Rogue Company
Senior Community Specialist
Hi-Rez Studios
While at Hi-Rez Studios, I served as a voice for Rogue Company players within the development team throughout all periods of the development cycle, owning every part of the community pipeline, including:
Community Strategy
Creator Program Strategy
Direct-to-Player Communications
Crisis Management
Cross-Collaboration Community Initiatives with QA, Design, and Engineering
Patch Notes Process
Sentiment Analysis and Reporting
Live Q&A Hosting
Livestream Show Flow and Co-Hosting
Discord Volunteer Moderator Program
Player Feedback Program, known as “The Board”
I led all player community initiatives with a few goals in mind:
Build player trust.
Humanize the team developing Rogue Company.
Be more present and consistent with communication.
Community Strategy Initiatives
After a particularly challenging update, I spun up live Q&As inside the Rogue Company Discord as a way to communicate directly to our players.
Affectionately known within the community as “Fireside Chats,” these hours-long sessions were a chance to speak openly with players about pain points, hot topics, burning questions, and the “why” around development decisions.
Often hosting over 800 unique players, these conversations served a crucial role in bridging the knowledge gap and rebuilding player trust.
#DEV/TALK
Community-published Discord Stages from February 2022
During the development of Rogue Company, our community’s top concern were bugs and issues that hindered the gameplay experience. To tackle bug fixing transparency, I revitalized and revamped the Rogue Company Trello Board to communicate issues that were known, resolved, or needed more information to reproduce.
In keeping this board up to date, I held a weekly 30-minute sync with QA and Design to identify, triage, and properly prioritize community issues.
This board had tremendous value to our community and would later become the basis upon which we noted bug fixes in content update livestreams.
The Rogue Company Trello
The Board was a group of players nominated by the Rogue Company community to provide continuous feedback to the development team. Players of the Board brought constructive feedback from players, representative of the community’s interests across all demographics and platforms, and acted as a focus group for future initiatives.
I managed the program, including invites, NDAs, relationships, and monthly meetings. Often times, I acted as the facilitator between members of the Board and the development team, allowing them to discuss hot button issues or share pre-production content in a safe environment.
The Board
Creator Program Strategy
I managed all creator program initiatives and activations from end-to-end: conception, development, and live facilitation. I handled all day-to-day work, including parsing, inviting, and onboarding new creators. The goals of the program were simple:
Build player trust.
Reach the wider player audience through creator communities.
Ensure creators have all the tools they need to be advocates for new content.
Creator Cosmetic Bundles were a collection of unlockable sprays and banners that represented a creator’s unique brand in-game.
We did not monetize these cosmetics. Instead, we ensured that the only way players could get their hands on these items was through the creator themselves. This was a huge win for our creator community, driving traffic to their content and allowing their audiences to celebrate their community sub-culture within the world of Rogue Company.
Creator Cosmetics
The creator program was a major contributor in the effort to build player trust. Creator Previews were events wherein the designers could show our NDA’d creators pre-production content. Creators were able to ask questions, vocalize concerns, and provide feedback, which was often integrated into the final product.
By the time the feature shipped, creators felt excited and invested in upcoming content because they had a part in building it.
These events became a fundamental part of the development process.
Creator Previews
Livestream Show Flow and Co-Hosting
Each update, we produced an Update Show to go over the changes, new cosmetics, and bug fixes.
I drafted the show flow and occasionally co-hosted alongside our designers.
Patch Notes and Crisis Communication
I wrote all player communications, including crisis comms, patch notes, hot fixes, and dev blogs. All forms of communication required formatting into BBCode (Steam) and HTML (web) before being delivered to localization teams for staging. Samples: