What technical skills do you use every day?

What technical skills do producers, programmers, artists, and designers use every day? Let’s hand over to our developers to find out. The technical skills that I use every day would definitely be the game engine that we use, which is for Sumo I think, almost all of us use Unreal Engine. So spending almost every day in that definitely has helped. I was using it long before I actually started working in games. So I think that always gives you an advantage, being able to jump straight into the job and already know what you’re doing without being instructed on how to use a particular software, which was really useful.

The three skills I use mostly day to day would be ZBrush, which is for the sculpting of characters. Then we’d move in to texturing, which is we use software like Substance Painter. And finally, we use 3ds Max, which is for more general 3D modelling. Over the course of my career in production, there are quite a few that I’ve picked up that are now second nature to me, agile and scrum methodologies, the way in which we break down and plan and monitor our work as a team. I’m accountable for our budget, so I spend a lot of time in Excel.

And I would also just say computer competency– being able to type fast enough to keep up with some of the meetings that we have and being able to then process those notes and emails to help with the way we communicate as a team are really vital.

I had some of the key skills I needed when I joined. I hadn’t really done very much Unreal, which I now use every single day. But I had a lot of experience with a lot of other programming languages and other engines, which kind of helped. So I learned a lot of Unreal very quickly early on. Most of the rest of the ones I more or less taught myself or learned via university before coming here– so things just like general programming, vector maths, problem solving, and debugging, that kind of stuff. The roles I did before getting into production all required me to manage my own time and to some extent manage the time of other people around me.

Every team I’ve worked with, I’ve sought to help the team. So I began developing those skills early. But anything around Scrum and agile that I can show a certificate that I’ve achieved this skill, I’ve learned all of that on the job and as I’ve gone.