Headshot for SVP and GM of Diablo, Rod Fergusson

Diablo Boss Rod Fergusson On What Makes a World Class Videogame Producer

There are few leaders in the industry whose CV even comes close to Rod Fergusson, who currently serves as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Diablo franchise. With credits including Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, Shadow Complex, Infinity Blade, Bulletstorm, BioShock Infinite, Microsoft Train Simulator and now Diablo, few producers have had a lead role in as many big name franchises as Rod…

Breaking into game design: Part 5 – prepare to interview

This article is the fifth in a series on how to land a job as a game designer. Check out previous posts for details on setting your career goal, building your portfolio, learning how to sell your experiences and writing your resume. If you’ve followed the series of articles up till now, then you’ve sent your resume and portfolio out to the world and are landing some interviews. The previous article on writing your resume covered the general process of phone and in […]

Breaking into game design: Part 4 – write your resume

This article is the fourth in a series on how to land a job as a game designer. Check out previous posts for details on setting your career goal, building your portfolio and learning how to sell your experiences. Now that I’m devoting my energies to Enhanced Wars, I do not see nearly the quantity of resumes as when I was part of the hiring process at BioWare’s San Francisco office. But I still review the occasional resume for someone […]

Breaking into game design: Part 3 – learn to sell yourself

This post is the third in a series about how to land a job as a game designer. Check out previous posts for details on setting your career goal and building your portfolio. Now that you’ve built a strong portfolio filled with tangible design works, you may think it is time to write your resume and start applying for jobs. But the same way that when designing features on Enhanced Wars I always set a […]

Breaking into game design: Part 2 – build your portfolio

This is post is the second in a series on how to land your first job as a game designer. You can read the first post about how to set your career goal at this link. Although I do not review as many resumes now that I’m an indie developer working on Enhanced Wars as I did when I was at BioWare San Francisco, I still review the odd resume here or there as a result of a […]

Breaking into game design: Part 1 – find your mountain

Before I left to work on Enhanced Wars, I was a producer and manager at BioWare’s San Francisco office. The majority of my time at BioWare was spent as a producer leading the Dragon Age Legends game team. During my most crunched state I had a team of 25, 19 of whom I managed directly. Hiring truly takes a team to do right (and I was lucky to have a strong team at EA between the […]