David Rosen

David Rosen is the founder and head programmer at Wolfire Games.

He started out making Mac OS games for competitions, one of which became one of his most popular - Black Shades.

The code and assets to this game were later released, leading to the enhanced title Black Shades Elite. A commercial version from Wolfire has also been ported to the iPhone.

In 2005 he released his first breakthrough title as a commercial indie games developer - Lugaru a "ninja rabbit fighting game" featuring rag-doll physics and an impressive implementation of third-person combat controls.

Lugaru was made available for Windows and ported to Mac OS X and Linux by Ryan C. Gordon.

Wolfire has since expanded and now leads campaigns to promote indie multi-platform and digital rights management-free development.

This was most notable in the case of the Humble Indie Bundle in 2010, a digital download offering Lugaru and four other notable indie games to consumers under a "pay-what-you-want scheme. The pack proved to be well-selling on all three platforms and donations were made with the cash to the Child's Play and Electronic Frontier Foundation charities.

In addition the Lugaru engine, HPL engine, Aquaria engine and Gish engine code were all released as free software under the GNU General Public License.

Rosen and his team are working on a sequel to Lugaru called Overgrowth which is to have a greater emphasis on plot and role-playing game elements. It is going to be released on the same platforms as the original. Although only speculative, it does not seem unlikely that one day the community will be able to see the Overgrowth code as well.