Sandra L. Powers

• 918 Contravest Lane
• Winter Springs FL 32708
• sandra@arcanepowers.com

Summary

Production, Engineering, Design

Experienced leader seeks opportunity to develop your next game. Key skills include:

• Strong leadership abilities, extraordinary organizational skills, and a focus on process and documentation.
• Solid grasp of all aspects of game development with extensive personal experience in design and programming.
• Proven aptitude for designing and implementing fun, elegant gameplay systems.
• Outstanding capacity to present complex information in a comprehensible fashion to non-technical, business, or executive audiences.
• Proven ability to schedule and manage risk, especially under resource constraints.

Experience

10/07 - present: Elder Game Consulting, Winter Springs FL

Contracting & Consulting

• Provided Senior Producer-level consultations, scheduling and design services to Shattered Reality Interactive, Inc., an MMO startup based in San Francisco, CA.
• Architected and coded backbone engine components for Emergent Game Technologies in Chapel Hill, NC.

04/07 - 09/07: Narwhal Games, San Diego CA

Developer: Starcrossed

• Designed, balanced and tested gameplay components for Starcrossed, a casual PC game published by iWin games in August 2007.
• Stand-out features of this tile-based puzzler include a story mode with over 30 levels of beautiful background art and a Challenge Grid with 50 unique ways to play the game.

04/06 - 04/07: Sony Online Entertainment, San Diego CA

Producer: EverQuest II, EverQuest II: Echoes of Faydwer, EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark

• Scheduled and tracked ongoing live development efforts across internal and external departments. This often involved juggling the development for an expansion, an adventure pack, and up to two live updates simultaneously, plus assorted projects from marketing, customer service, platform, and other external departments.
• Spearheaded efforts to document and streamline development processes in order to increase productivity throughout the team. This included everything from refining bug tracking procedures to standardizing the use of the Wiki for update documentation.
• Formalized monthly update process, which improved overall quality and significantly reduced the incidence of serious bugs.

12/05 - 04/06: Turbine, Inc., Westwood MA

Contract Engineer: Asheron's Call

• Provided hassle-free on-demand bug fixing, system design and implementation.
• Collaborated remotely with multidisciplinary team to identify most-bang-for-buck features.

11/05 - 12/05: Perpetual Entertainment, San Francisco CA

Contract Designer: Gods and Heroes

• Collated information from designers, artists, and engineers in order to synchronize game design requirements and expectations across departments.
• Produced and maintained on-demand design specifications for game systems including quests, death, and movement and camera controls.

12/00 - 08/05: Turbine, Inc., Westwood MA and Santa Monica CA

Producer: Asheron's Call, Asheron's Call: Throne of Destiny

• Coordinated and prioritized extremely scarce resources in order to successfully launch over 30 mini-expansions and one large-scale boxed expansion for a live MMO. This involved developing extensive communication channels with many disparate teams, from art to marketing to NetOps.
• Formalized monthly update process, which improved overall quality and significantly reduced the incidence of serious bugs.
• Spearheaded the formulation of a written game vision in order to better prioritize ongoing development. This included both an overall mission statement and the visions for two nine-month story arcs.
• Supervised emergency crisis management efforts that affected tens of thousands of live subscribers. This 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.

Lead Engineer: Asheron's Call, Asheron's Call: Throne of Destiny

• Managed a team of up to five engineers, from associate-level engineers who required significant training and mentoring to rather eccentric senior engineers. Also coordinated contract engineers from across the country on a daily basis.
• Created and executed schedule of engineering tasks; prioritized engineering resources to meet shifting needs and resolve complex dependencies among other departments; regularly reported status to executives in a concise and comprehensible fashion with a focus on possible risks.
• Resolved hundred of bugs and implemented more than five major new game systems and over a hundred minor gameplay additions, including: rare treasure items, alternative advancement, "tinkering", character titles, "PK Lite", skill sellback, and pets.

Game System Designer: Asheron's Call, Asheron's Call: Throne of Destiny

• Created a new layer of crafting gameplay that integrated randomly-generated treasure with player crafting skills. This "tinkering system" has been repeatedly recognized by players as one of the best additions to Asheron's Call.
• Developed mechanisms for ongoing content balance. This included analyzing damage over time for all damage-dealing skills, drafting dynamic spreadsheets for evaluating treasure-generated and quest weapons, and establishing guidelines for creating and modifying weapons. This work increased the live team's ability to introduce new weapons while dramatically decreasing the amount of balance tweaking necessary after each update.

Senior Engineer: Asheron's Call 2

• Architected and engineered five crucial gameplay systems for Asheron's Call 2 (then in development), including skills and the all-important death system.
• Assisted in design of game-system-to-object communication interface.

06/00 - 12/00: ISX Corporation, Atlanta GA

Software Engineer

• Rescued and rebuilt a logging utility for multi-agent research collaboration (CoABS).
• Rapidly prototyped new military/civilian planning technology.

09/98 - 06/00: Advanced Systems Technology, Orlando FL

Programmer Analyst

• Developed four Windows-based submarine applications for military training and research.

Awards

• 2004: Certificate of Appreciation (AC1 Live Team) - Turbine, Inc.
• 2003: Leader of the Year - Turbine, Inc.
• 2002: Firefighter of the Year - Turbine, Inc.
• 2000: Flash Award (CoABS) - ISX Corporation

Education

• 1999: BS Computer Science - University of Central Florida - Magna cum Laude
• 1997: BS Anthropology - University of Central Florida - Magna cum Laude
• 1994: BA Pure Mathematics - Florida State University - Magna cum Laude