Greg Lord has loved, played, studied, and attempted to create games for quite literally as long as he can remember.  (In fact, he’d prefer his family might forget his days of running around with sticks as a five-year-old, yelling about being Link, and defeating Ganon.)  Born just in time to meet and grow up with the NES, his own gaming and artistic interests stem from that magical early 8-bit world, and followed along as it flowed along into the classic eras of 16-bit, of 3D, of AAA and indie alike — and, eventually, into his own attempts to join in the craft of making games.

It’s safe to say that all of his creative pursuits have branched outward from this early fascination with games.  His interest in art began with his endlessly drawing video game characters in notebooks — and somewhere along the line became an effort to learn to paint, sculpt, 3D model, and animate them, for games of his own.  His interest in programming began with early and bewildered stumbles through the code of PC game mods, rom hacks, and point-and-click-adventure game engines — and eventually led to him becoming a professional web and 3D/VR developer.  Some of his earliest efforts at writing began as video game fan fiction — eventually leading to his to earning an English degree focused on Creative Writing.  And, perhaps closest to his heart of all of these, his earliest efforts at writing music came from searching out the notes and melodies of his favorite Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda soundtracks on an old family piano, beginning the slow progression of musical composition that today finds him writing the soundtracks for Stellar Door’s games and film projects (and plenty more of his own game projects in the meantime).

In his real life, Greg is a designer/developer and educator, working at Hamilton College’s Digital Humanities Initiative, developing (and leading/training a team of undergraduate students in developing) digital research projects consisting of 3D modeling, animation, virtual reality, and interactive research using 3D and game development engines.  His own scholarly research and teaching focuses on the storytelling and interactive narrative structures of video games.

Melanie Judd is a graphic designer and illustrator who eats, drinks, and breathes art. From a very young age she has been buried in a sketchbook, capturing life in the form of doodles. She grew up trying her best to render dreams and imagined stories into reality in the only way she knew how. While she can’t remember the first time she picked up the hobby, it really took off in the later years of middle school/early high school. It was here that her interest in art for the purpose of storytelling began to flourish under the influence of many popular icons in animation, comic illustration, and game design.

Game development was always an attractive concept, rooted in a childhood spent designing her own Pokémon and drawing out game levels on lined paper for her classmates. The discovery of flash games and consequently the genre of point-and-click adventure games made this interest all the more approachable for someone with an illustration background. Independent game development companies like Pastel Games and Daedalic Entertainment proceeded to greatly inform a lot of what makes her art style what it is today. While she dabbled very lightly in RPG maker and made small steps towards making her own games, it wasn’t until she was invited to work on a Ludum Dare Game Jam game that this dream was fully realized, thus making Obsolete the first game she had the pleasure to work on. Working with Stellar Door Studios has only opened up more opportunities since then.

When she’s not working on projects for her day job as a designer or making funky artwork for Stellar Door Studios creations, she’s often found catching up on her massive backlog of games, digging into one of many half-finished books, adventuring with her party in an ongoing DnD campaign, or working on her own creative projects.

It is heavily rumored that she is actually sixteen octopi (octopodes) stacked upon one another in a trench coat, leading to both her fascination with the mysteries of the deep, and her ability to produce artwork so quickly.

Adam Silcott masquerades as a modern day human, despite having originated somewhere in deep space and settling among humankind only after the accidental crash landing of his vessel, known as the Monolith.  He struggles to use Earth’s primitive technologies to adequately rebuild and refuel his vessel, an effort that has required the harvesting of humanity’s electrical brain activity — a requirement that has urged him to take up game design, in an effort to maximally energize the nearby brainwaves of his unwitting brainwave generators–or, more delicately put, neighbors.

When anyone gets suspicious, Adam tells them the backstory he fabricated to fit in: He programmed his first game on a TRS-80 when he was 9. It was a downhill racing/skiing sort of thing that was totally unfair, but he loved it all the same. It sparked a lifetime obsession with game design, a hobby that he continues to enjoy to this day. He’s also been known to do some drawing, painting, and sculpting. All totally normal activities that normal humans enjoy.

In his day job he works with Unity to visualize earth science data in VR. It’s all in the hopes of getting to hitch a ride on one of those sweet satellite launches someday. First step low Earth orbit, next step hitching a ride on a Vogon constructor fleet.