About Forced Feedback
My name is Vincent “Sklathill” Diamante, and I do various things. I’m a sort of general purpose freelance something-or-other, which has been pretty fun for the last decade or so, much of that time spent on the internet. When I’m not busy being a music composer/game designer/teacher/writer/graduate student, I try to keep up on video games, check out restaurants, and search for excellent deals on electronic gear purchases.
Sklathill?
Rhymes with splat-kill. Been using that as my net name since the dawn of the internet. It wasn’t until at least a year later that I realized Vince Diamante was an anagram for Evident Maniac. Which is a pretty darn cool name. I’d already grown attached to Sklathill, however.
Music Composer?
I graduated from the University of Southern California in 2004 with a Bachelor of Music degree in Electroacoustic Media. USC has since dropped the major, making me the last student in the school’s history to complete the program, a unique combination of classical music performance with computer-assisted, electronic, and alternative music creation techniques. These days, the classical piano chops have been going down while the music composition skills have been getting a bit of a workout, a handful of long-term (3-9 months) projects punctuated by short-order freelance jobs that hit hard, often at inopportune times.
Game designer?
I’ve done a bit of game design in the past. Did a nice chunk of game and level design on something called Dyadin, and a good bit less than that on Cloud. (On both projects, my primary functions were audio designer and music composer.) Both projects have gotten their fair share of accolades, with Cloud’s bordering on EL GIGANTE territory. More recently, I did some level design pieces while doing sound integration on a future Xbox 360 title.
Teacher?
Somehow I was peripherally involved in the process of creating and expanding the games curriculum in the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC many years ago. Since then, I’ve worked as a consultant, teaching assistant, and teacher on various courses offered through the school’s ITP (Information Technology Program) department, centered mostly on teaching game production fundamentals and prototyping skills to college undergrads. During the summer, I’m also involved in a summer seminar that puts some pretty darn bright high school students through the wringer in a one month course on video game production.
Writer?
I started my meager journalism career on diverse small video game websites around 1999. Mostly reviews of imports that people didn’t care about, but it was a fun little thing. Then in 2001, I got pinged for a stint as a regular on video game talk show on XM Radio, lasting from the test market period through the start of the nationwide XM rollout. Besides being pretty fun, the job provided the spark to begin working on my own video game web site. I got together with another guy from USC, Brandon Sheffield, and we created insert credit. The website is still around and going strong, though these days I don’t do all that much writing for it; I’ve been just a bit too busy with the whole grad school thing as well as managing the backend. I still do a couple of things here and there, though, and I write a bit for Gamasutra as well. Writing’s been pretty good to me, but I haven’t been very good at cultivating it lately; hopefully this will change in the near future.
Graduate Student?
Not anymore. I received my MFA in Interactive Media from the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California in May of 2007.
Forced Feedback?
This is the blog you’re reading. I started it in 2005 because…
- Everyone has a blog.
- I needed to do something with this silly forcedfeedback.com domain I got.
- Maybe it’ll get me to write more?
Who knows. Maybe it’ll get me to write more.