Professional Game Development

SimCity Societies and SCS: Destinations

For my second retail product, I was fortunate enough to work on the latest game in the venerable SimCity series, SimCity Societies. As a member of the Development support team, I was responsible for finding and reporting bugs, implementing much of the game's XML database, thoroughly documenting most of this database, setting up our build creation automation process and our process for sending builds to EA, assisting the design team with balance testing, and a number of other duties further documented on my resume. This position was a great opportunity for me to work alongside the design, programming, art and sound teams for the first time. Because of my quality work on this project, I was made Lead Development Support, giving me an array of new responsibilities. Thanks to a lot of late nights and working weekends in the early fall season, we were able to ship the game in November 2007 after only about a year of development.

We began development of the expansion pack, SimCity Societies Destinations, immediately following completion of the original game. It was eventually completed in June 2008.

 

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade is the first retail product that I worked on.  It is the first expansion pack for the highly successful MMORPG World of Warcraft, which currently boasts over ten million players worldwide. As a quality assurance analyst, I performed a wide range of tasks in helping to make the game better for its release in January 2007. I did a significant amount of focus testing on the new environments, quests, items, characters and spells/abilities, ensuring that they worked as intended. Additionally, I spent a portion of my time communicating with players in the alpha and beta tests of the game and investigating the bugs that they reported. My other duties included going over checklists to ensure proper functionality of various aspects of the game, and ensuring that the developers' bug fixes were correctly implemented.

Because of the staggering amount of new content that needed to be tested, I worked one or two days of overtime nearly every weekend during my time at Blizzard, in addition to a number of weeks filled with 11-hour workdays. I believe the finished product turned out remarkably clean and free of major issues.