Video Game Developer Panel

Gaming is one of the biggest and most expansive industries in the world today, and interest in careers in gaming is always growing. For another special FanCentral event, we'll be chatting with some of the folks that make it all happen! This FanCentral Saturday we have a great group of professional video game developers that will join us for a special panel to discuss the ins and outs of the gaming industry: how they got started, what their years in the business has taught them, and what do they see as the future for video game development. This will be a fantastic chat that any gamer or potential developer won't want to miss. See you there!

This program is available online only. Registration is required. Details on how to participate will be emailed. Emails may go to your spam folder.

Part of FanCentral: Fuel Your Obsession! generously supported by the Friends of the Dallas Public Library

Guests:

Darcy Ludington: I have worked at Riot Games for three years. I joined Wild Rift (League of Legends on mobile!) early this year as a Producer for an internal engineering team where we build tools to speed up or streamline the other developers. Prior to this role, I worked on Player Support Engineering as a Strategic Program Manager where I built player-facing and agent-facing tooling for all of our games! If you ever checked out how much you spent on League of Legends, that type of tech was me!  My favorite games are: Skyrim, Teamfight Tactics,  Kingdoms Reborn, and It Takes Two. 

Brent Randall: I started my professional game developer career at Riot over a decade ago. I've filled many roles over the years but I am currently a Principal Engineer in our Research & Development team (aka new games!). I worked on LoL for about seven years and VALORANT for about three years prior to it's release. Some of my work included Project Chronobreak, VALORANT's 128-Tick Servers and porting League of Legends to Mac OSX. Recently I've played Hades, Among Us, Gunfire Reborn, The Elder Scrolls Online and have just been getting into World of Warcraft's latest expansion. Obviously a huge fan of VALORANT and League of Legends as well.

Michael Coleman: I’ve been working at Riot for about 2 1/2 years now as an Instructional Designer for Player Support. Basically when we release something new, I create content and work with regional teams around the world to ensure we’re ready to support and help players when any questions or issues they might have about the new thing. I mainly focus on Wild Rift and TFT in terms of products, as well as all of our regional teams in Asia. I was literally born with an original NES in my house and have been a gamer ever since! I’m a big fan or RPGs or Action RPGS and some of the games I’ve been playing recently include Spider-man: Miles Morales and Assasin’s Creed: Valhalla. My favorite game of all time is probably Metal Gear Solid or Valkyria Chronicles. 

Gina Cruz Rivera: I joined Riot Games in 2016 as an analyst for the Localization discipline and the League of Legends Release team. After two years I transitioned to supporting our Live Services teams. At the beginning of this year I transitioned again to join the Wild Rift insights team and am currently working on supporting our open beta as well as the China launch. I've been playing games since the 5th grade starting with Mario 64. I have thousands of hours into various Pokemon games over the years as well as the Animal Crossing series! Some of my more recent favorites have been Wild Rift (of course), Risk of Rain II, Sea of Thieves, League of Legends, and the new Pokemon Snap.

Shaun Randall: I worked as a Product Manager at Riot Games for 8 years before quitting to start my own studio, Edenic Era Studios.  Since then we have launched Valgrave: Immortal Plains, a F2P Battle Royale with over 200k players on Steam with about 2 people.  We have recently started work on Lodestar, a sci-fi space mashup of Satisfactory/Factorio production games with the exploration of Subnautica/Zelda.  Recently I have been playing Wild Rift and basically any popular survival/crafting game.