Author / Lanny McNie

Lanny McNie

As the dev mgr, Lanny oversees the technical day-to-day details of production and makes sure things get out the door.

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by Lanny McNie

Reasons to Work at gskinner

A few years ago, we shared some awesome reasons why you should come work with us. We are in a brand new office and hiring smart developers and designers, so we thought we would update the list.

We Have the Coolest Clients & Projects

We’re privileged to collaborate with notable organizations like Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Disney, National Film Board, and FITC (to name a few). We are tasked to prove concepts, explore new functionality, and create flagship experiences for announcements. We design and build world-class apps, experiences, installations, and games on a wide variety of platforms. This rich breadth of work offers constant engagement and opportunities to learn and grow.

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by Lanny McNie

Great Pumpkin Showdown 2017


Hallowe’en at gskinner means two traditions:

The first tradition is our annual pumpkin carving afternoon. Earlier in the week, we announced some teams, and on Friday we brought in food, drinks, snacks, and some classic Tim Burton Hallowe’en movies. The day was punctuated with visits from Dodo, our office dog for the day, on loan from Chris K.

The second tradition is the design and development of our Pumpkin Voting App. This privilege falls on our newest team member(s). They manage all the project stages, from initial sketches and ideation, right through deployment! It’s a great opportunity to provide some training and practice with real deadlines.
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by Lanny McNie

Great Pumpkin Showdown 2016

It has been a few years since we did it, but this year we decided to spend an afternoon carving some pumpkins.

Last week, our newest team members Chris and Matthew found some time in their very busy schedules to build a voting app. You can check out the app at pumpkin.gskinner.com/2016/.

Please jump in and vote for best pumpkin! Instead of the usual “select your favorite”, this app uses a face-off model. If you don’t like where you end up, start again. We will cut off voting on Friday at 5pm.

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by Lanny McNie

Explaining Patterns and Matches in RegExr

RegExr 2.0 was released a little over 2 years ago. If you haven’t used it, it is a great way to test, preview, and share Regular Expressions. We’re committed to updating and improving RegExr, and in January we quietly pushed out some features to help inspect and explain patterns.

Check out RegExr here.

The New “Tools” Bar

Initially, RegExr only had one tool, the “substitution” panel, which let users show sample text with matches substituted using an expression. It was hidden by default, unless a pattern included a substitution expression. This tool has been renamed “replace”, and is now part of a larger “tools” bar, which we hope to continue growing in the future. In the meantime, it has a few other useful tools that I’ll describe below in more detail. Continue reading →

by Lanny McNie

The Dragon Age ISS

In 2014, we worked with BioWare to create the ISS: an interactive, animated cinematic of a player’s history in the first two games of the Dragon Age series, narrated by one of the characters, Varric.

When we first met with BioWare’s online team to discuss the Interactive Story Summary, we were floored. It’s always a privilege to work with one of the best game development companies in the world, and the ISS presented a challenge that was perfectly suited with some of the tech we have been focused on for the last few years. The goal of the ISS is to summarize the complex narrative and decisions that players have made in previous games in the series, and give them control of those choices leading into their latest chapter, Dragon Age: Inquisition.

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by Lanny McNie

Game Design and Life

I spend a lot of time thinking about video games, from concept to completion and then some. Whether making, playing or being involved with the community, there are a few things I have noticed that I’d like to share.

Game design is equal parts organic and structure, but the more time I spend with both the process and the end product, the more I realize that there are hidden, underlying core values in game design that closely resemble the six human needs. The more of these values/needs the game hits, the subjectively “better” the game is.

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by Lanny McNie

Thoughts on Responsive “Art Direction”

In the creative community, there are discrepancies in how people use design-related lexicon. Terms like “Creative Direction”, “Asset Production”, and “Design” are often used interchangeably and inaccurately. It can be confusing.

“Art direction” in particular, means different things to different people, and there’s a recent trend in using this term to describe specific processes surrounding the production of scalable assets in responsive systems.

For example, according to the Google Developer’s documentation on responsive images:

“[c]hanging images based on device characteristics, also known as art direction can be accomplished using the picture element. The picture element defines a declarative solution for providing multiple versions of an image based on different characteristics, like device size, device resolution, orientation, and more”. – Google Developer Documentation.
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