"There are a number of key industry people here at Insight For Hire, with five in house consultants, and a further five consulting partners. The networks and experience across these ten key individuals mean you will have hundreds of people in your corner to call upon for knowledge and help."
Martyn Brown
Managing Director
Martyn brings a tremendous wealth of games industry experience from critical and commercial hits since 1990, and boasts instinctive no-nonsense decision-making, an enviable industry network and a natural ability to highly motivate and develop companies and individuals.
History: Martyn has 30 years in the games industry; starting life as a hobbyist programmer/designer at 17 and releasing his first game in 1984. Martyn co-founded Team17 in 1990, producing and part-designing Alien Breed, Project-X, Superfrog, Body Blows and many others on the Amiga. He signed and worked on the huge selling 'Worms' titles for 15 years. As well as managing the studio Martyn helped Team17 embrace the move to fully independent digital publishing almost ten years ago. Martyn set up Insight For Hire, an independent consultancy, in 2011.
Capability: Including a wide range of Independents, Martyn has worked with many companies, AAA publishers and platform holders. He's sat on the BAFTA panel, and chaired the European Video Game Awards in Paris as well as lecturing extensively around Europe and the USA. Martyn was also a founder member of Game Republic, the association for video games development in the Yorkshire and Humber region.
Paul Kilburn
Production Director
Paul has 20 years' experience in the industry. With a strong production methodology and deep understanding of what is required to plan, schedule and monitor a project's progress from pre-production to submission, he knows what it takes to get a project to the finish line.
History: Joining Team17 in 1995, Paul spent seventeen years working in production. During Team17's third-party publishing phase, he was the key producer on several of the hugely successful "Worms" series, the platinum-selling "Lemmings" as well as the "Alien Breed" trilogy, moving up to Team17's Head of Production for a number of years. In 2011 Paul joined The Blast Furnace as Executive Producer, overseeing production on "Pitfall" and "Call of Duty: Strike Team", and joined Insight for Hire in 2013.
Capability: Paul was responsible for Team17 consistently delivering projects to time and budget on all major platforms: from PC and console, to handheld and mobile. He defined the company's production process as Team17 transitioned to self-publishing on digital platforms: a production process that the company still uses successfully today. Paul establishes and maintains close relationships with all major publishers and platform-holders.
Supporting Martyn and Paul are...
John Dennis
Design Director
John has been in the games industry for 18 years. He understands all aspects of game design and how it interfaces with development, including such diverse areas as UI and UX design, authoring design documentation for pitches and designing MTX and social systems for mobile games.
History: John joined Team17 in 1997 and spent the next fifteen years working in design. Following a Team17 career that included design credits on the "Worms" series, "Lemmings" and "Alien Breed" trilogy, he joined The Blast Furnace in 2012 working as lead designer on "Call of Duty: Strike Team". With that title released to critical acclaim, John joined Insight For Hire in 2014.
Capability: John worked closely with Martyn Brown to successfully pitch game concepts to many top-tier publishers and platform-holders including Sony, THQ, Codemasters, Vivendi and Microsoft. As Head of Design, he defined the iterative design process by which the quality of all Team17 titles was ensured, systematically monitoring quality and integrating usability data to enhance the user experience.
Andy Clitheroe
Technical Director
After 20 years in the games industry Andy has developed a capability and passion for problem solving, creative thinking and bringing attention-to-detail to bear on fresh challenges. His extensive experience spans C++ and C#, rapid prototyping and working with middleware like Unity.
History: As a Senior Programmer Andy was at Team17 for 18 years, working through the ranks. He moved to The Blast Furnace in 2012 to work on the highly acclaimed Call of Duty: Strike Team and to Insight for Hire in 2014 to reconnect with Martyn, Paul and John in order to help independents.
Capability: Andy was a problem solver at Team17, examples of work include devising and creating code and shaders for a fine-grained deformable 2.5D landscape, a particle-based water simulation and rendering engine, and a robust stacking physics engine compatible with an intricate destructible environment. On Strike Team he devised and implemented efficient awareness runtime systems and markup/bake tools which made dynamic squad-based AI and unscripted 'bot' play (Survival Mode) possible for what is believed to be a first on mobile.
Chris Welsh
Producer
With a solid 10 years in the industry Chris has the exceptional attention to detail required to work in localisation and QA on some of the biggest games in the industry for the most demanding publishers. These skills only strengthened his production capability over the last few years. Determined and accurate, Chris sees the detail needed.
History: Chris joined Rockstar Lincoln in 2003 as a localisation tester. In his nine years at Rockstar Lincoln, Chris' responsibilities grew to the management and supervision of all aspects of QA, localisation and title submission on all platforms. He left Rockstar in 2012 to join The Blast Furnace as Producer and QA Manager, moving to Insight For Hire in 2014.
Capability: Chris worked on all Rockstar's blockbuster titles including the "Grand Theft Auto" series, "Red Dead Redemption" and the "Midnight Club" series, the sheer scale of several of those games providing unique challenges for quality assurance and localisation. As a Producer on "Call of Duty: Strike Team" on mobile, Chris has a good grounding in bringing challenging titles to fruitful outcomes.