thatgamecompany

Production Assistant

During my time at thatgamecompany, I contributed to multiple projects including:

Beta
gamedefs system and workflow
Broadcast Tech (Interview Tech, Sky: Children of the Light's 6th Anniversary Creator Awards, Broadcast Follow + Superlike)
Updating UGC features.

Over the course of the 3-month contract, I worked closely with and earned the trust of backend engineering, ITS (TGC's internal tools team), gameplay engineering, technical UI and the product manager to deliver new experiences and develop new technology!

Tools: Confluence, Jira, Slack, Figma

Skills: Technical Writing, System Documentation and Design,

Broadcast Tech

Broadcast Tech is tech that break the 8-player game room barrier for Sky: Children of the Light. A Broadcaster can appear across all clusters in the game as a fully rendered Avatar. This was core tech to many parts of Sky's in-game 6th anniversary live event including: the live Award Show hosted in August, Interview Tech and the tech's internal tooling (which allows for thousands of players to queue for a chance to be interviewed by company staff, and company staff can moderate interviewees on stage), and Superlike. These anniversary events were the most cross-disciplinary projects the company had ever executed, and I was integral to ensuring it flowed smoothly.

I worked with a team of 16 and my key contributions include:

Bridged communication gaps between backend engineering, gameplay engineering and the Community Team for Sky’s 6th Anniversary Award Show.
Proactively identified workflow deficiencies and implemented new structures to resolve them.
Organized meeting scheduling, prepared meeting notes, and disseminated/followed up on action items.
Facilitated communication between the community team and engineering teams (teams that had never worked together before) that built trust and strengthened team dynamics.
Authored a robust set of technical documentation for Broadcast Tech. At the start of the project, Broadcast Tech did not have a comprehensive set of documentation, so I collaborated closely with the Product Manager to propose new structures for creating a centralized source of truth on the technology!
Coordinated sign-off processes for Interview Tech and the Award show, ensuring the smooth delivery of this content for Sky’s biggest patch of the year.

Interview Tech in live! Players were invited up to stage after queueing to interact with TGC staff and their messages appeared to everyone in the game!

The Live Award Show!

Additionally, when I joined, there was no set of comprehensive documentation on what Broadcast Tech is, how to use it, and its limitations. I collaborated closely with the Product Manager, a backend engineer, a server engineer, and thatgamecompany's CTO to gather answers and create a centralized source of truth for this system.

Problem Statement: Broadcast Tech was confusing and people did not know how to use it, and onboarding to it was difficult.

Solution: create documentation!

gamedefs

Sky: Children of the Light has three different environments: Dev, Beta and Live. Variables in all three environments are controlled by gamedefs which is a system for configuring clients and services. It organizes game data and controls functionality.

Problem Statement: gamedefs is a complex system, and different types of defs for different environments require approval. Additionally, if a def change is not submitted before a cutoff, it will need a workflow to correct.

Solution: create documentation to clarify what needs approval, and what needs the workflow.

My key contributions include:

Authored technical documentation to clarify gamedef types and submission process.
Created workflow charts to clarify submission process for gamedefs depending on the environment.

This chart is a recreation of the flowchart as authored in the documentation. The original flowchart is not publicly available due to NDA, but available upon request!

Documentation Example

Beta

Sky: Children of the Light has three different environments: Dev, Beta and Live. Variables in all three environments are controlled by "gamedefs", which is a system for configuring clients and services. It organizes game data and controls functionality.

My key contributions include:

Created workflow charts to clarify submission process for gamedefs depending on the environment.
Authored documentation on Sky's Beta Build and Release process from end to end.
Facilitated meetings to discuss technical aspects of the Beta testing process and pipeline.
Took meetings notes for Beta program syncs and debriefs.
Facilitated merge cutoff process, which tells designers that all work up to a certain time will be taken into the Beta build, and communicated to the Build Team that Beta builds are ready to be made.

Problem Statement: Beta players' account progress needs to get reset every few months, but this feels bad from a player perspective.

Solution: Account mirroring: copy a player's data from Live into Beta so they have access to their cosmetics and game progress.

I collaborated closely with the release producer and technical project manager to facilitate technical discussions on account mirroring feasibility. During these discussions, I took notes on the technical aspects, and disseminated action items.