Melissa Janowicz

I figure I should make some sort of intro post!

My name is Melissa Janowicz, I’m the Lead Combat AI Designer at Respawn Entertainment, working on a Star Wars game.

I’ve been in the games industry for what feels like my entire life. I decided that I wanted to make games when I was 13, dabbled in games art and programming in my teens and got totally hooked on that, went to animation school while working for RadioShack in sales and then entered the games industry and never looked back.

I was a games artist for awhile (doing concept art, production art, backgrounds, and UI) and worked on a lot of stuff including Disney’s Club Penguin, but made the change into design because I realized that it was what I actually wanted to do with my life. After that, I fell in love with artificial intelligence while I was at BioWare and decided to make that my focus, and did for the next several years. Now, I get to be a part of the coolest team ever.

When I’m not doing that I’m essentially being a huge nerd. I play an extremely wide variety of games (digital and physical), I still love cool art and independent creators (even if I don’t have that much time to draw these days)… I casually collect Pokemon cards (I have since base set, and never stopped). I am really into anime and have been since I was a kid. So you’ll probably be hearing a lot about that stuff here as long as I stick around.