Sandra "srand" Powers: Resume

Summary

Outstanding capacity to communicate complex information across a wide variety of audiences, from artists to executives.
Extraordinary organizational skills with a focus on flexible process and documentation.
Proven ability to coordinate personnel, manage risk, and maintain team motivation and direction, especially under extreme resource constraints.
Extensive knowledge of MMO pipelines and bottlenecks, plus the foresight to anticipate problems and the initiative to implement solutions and deliver a high quality product on time.

Scheduled and coordinated ongoing live development efforts across internal and external departments. This often involved juggling the development of an expansion, an adventure pack, and up to two live updates simultaneously, plus assorted projects from marketing, customer service, platform, and other external departments.
Formalized the monthly update process, which improved overall quality and significantly reduced the incidence of serious bugs.

Coordinated and prioritized extremely scarce resources during the development of a boxed expansion pack and more than thirty 'mini-expansion' content updates.
Spearheaded the formulation of a written game Vision in order to better prioritize ongoing development. This included both an overall mission statement and the roadmaps for two nine-month story arcs.
Supervised emergency crisis management efforts, which included both making the hard decisions necessary in a crisis and communicating the technical details of crises upwards and outwards in a timely and comprehensible manner.
Also filled role of lead engineer and provided game system design as necessary.

Created and contributed to Elder Game, a blog that takes a probing look at the state of the MMO industry.
Ohai, Inc. (San Francisco, CA): Designed and integrated game systems (combat, crafting, loot) and RMT systems for Flash-based vampire MMO.
Lucrative Gaming, LLC (Dayton, OH): Built and maintained several game-related websites, including FlashGameLicense.com and GamerSafe.com.
XIG Networks: Designed and implemented server-side game logic for virtual world poker application.
Turbine, Inc. (Westwood, MA): Investigated feasibility of Flash-based UI for existing MMO games. Also provided on-demand bug fixes, system design and implementation for Asheron's Call team.
Emergent Game Technologies (Chapel Hill, NC): Architected and coded backbone components for MMO server engine.
Shattered Reality Interactive, Inc. (San Francisco, CA): Acted as Senior Producer for MMO team during early start-up.
Narwhal Games (San Diego, CA): Designed, balanced and tested gameplay components for Starcrossed, a casual PC game published by iWin games in August 2007.
Perpetual Entertainment (San Francisco CA): Collated information from designers, artists, and engineers in order to synchronize game design requirements across departments for the MMO Gods and Heroes.