World of Warcraft: In Conversation with Darren Williams and Ely Cannon

Associate Technical Director

As an associate technical director on the World of Warcraft development team at Blizzard Entertainment, Darren Williams uses his technical knowledge and love of game systems to make the goals of designers, artists, and animators a reality in-game. Fueled by a passion for collaborating with other engineers and developers across multiple disciplines, Darren and his team have worked to bring a variety of modern WoW features to life, including loot and itemization, spell visual effects, skyriding, character customization and animation, and in-game cinematic cutscenes.

Darren began his career at Blizzard Entertainment in March 2010 as a senior gameplay engineer for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and has worked on every WoW expansion since. He got his start in games straight out of university as a junior engine programmer at Ratbag Games in Adelaide, Australia, and soon found that his true passion lay in gameplay engineering—helping designers, animators, and artists bring their visions to life in-game. He spent five years working in the Australian game industry before fulfilling his dream of coming to work at Blizzard Entertainment.

Darren holds a Bachelor of Engineering: Computer Systems degree from the University of Adelaide. When he isn’t busy helping make World of Warcraft come to life, he likes to sketch and draw in his spare time.

Senior Art Director

As senior art director of Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, Ely Cannon oversees the multidisciplinary teams of artists who help bring Azeroth to life and works to maintain the game’s consistent style and a high level of artistic quality. Today, he’s focused on guiding the vision and creation of art for a variety of WoW content, as well as the current expansion, The War Within.

Prior to taking on the role of senior art director, Ely headed up the art team responsible for creating the outdoor and organic elements of game world, as well as skies, weather, and exterior light effects. Ely has also contributed both as an artist and level designer to more than 50 zones that WoW players have journeyed across over the years, from The Burning Crusade areas like Nagrand and Netherstorm to the city of Suramar in Legion.

Ely joined Blizzard Entertainment in 2006 as senior level designer on The Burning Crusade. Prior to joining Blizzard, he worked on the Guild Wars titles Prophecies, Factions, and Nightfall; he also worked in the film industry contributing visual effects to movies including Transformers and Spider-Man 3.

Ely holds a B.S. in Digital Arts from Henry Cogswell College. In his free time, he is an avid tabletop gamer, terrain builder, and budding 3D printing enthusiast.

Jini Maxwell is an exhibition curator at ACMI who specialises in videogames. They are the curator of Honk: Untitled Goose Exhibition (2024) and Out of Bounds: Exploring the Limits of Videogames (2022) and ACMI’s Games Lab showcase (ongoing). Jini is currently co-curating a major videogame exhibition at ACMI alongside senior curator Bethan Johnson.
Previously, Jini has delivered talks and events about games and play at Melbourne Design Week, A.MAZE festival, GCAP, Melbourne Writer's Festival, Freeplay Festival and The Wheeler Centre. Prior to working as a curator, Jini was an award-winning videogame journalist, and was part of the founding team behind Gameshub. In 2021, Jini was named Videogame Journalist of the year at the Samsung IT Journalism awards.
Jini is also an external assessor for the Vicscreen Games production fund, and sits on the advisory committee for QUT, RMIT and Swinburne's Research Project 'Artistic practice in Australian game development.'