Zynga

For about a year I worked at Zynga Austin, working with teams in the UK and US to develop a mobile Star Wars title called Star Wars: Hunters. This was originally a job I took to go back to some IC work after the years of leading at Certain Affinity, but quickly transitioned into a Lead role anyways. At that point, I realized I wasn’t going to escape the management track in my career any longer.

Star Wars Hunters

While at Zynga, I lead UI development for a variety of meta features within the front-end of the title as well as overseeing the localization pipeline with our internal localization team. As the core game loop had been established and refined by the time I was hired, a lot of the challenges we faced involved integrating screens/meta functionality within the game after years of prior development.

In addition to this, the game was shipping on iOS, Android, and Switch, which were all platforms I had never developed on in my career. The majority of the title was being developed at a studio in Brighton, UK so facilitating non-US time zone was also a huge challenge.

A very challenging project that exposed me to a completely different paradigm for making video games.