Erlend Sogge Heggen

I've managed the jMonkeyEngine project since the start of the 3.0 version, which I introduced together with Kirill Vainer. Since then the team has grown from 2 to 8 people, all actively dedicating their time to develop a professional-grade, open source game engine.

Running campaigns & user testing and customer interaction.

Started out as a casual writer. Gradually worked my way up to responsibilities in management, and basically the whole year of 2008 I took charge of the project as 'Director', until the full design, codebase and staff changed hands again at the end of the year when I took off for my 4 month volunteer work in Ghana starting January 2009.

I started out making general suggestions in management, pr and business. Shortly after some nice discussions with Marius we were putting the core team together, which later grow to become the most professional assembly of hobbyists I have ever had the privilege to work with. While I started out doing mostly project co-ordination and community management, my responsibility gradually shifted into public relations, as I harvested a lot of contacts in the open source communities, getting in touch with prospective developers and affiliates, while generally spreading the word of JFusion. When I went away for a 4 month stay in Ghana as a volunteer worker, my position in JFusion came to an unofficial halt.

I started out with a simple mock concept, based off of a proven casual game element. When Joseph Gordon, the project manager and representative of Ocean Legacy gave me the green light for that design, I expanded on it as we expanded our team with other volunteer professionals. During the course of the project I kept up with minor iterations on the design, while communicating as frequently as possible with the team and prospective associates. I was living in Chile (across the globe from Norway) at the time, so internet access was sometimes scarce. Although the final project was somewhat lacking in polish and innovative design, it served its purpose perfectly as a campaign driver, and to this day it's excellent scoring makes it very worthwhile.