About Us

Founders

Jared Gaul cofounded Render Junkies in 2011 and is the main architect of the engine that all Render Junkies games use. He's worked on the engine in his spare time over the last five years and his efforts are paying off.

In addition to shipping two iOS titles with the Render Junkies engine, Jared has worked on four other games in his three years in the industry. Two Nintendo DS games shipped from Firebrand Games where he worked as Senior and Lead Developer. Jared then continued on with more projects for Muse Games in the role of Senior Developer. Prior to his work in the game industry he spent two years in the simulation industry and worked on multiple simulators.

Jared attended Full Sail University, where he studied Game Design and Development and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 2006.

John Webb joined Jared in 2011 to start working with the engine, and to eventually cofound Render Junkies. After working through college, and on various games along the way, Render Junkies being created was only a matter of time.

Since college John has worked in the gaming industry for Scaleform, creators of the #1 Flash-based UI middleware solution. At Scaleform John took on many roles from Software Developer to Web Systems Designer, managing projects ranging from electronic software distribution to implementing their support ticketing system. In his spare time he's been developing Alien Launch to get more in tune with the engine, and to help push the ultimate goals of Render Junkies forward.

John attended Full Sail University, where he studied Game Design and Development and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 2006.

Our Journey

While attending Full Sail University Jared and John worked together with a team of four other students under the name Render Junkies. In five months the team designed and developed, from scratch, Samurai Colossus. Creating this game was a blast and gave everyone the experience and motivation to run full speed ahead into the industry.

For the last five years, Jared has been working in his spare time to develop an engine with the sole purpose of rekindling Render Junkies. Initially the task started on a PC and it slowly became cross platform and found its way over to mobile devices. As the engine matured it was time to test it out in the real world.

StretchyBand is more of a toy, and utility than a game. Its purpose was to give the engine its initial test in a commercial environment with a highly technical app. The engine's performance and architecture adapted beautifully and handled running StretchyBand just fine across all iOS hardware. This learning experience helped break down the barrier of entry into the mobile market and set a solid foundation for Render Junkies development.

After StretchyBand, the engine continued to evolve and eventually iTapGreener was born out of the mind of Jared and his new wife, Kailee. Jared wanted to prove that, beyond a more technical based app like StretchyBand, the engine could be used for actual game development. The engine easily adapted to handle 3D and 2D together. In addition the asset pipeline improved and social networking features, including Facebook, Twitter, and Game Center were built in.

Around the time that iTapGreener launched, Jared and John started discussing where to go next. Now that the engine was established it was time to spend more time thinking about game development and deeper design. The Alien Launch project was started for a dual-purpose, to get John up to speed on the engine and to generate revenue to fund our long-term goals.

While the games are fun and addictive, Render Junkies doesn't want to simply create one-off titles. Their true passion is to create games that synergize well together and transcend a single app, building a community around gaming, and making concepts that exist on other platforms available on mobile devices through intuitive interfaces. We aim to reinvent how people perceive mobile gaming and open up the platform to a new way of thinking.