Meet Ed

We've been enjoying Countrycore season in Sunshine Valley so thought it was a good time to hop off our broomsticks and come get cozy on the Netspeak cottage sofa to meet more of the team. 💚✨

💛 Who are you and what do you do?

Hi! I’m Ed and I’m Creative Director. What that means is that I do all sorts of things!

Some Creative Directors treat the job as if it means tell everyone what to do all the time, but I prefer thinking of my role as enabling all the magical creative people in our team to do the work they love, confident in the knowledge that it all adds up to something coherent at the end of the day.

That means I’m in a lot of kickoffs (when we start new pieces of work), and I give feedback on people’s work, and I write planning documentation, and I work with our Design and Product Design and Art and Production leads to map out the future of the game.

I also consider it my responsibility to sometimes leak spoilers for upcoming content to our players on Discord. Oh, and I also do quite a lot of copywriting.

⏲️ What does the Creative Director’s daily routine look like?

Most mornings I start by talking to the designers, because in our studio, Game Design is the discipline where all other skills converge.

The designers receive tools made by the tech team and art made by the art team and features made by the front-end team and their job is to knit that all together into something that the players will see - so I like to have a good sense of what they’re working on at any given time, because it’s very close to the players’ experience, and that’s what everything is about at the end of the day.

Other than that, my days are a hot mess of meetings, workshops, brainstorming sessions, writing, and staring out of the window thinking.

I find that often the best ideas don’t happen at the desk, so I try to take at least two short walks every day to give myself a chance to think about things from a different perspective. 🌳

🌟 Out of all the tasks you do, which one do you enjoy the most?

This is a secret (don’t tell anyone!) but the thing I look forward to most is playing the production version game the day after we release something new.

It’s wonderful seeing all the players sinking their teeth into something we’ve just spent a few weeks working on (and inevitably finding weird ways to break it).

On the day after a release I tend to get my morning meetings out of the way, and then make myself a cup of tea and curl up on the sofa to play the game. It’s joyful. ☕

☀️ What’s your favorite part of Sunshine Days?

Gosh, what a difficult question. Is it the soundtrack in Perfect Stride? Is it the word ‘Plotherball’? Is it the way ‘Doom Goblin’ is a perfectly valid name for a player to choose?

Nah, it’s none of those! It’s the community! It’s being able to foster a community of such lovely, kind players. It’s having a safe, cosy little corner of the online world to call our own. 💛☀️

💻 What’s it like working at Netspeak?

This is the first time I’ve ever worked in a company where caring about D&I didn’t feel like pushing a boulder up a hill. That’s so rare, particularly in mobile!

It’s wonderful to work in a leadership team with a wide breadth of identities present, and it’s refreshing to feel that the studio leadership is behind us. The people here are wonderful and the game is really ambitious, which is exactly where I want to be.

🤗 What’s your sharecode in Sunshine Days?

I can’t tell you right now! My house is such a mess. I need to delete everything and start again. I’ll post it on our social media when I’ve finished rebuilding. Promise. 😎