Michael Russell

My name is Michael and, in a past life, I worked for a wide variety of game developers, ranging from Access Software to Microsoft Game Studios to Ritual Entertainment.

After leaving the games industry in 2006, I kept doing work to keep my skills up and ended up creating RomTerraria, which was not only one of the first widely used mods for Terraria, but also recognized as one of PC Gamers' "Top 5 Mods For Terraria."  In the years since, the resolution unlocking code has been added to Terraria itself to unlock 4K resolution and the zoom unlock code has been added into tModLoader and so RomTerraria has been retired.  I've also released a general purpose XNA resolution unlocker utility.  I've also been doing a lot of work running game jams and building a suite of Left 4 Dead 2 mutations for the Shacknews community.

I've started doing a lot of work over the last two years with Unity and am looking at ways of creating some general purpose mod tools for Unity games, and that's part of why I'm creating this Patreon.

I have a good job and have no real need for additional funds, but I've found that in the past, I've done my best work when I've had a small community that I build things for with a tight feedback loop.  Knowing that I owe people who are paying for mods and tools will keep me motivated.  The funds from this Patreon will be funneled towards software license fees and towards prize money for game jams.  Also, only having funds collected on a release makes it easy to ensure that nobody is paying during months where I can't do any work due to crunch mode or other obligations.

Currently, I have mods in progress for:

• Hollow Knight
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Quake 1/2
• Terraria

I also have a variety of game development tools in the works as well.