Glenn Wauchop

I completed a Bachelor of IT at CQU way back in 2001 and have had quite an interesting career since then. I've mostly worked in private industry from mobile content creation and education but have done some government work as well. 

After a few years in the IT industry, I decided I wanted to pursue further study, and I pivoted into film as I was passionate about visual media and storytelling. From 2010 to 2012 I completed a Film and Screen Media degree from Griffith Film School and worked on music videos, short films and was also First Assistant Director on a feature film. A fantasy murder mystery short film I produced titled The Fairest of Them All was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 and the director and I flew over for the festival that year. That experience is a highlight of my career! 

I continued to work on various productions in subsequent years while also juggling full-time software development work. In 2014 I started pursuing game development, as I saw it as a middle ground between my professional and creative interests. I started working for Origo Education in 2015, which allowed me to delve further into interactive media. 

In 2018, I started creating my own game, The Abnormal Place. This game is a mix between Alice in Wonderland and Tim Burton which I created with the help of an illustrator (for the creature designs) and a composer from the Griffith Conservatorium in Brisbane. At the end of 2019 I finished up my work at Origo to work on the game full time. I was accepted into the Queensland Government New Initiative Incentive Scheme (NEIS) program in 2020 just as COVID-19 hit, which allowed some additional opportunity to work on the game. I shipped The Abnormal Place at the end of 2021. 

Whilst finishing The Abnormal Place I started work on a big local indie game called Phantom Abyss. I was on the Phantom Abyss team for over a year and in 2023 the team and I won Best Technical Achievement at the Australian Games Awards in Melbourne. 

In 2023 I also joined the team making Macabre, a first-person co-op horror extraction game. Macabre undertook a successful Kickstarter campaign achieving our funding goal within 38 hours of launching. 

I'm currently studying a project management course because a lot of my work is project based. Whether it's creative work within the game development space or for film and video projects or just for day-to-day work, having more understanding of how to manage projects will be invaluable for me and the teams I'm part of. With CQU I was able to study online and it was also familiar because of my previous Bachelor of IT degree.

I am still juggling creative projects with full-time employment (and study). In my role at MAXART I have specialised in VR, simulation and game development where I've helped with various games projects, web-based training related apps and AR apps. The simulation work I'm currently undertaking involves knowledge of both UE5, Unity and Blender as well as knowledge around physics, maths and geometry. Last year I had an opportunity to direct voice-over actors for an interactive training application and also completed the video editing for that project. MAXART has been exciting and very much feels like working in a small game studio.