Ethan Levy's Blog
Ethan Levy is a 10 year veteran as a game developer and simply lives for making games which bring joy to players’ hearts. Starting at the ground level as an intern and tester at Pandemic Studios working on Star Wars: Battlefront, he has contributed to over 20 shipped games in almost every role. While working at casual game publishers PlayFirst and iWin, he worked as a producer, designer, external consultant and metrics analyst on a variety of titles including Jewel Quest Mysteries and the Diner Dash/Wedding Dash series.
In 2008, he joined Electronic Arts’ Office of the chief creative officer working for Rich Hilleman before becoming EA2D’s first employee. At the studio, he has led the development of Dragon Age Journeys, Dragon Age Legends and Dragon Age Legends: Remix 01 as Game Producer. In 2011, the studio became BioWare San Francisco, and Ethan helped shepherd the studio through the transition and kick off the development of a new game in the BioWare family as Design Manager. In spring of 2012, he left EA to co-found Quarter Spiral. Ethan has worked on games that have appeared on every platform, including console, handheld, mobile, tablet, browser and social network.
Expert Blogs
In this post, producer and monetization consultant Levy discusses difficult yet important challenge of quitting development on a live, free-to-play game.
In this design tutorial, veteran designer Levy details a process for writing feature briefs - short documents that describe the soul of a feature in a page or two. This lightweight process reduces time wasted speccing features that are never implemented.
Posted by
Ethan Levy
on Fri, 12 Jul 2013 02:31:00 EDT
in
In the fifth and final article in a series on landing your first job in game design, veteran designer Levy explains how to prepare for interviews and wraps up with a realistic look at the many challenges you will face in breaking into game design.
In this blog post, veteran designer Levy explains the value of writing tuning reports and sharing with your team and players when balancing a game. He also provides a downloadable template of a tuning report for adaptation for your use.
Posted by
Ethan Levy
on Sun, 07 Jul 2013 06:33:00 EDT
in
In the fourth article in a series on landing your first job in game design, veteran designer Levy explains the many use cases for your resume and gives specific guidelines on how to write it.
In the third article in a series on landing your first job in game design, veteran designer Levy explains the importance of learning to sell your unique qualities and accomplishments before applying for jobs.
Ethan Levy's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 07/07/2013 - 06:33]
In my opinion, an online ...
In my opinion, an online portfolio is an absolute must for those earlier in their careers without a number of published or notable games under their belt. Once someone is further along and has a proven track record, having an online portfolio is nice but potentially unnecessary. For more information ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 06/27/2013 - 09:10]
I 'm sure that at ...
I 'm sure that at the absolutely top developers like Naughty Dog, Valve, Bungie etc they have the luxury and resume flow to allow them to get the perfect candidate for the role. But in my experience, it is rare to find a candidate who fits all the requirements of ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 06/21/2013 - 09:43]
To clarify, by hiring manager ...
To clarify, by hiring manager I am not referring to someone in an HR function but the game team member who will be the new employee 's manager. This person is the hiring manager who is generally the primary point of contact with HR regarding the contact. This will generally ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 04/01/2013 - 02:53]
Sounds like a dream set ...
Sounds like a dream set up, JT I would love to hear the trials, tribulations and results of implementing these processes 100 on a game 's development. I hope you are able to see them through and look forward to playing whatever you work on next.
Comment In:
[News - 05/16/2012 - 12:33]
