At Wargaming, I had the opportunity to kick off my gaming career and work my way up the ranks from part-time QA tester to Senior UI/UX Technical Designer. It is an interesting story that I would love to share, but if you want the raw data, just head to the bottom and click the button.

 

It was a chance meeting, set up by a former Full Sail instructor and the head of HR from recently acquired Day 1 Studios when I decided to go out to E3. The meeting was short and to the point: "We are going to become Wargaming, and we need testers immediately." It was also an outrageous coincidence that the studio was in my hometown and I had just graduated with my degree.In the beginning, as a tester, I had a particularly high aptitude for UI-centric design. I had a web development history, and while it was a fun hobby, I never really took it seriously. But it would pay off over time.

 

After a relatively short stint in QA, it was determined that the team was in need of a UI role, so I applied and moved up to UI Designer. The title was fairly ambiguous as I did wireframing, bug fixes in-engine, and art. The web experience would pay off right away as the UI in the Despair engine was developed in Flash with Scaleform as the middleware technology that ran it all.

 

Eventually, I would graduate to being a UX Designer without the other hats as the team continued to grow. But there was still a gap in the process due to the fact that we now had multiple UX designers, artists, and engineers. I decided to take on a role that engineering generally did, and I would start hooking up the functionality and screen layouts right in-engine. Engineers would teach me ActionScript, and I would hook up as much as I could and even streamlined the process of getting features up and running.

 

Eventually, a lead would determine that my ability and experience would be better suited as a Tech Designer and my tenure warranted a senior-level position. From there, I went on to lead the way for other designers, worked on three incubation projects that all got pretty far into development but sadly did not release, and that would set the trajectory for me as a UI/UX Tech Designer.