End of March Wrap Up
Introduction
Hi, everyone. Derek Czerkaski here. For those who don’t know from previous blog posts, I am the Head of Studio here at Quantum Integrity Software. I’m writing this week’s blog alongside our new Community Associate, Anton Charpentier, who will begin taking over our public-facing blogs more directly in the future. Normally, I would have our CEO Nik Zorko writing this blog, but he came down with a nasty case of COVID-19 during our trip to GDC this year. I wanted to include a photo of the team members who were fortunate enough to join us at the convention, as well as a few others just to showcase the camaraderie and friendship experienced last week!
First, I’d like to introduce the community to Anton, and allow him to write a brief introductory message to our community about who he is, what we’re striving to accomplish, and what to expect coming up in the future in relation to our messaging strategy.
Greetings,
Hey everyone, nice to meet you. As Derek mentioned, my name is Anton Charpentier, and I am the new Community Associate at QI Software. I'll be the primary author of future blog posts and will aim to ensure that they come out on a bi-weekly cycle. These blog posts will give a brief insight into Dead Matter's production and allow me to check in with all of you.
In addition to blog posts, I will be assisting in Community Playtests. I will be looking for volunteers later next month. Also, I'm happy to announce the revival of Development Vlogs, which I will be producing and editing. These vlogs will coincide with larger development patches and we will have more information on them in the future. Finally, I'll be expanding our social media presence on current platforms and new ones like TikTok.
That's all from me for now. See you all in a couple of weeks. I'll give the blog back to Derek so he can share some highlights from the company's trip to GDC.
GDC Photos and Wrap
I didn’t take too many photos at GDC as the convention is quite chaotic. However, we have a few team photos that I thought were worth sharing!
The first is a group photo of myself (middle left), Nik (left), Scott (middle right), and Steve Swires (far right), our newly-hired Technical Director! The cable cars are also a huge aspect of the city; did you know they have a museum dedicated to them? The remaining photos are from inside the convention center itself (note the support for Canadian games!) and from a boat tour around the bay area we were fortunate to take with a variety of other developers!
New Hires
Anton is one of several new hires joining QI Software! I’d like to make a few more introductions to folks that have recently joined our team:
Louis Langlet joins our team as a Jr. Gameplay Designer. He previously released a student project titled Blood Spear on Steam. It’s free to play if you’re curious, so please give it a look! We’re excited to have him pair up with Nik Z to advance our moment-to-moment gameplay.
Laura Ukrainec represents our second intern to join our team this year; she’s joining the team as an intern Gameplay Programmer. She joins us from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, and we’re excited to grow and develop alongside her as both a company and a project!
Tim Perreault joins our team as a dedicated Lead Producer for the company. His experience, patience, and strengths associated not only with leadership, but with Jira, Scrum, and production principles are guaranteed to make the difference for us in regards to organization and structure. I’m ecstatic to have the privilege of working alongside Tim for a second time in my career!
Arthur de Padua joins our team as a Senior UI Designer boasting over a decade of experience! We previously worked together in the past as well, and his drive and experience are certain to add much-needed experience to our growing design core. Arthur has helped to ship multiple titles on PC, as well as on numerous consoles (PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo DS) and mobile devices!
We have several additional hires preparing to on-board in the coming weeks; there is substantial momentum being generated behind our doors and we are eager to accelerate our development of Dead Matter! As mentioned in my preliminary blog, our first update will be limited in scope as a result of the intense ramp, but we’re building out a strong foundation which should result in substantial developmental velocity for updates 2 and 3 this year! Altogether, we added over 60 years of experience to the team in March!
With that being said, we still have some remaining roles to be filled, especially on the Design and Level Design teams! If you have the knowledge, passion, and portfolio to showcase your work, please explore our open roles here and apply: https://jobs.qi.games/
Well-wishes
I hope you’ll all join me in wishing Nik Z a speedy recovery! Once he returns to full duty, we’ll put out more details surrounding our next update.
Between GDC and COVID, we don’t have a lot more to share beyond the excitement of a rapidly growing team so we’ll keep this one short and sweet and have a more robust blog in the next two weeks!
Signing out,
Derek Czerkaski
Head of Studio
