Francis Elphick Email & Phone Number

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Montreal

As a Game Director I led a team that scaled up to 40 people for a newly pitched title at Gameloft Montreal. Structured a multi-disciplinary leadership team as a collaborative round table. - Responsible for launching a new game initiative with key genre concepts and a product position based on thorough market research - Laid out and communicated a design vision that could fit with a plan for a viable product with strong business potential. Regularly presented for team members, stakeholders and potential partners. - Demonstrated the validity of our concept by performing market tests and player tests - Planned and built a scalable team structure using an interdisciplinary agile/scrum team model - Directed the team towards game concepts and creative objectives that were informed choices using player demographics, profiles, references and in-house tests - Completed a pipeline from pre-production to a live test environment in 12 countries. Continued to build a product in a live environment using regularly updated metrics - Collaborated with marketing and community teams to monitor and influence user acquisition performance and user feedback - Routinely involved our live ops and analytics team to define goals for tracking and interpreting large volumes of data from a design perspective, offering meaningful conclusions. - Demonstrated with live player data and comparisons that production efforts were successfully impacting KPIs.As Social & Live Ops Director I collaborated with a number of studio leaders to help teams pitch and deliver higher quality games and to stay well informed in an evolving space. - Designed and helped to execute social features, primarily in collaboration with the Dungeon Hunter Champions. Rapidly provided documentation, greyboxes, proof of concept level scripting and in-game demonstrations of how the concept could be created. - Assisted at the studio level in the creation and review of a number of early concepts.

Montreal

Lead Game Design “Jurassic World: Alive”Lead Game Design and Live Operations on "Jurassic World: The Game"Awarded with Google Play’s “Best apps of 2015”Peaked in the top 8th grossing slot.Implemented Ludia’s first truly live ops driven game with a “game as a service” development mentality. Led all design aspects of the game and assisted executive and co-publishing partners in developing a strategy around it. Regularly communicated the project’s vision, both internally and externally.

Montreal

Unannounced title for iOS.Simultaneously running project while working on Gangstar Vegas “Game Evolution”.

Montreal

Gangstar Vegas “Game Evolution” (Multiple Updates)Responsible for nearly all aspects of game evolution strategy and implementation. This is done in close collaboration with our ``game monetization management``, ``community management`` and ``product management``.Design goals include:Retention: Effectively holding and increasing user retention and game longevity through fun. This is achieved through social or personal engagement techniques, community organization, item and mission content. This content is designed to be regularly released over a scheduled period of time.Acquisition and re-acquisition: Creating rich content to drive visibility and promotional aspects of the game, creating a second wave of interest and desirability.Conversion: Applying conversion techniques to capitalize on our retention and acquisition process, further increasing the success of the franchise, and propels future game evolution content.

Montreal, Canada Area Qc

Gangstar VegasDirection and over-view of all design aspects on one of Gameloft's largest world productions.Separated team and workloads into five areas of production:Systems Design: The 3Cs, especially controls and cameras, documentation, balancing, game progression, game mechanics, open world systems and A.I.Narrative Design: Initial concepts, characters, scripts, localization, storyboarding and pre-visualization, voice recording and motion capture.HUD/Menu Design: HUD layouts, menu layouts, menu flow, simplification and accessibility.Economic Design: Monetization techniques, data tracking, content diversity, probability and collection systems, market comparisons, connectivity and social engagement features.Level Design: Design tools, integration pipelines, level documentation, mission progression and arc, focus and flow, environment design and greyboxing.Increasingly engaged in many roles as project shifted from pre-production to final-production stages requiring anything from internal pitches and early design concepts to final integration and debugging.Working closely with all other departments, leads, project seniors, producers and studio management.Led a strong team with as many as 15 designers plus several non-design resources.Subsequently promoted to ``Senior`` Lead Game Designer.

Montreal, Canada Area Qc

Design for many elements including levels, sound, gameplay and mechanics. Regularly working along side programmers, artists, sound engineers, other designers and management.Also responsible for assisting technical designers with design and engine integration.Subsequently promoted to Lead Game Designer.

Level design, level documentation, and engine integration.Subsequently promoted to Game Designer.

Contracted to provide assistance in level design and engine integration.Subsequently contracted to provide corporate training with the goal of introducing level editors and game engines.