Spotlight: Joe Borley, Producer

25th Sep 2022

How did you get your job at d3t?

I have been playing games since I was old enough to hold a mega drive controller and had wanted to work in the games industry ever since I realised you can make a career out of it. After College I studied for a degree in Computer Game Art, and for a time I worked as a self-employed 3D Artist. However, things didn’t work out how I had planned, and I job hopped for a while.

Prior to getting the job at d3t, I had been working as a Project Coordinator in the financial tech industry. I found that I really enjoyed this type of work but the dream of working in the games industry never went away. I then looked to transition the project planning skills I had picked up over to video games.

After interviewing for d3t and then being offered the role, it was understatement to say that I was over the moon. I joined as an Associate Producer and have since progressed to a Producer role this year. I have been at d3t over a year now and every day is a blast. It’s been a long journey to get here, but I know I’m just getting started.

What do you do day-to-day?

Every day always brings something new to deal with, but a typical day will look something like this.

I start the day off catching up on emails/DM messages / JIRA tickets updates, and going through anything from the day before from either the dev team or a client.

I then host the daily stand-up for the project I’m on to determine what everyone is working on that day, along with helping to work through solutions with them if they are blocked on anything or if there are any additional issues to resolve.

The rest of the day is then usually split up between; task creation and management, client meetings, sprint planning, report writing, risk register management for d3t as well as ensuring the various departments are working and communicating effectively with each other and with our clients.

My favourite thing about this job is constantly being in a room full of exceptionally talented individuals and learning from them.

Do you have any tips for people looking to get into the games industry?

I didn’t end up having a typical route into the games industry and it took me much longer to get into it than I had originally planned.

If you are just starting out it can be demoralising if you don’t see progress immediately, but if it’s something you are passionate about wanting to do, keep working at it. The more you know about the industry and can demonstrate in your CV and interviews the better. Make sure to research the specific roles and studios you want to apply for, if you can, reach out and speak with dev’s in the role you want to move into on sites like LinkedIn.

For a production role there is no one size fits all solution and there are multiple different types of production roles depending on what the company needs, but it typically helps to be easily approachable as well as having a good foundational knowledge of the key software’s such as Jira/Confluence/Trello/Miro/Excel. Being familiar with common Project Management methodologies for games and software development such as Agile is also useful too.

We are hiring

Stay tuned for more spotlight features coming soon. In the meantime, if you’re feeling inspired and want to join our team, check out our vacancies page!