Meet Emory Irpan: Artist, Game Designer, Product Leader & Layer Advisor
We’re excited to announce our newest advisor — games industry veteran Emory Irpan.
Emory has been an early supporter of the Layer platform, and brings a wealth of experience as a product leader and game designer/artist. As a lifetime artist and game designer, Emory’s perspective will be invaluable as we create tools that uplift and empower the next generation of game developers.
Emory’s passion for games started early when he created his first childhood game using Macromedia Flash’s ActionScript 2.0. This led him into a career in games, working on several notable AAA titles and eventually in a leadership role at Unity, the world’s most widely-used game engine.
As a product leader on the Unity Monetization Team, Emory pioneered the creation and launch of new products designed to create sustainable user LTV for developers. Prior to Unity, Emory worked in production and product design roles at Maxis (The Sims) and Activision (Call of Duty). Outside of AAA, Emory also founded a 38-person indie game startup to create networked multiplayer games in Unreal, and worked as a graphic designer at a Fortune 500 company.
Emory’s specialties include UX/UI design, gameplay feature design, metagame progression models, game economies, and development process improvements. In his free time Emory creates freelance artwork for mobile studios, Augmented Reality (AR) games, board games, and card games.
He’s also a top 1000 globally-ranked Magic: The Gathering player across both constructed and limited formats (in case it wasn’t obvious that he loves card games).
With his deep background in art production and successful history across the games industry, Emory was the perfect choice as a strategic advisor to the Layer team.
“I firmly believe that leveraging AI (done right), is not to be feared, but fully embraced as a tool that simply turbo-charges Artists and Developers creativity, productivity, and quality. It does not have to be seen as a threat, it will not replace artists, but instead empower them in the same way that other new tools (e.g. Photoshop, Unity etc.) have in years past, but to a quantitatively, and qualitatively greater degree.” — Emory Irpan
As Layer continues its growth in the generative-AI space, strategic input from leaders who have built and scaled services for millions of players and developers is key. While we’re games veterans and leaders ourselves, we’ve always understood the importance of new perspectives that help us grow and evolve as a team. We firmly believe that Emory will bring that new perspective, and work to position Layer as the industry standard for professional games asset creation.
Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Emory — we can’t wait to see his impact on the Layer team as we fulfill our mission to empower game artists.
