Sean Landis, the lead developer at Raincrow Studios (a game company currently making a mobile game named “Covens”) came to HHS April 4 for an ELT event. Sean graduated from the University of Maryland, he studied Japanese and then went to Hokkaido (an island north of Japan) to teach English to kids. He told the audience that there was a lot of snow in Hokkaido. He later moved to a different Japanese island and continued to teach. He had a side hobby of being a web designer and later started working at JMU as a web designer.

The main thing he is working on is the aforementioned “Covens” for which he is the lead developer. He said that there are only six people working on the game which seems very small for such an ambitious task, but they seem to be going strong nevertheless. The team was working on it for a year before Sean joined the team,  He states that his role is to “make the servers the phones talk to.”

The general theme of the game was that it’s a free to play game where you go around the world and collect herbs, or battle “spirits”  in the real world, not like Pokemon Go as in you walk around the real world you inhabit, but it’s like looking at Google Maps of the Earth as you play the game. Apparently some things only happen at certain times of the year or only in certain weather, so if it were Pokemon Go you would have to wait or you would have to go around the world. But in Covens you can fly around the world and interact with every other player in the real world and experience their weather and their time of year.