldn’t have except for the folks waiting behind them!) Even those who were skeptical at first would start playing and then get giddy. That’s what we like to see! Plus people had fun with the swag, applying temporary tattoos of the Alchemist, Imp, or Mechanical Golem, adding a Runic Games bottle opener to their keychain and walking off proudly with Torchlight totes. When we broke down the booth Sunday night, it took about 8 or 9 of us fifteen minutes, and we hand-carried the monitors, computers, random leftovers, and our vacuum the three blocks back to the office – now that’s epic. :)

There are a lot of previews and impressions coming in, and we’d like to share those with you. They are already on the forums, but for added convenience we’ve made a Press page here on the website so you can just click over and find a review at a glance. We’ve even pulled handy little sound bites. If you find one we’ve missed, don’t hesitate to shoot us a note – otherwise, we’ll keep it as updated as possible.

Thank you everyone who stopped by and played for making this the most memorable PAX ever! We can’t wait to ship Torchlight to you on October 27.