I have worked a few years in game development, for a company named Icarus Studios. The studio is now part of MFV. I was a QA Lead for Icarus and enjoyed my work a great deal. My goal is to get back in the game development field and eventually become a producer. I enjoy being the guy who helps make it all work. As a QA Lead, my job was coordination as much as anything else. I like writing and creating, as well. I have done that on the tabletop side of things. Below are some of the games I worked on, and my thoughts about working on them.
Fallen Earth was my first game development job. I was QA lead on the game and had a good size department to work with. Fallen Earth was an ambitious game. It is a first person-ish, massively, multi-player, role playing game. It was built on the Icarus engine for making MMO’s. I was already friends with a sizable portion of the games content team. Some of them have been my friends for more than a decade. That had a lot to do with how I got my foot in the door. I managed to move up by proving I belonged there. There were a lot of long nights working on this game, and I am proud of the work I did.
Dexter is a successful show about a semi-heroic serial killer who channels his terrible urges into punishing bad guys. Icarus contracted with Marc Echo company to make the iPhone game of the game. I was not the lead on this one. I was just another tester. The lead, now known as Cat Minkowitz, was an excellent lead and shepherded the game through to release. It was an interesting experience to test in iOS, and I later got to use that in testing the Fallen Earth iPhone app.
Fallen Earth: Bloodsports was the first major rerelease of Fallen Earth. WE were going to released in Walmart and the like, so everyone was excited about it. It was to introduce more sport like pvp battlegrounds, and a new sector was part of the process as well. I had a lot of other duties as well, like checking changes to the website, the iOS app, the billing system and the like. Anything that was related to the game, but not directly a game system became something I was involved in testing. Of course, shortly before Bloodsports was released, there was a mass layoff. I can say, despite that, I have no hard feelings to the game itself. I did a lot of good work there, and I am proud of what we did.