THE PRODUCT

 

Ganz was a plush toy manufacturer and game studio most known for Webkinz , an online video game world for children that over its history has had over 20 Million users.  It was one of the first MMO games for children, and still has many loyal fans.

 

We had a 3d Art and Dev team of well over 400.

 

MY ROLE

 

I was a senior audio designer at Ganz. Reporting to the Audio Director,  I supervised a team of audio designers across 4 major gaming properties, Webkinz, Webkinz Jr, Tail Towns and Amazing World.

 

We ensured the audio dimension of the user experience in the gameplay was top notch, and the music, dialogue, and effect were everything they could and should be.

​

EVOLUTION

 

Webkinz was approaching the end of it's lifecycle, and we needed to launch a new product to replace it.

 

To keep revenue going to fund new games, I oversaw the full site translation into 13 languages, which required tight collaboration with the creative, translation and dev teams, resulting in over 10M in additional revenue for Webkinz

 

We adopted Scrum, and I conducted a daily Scrum with the audio design teams, to monitor the progress of their individual scrum teams relating to the games they were assigned to.

 

Owned all audio processes for Amazing World, a 3D MMO slated to replace Webkinz, working collaboratively with Product, Designers and Developers to built the prioritized features and bring the creative to vision to reality.

 

Amazing World ran on steam for 7 years.

​

TAKEAWAYS

 

Our Director of Interactive was an agile expert, and has gone on to be CTO at IBM Canada, and a global agility strategist.  I took a lot of key lessons on agile strategy, distributive decision-making, high-performance teams, and the importance of bringing energy around a vision.

 

I was able to learn new technical skills such as the Unity3d environment so I could quickly iterate on games with the level designers.

 

I discovered I could work with very specialized and highly technical teams, if we clearly articulated the vision of what we trying to accomplish, why we needed to do it, and what it would mean for the user experience.