As of July 2022, Proletariat Inc was acquired by Blizzard Entertainment to primarily work on World of Warcraft (WoW). If you would like to learn more about the details of this acquisition, please see the official press release.
From May 2020 to January 2023, I worked as as a Game Producer at Proletariat Inc, primarily focused on World of Warcraft development post-acquisition. Prior to the Blizzard Entertainment acquisition I was mainly supporting our multiplayer action-magic title Spellbreak along with several other internal company projects.
I worked with a variety of Irvine-side WoW teams across art and design as the Boston team found its footing within the overall game team. Alongside this I worked with the rest of the Proletariat / Boston team to plan milestones for future development, familiarize ourselves with WoW as a product better, and help our developers learn the new tools and pipelines through exploratory prototyping work.
Working as a producer on Spellbreak, I helped drive the development of multiple major map and environment updates, several seasons of quest content, and a variety of other game features and initiatives. I frequently worked with the Environment / Quest Design team which staffed between 12 - 20 team members at any given time. Much of this work involved coordination between almost every discipline at the company including artists, engineers, narrative and gameplay designers, QA, publishing, and audio.
Some of my other general production responsibilities have included triaging bugs with stakeholders, preparing content for weekly all-hands meetings to acknowledge the accomplishments of team members, and meeting one-on-one with team members to discuss their work and help support them in any necessary ways. I also gained experience working on both sides of various external partner contracts.
I was able to work with several different pipelines while at Proletariat including environment art, level design, gameplay design, UI feature iteration, and more. Experiencing all of these different disciplines has helped me better understand how to think of a project as a holistic experience and product rather than solely focus on the current task at hand in isolation.
I worked as a Production Assistant at Epic Games on the Fortnite team from 2019 to 2020. My main responsibilities included scoping and tracking feature development, coordinating cross-team communication for daily operations, running daily stand-ups, and organizing communication with external partners.
My day-to-day work involved juggling the tasks and pipelines of several different teams ranging from competitive development, to anticheat, to community, and more. Much of my days were spent tracking the development progress of new features and triaging bug fixes for every new release, which happened every week or two. I also helped drive the scope of upcoming features and feature expansions.
One of my main responsibilities involved managing event calendars to ensure in-game tournaments didn’t conflict with release schedules or were put at risk due to shifting development priorities. This work continued to grow in importance as we scaled up more frequent weekly in-game competitions such as the Fortnite Champion Series (FNCS).
One of my larger projects within my team was to establish more effective production practices so we can track development progress more efficiently while also making it easier for other teams and leads to understand our goals for each release. I created new tools using JIRA and other software to make our goals more immediately obvious across all of Fortnite development. I also started running more regular backlog reviews and release syncs to make sure we didn’t neglect any of our feature responsibilities as the game expanded.
Another core duty I had was to organize meetings and track action items with external partners, most notably the Twitch Rivals team. Fortnite was featured in several Twitch Rivals events during my time with the project which gave me the opportunity to contribute to events like TwitchCon 2019 and the Twitch Rivals Streamer Bowl.
Along with external events, I also contributed to the Fortnite World Cup in some big ways. I organized many playtests with external volunteers for the maps used in the Creative World Cup and helped to document and track any and all issues that came out of these playtests. Once the entire event was done, I assisted senior producers to organize and run a comprehensive post-mortem of the Fortnite World Cup with representatives from all the various teams involved in its production.
In the summer of 2018, I worked at Adult Swim Games as their Production Intern. While there, I mainly worked with the titles Death’s Gambit, Pool Panic, and Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe. All of these titles shipped during or shortly after my internship.
My day-to-day responsibilities as the Production Intern included attending and taking detailed notes on meetings with developers, informing development teams of production, QA, and marketing updates, and QA testing various games. I also assisted with the metadata submission of Battle Chef Brigade Deluxe to the Sony PlayStation Store. I gained valuable skills here such as learning to use software like JIRA and Basecamp.
During this job I was able to learn invaluable information about the publishing process for games and about how to effectively organize and run meetings with developers. I was able to learn and witness much of the process of launching new games on both Steam and first-party console platforms (namely PS4 and Nintendo Switch), and the complications that come with that process.
Leap A Head was originally developed for iOS and Android tablets and phones during MassDiGI's Summer Innovation Program in 2017 using Unity. During the Summer of 2017, I worked as Lead Designer on this game with a team of six other developers.
I drove the design of main game systems such as level progression and on-boarding new mechanics. I also personally designed, implemented, and tested dozens of game levels.
I conducted internal QA testing as well as external UX playtest sessions. The game is available for both iOS and Android, you can find the iOS page here and the Google Play page here.
