Erin Hoffman, former Zynga lead systems designer, has joined social game studio Loot Drop as a lead designer.
Hoffman brings several years of experience working with online games, and has helped developed games such as Zynga's FrontierVille, the licensed title Kung Fu Panda World, and Simutronics' DragonRealms.
"Erin brings a soul to social games, and that's something I'd say about few game designers in this space. She genuinely believes in making games fun -- first and foremost -- and that's something core at Loot Drop. We are grateful she's joined us," said company COO Brenda Brathwaite.
In addition, Hoffman served on the International Game Developers Association's board of directors from 2009 until earlier this year, and was listed among NextGen's most influential women in the industry in 2006.
Loot Drop was founded in November 2010 by industry veterans John Romero, Robert Sirotek and Tom Hall. In October the company revealed that it is working on an unannounced project with Ubisoft as its publisher.
Good for Erin Hoffman, I remember Simutronics DragonRealms, I played that mud throughout my teenage years. It didn't look like much at first, being a MUD it didn't seem too interesting. Though after trying it for a month I became captured by it. It was how I learned how to hit keys fast enough to type "slash gob head" "slash gob neck" in under 5 seconds. It made me go shoot gob left eye, wear cross, remove cross shoot gob right eye. Then I would have this gory message of how blood squirted profusely out of the goblins eye socket. I used to live in st louis. It was just a coiencidence that I had found the webspace www.play.net and joined dragon realms. It was one of my first pay to play games that I experienced. I'm glad to see Erin is making her way into new frontiers.
Thanks, Andrew. :) I have mixed feelings about this presentation because I get terribly nervous speaking in front of large groups, but you might like this talk I gave at LOGIN last year about DragonRealms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO7auL4WDgc&feature=related
