Patrick Roche Email & Phone Number

Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom

Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom

Automation and Web Test Engineer with a specialisation in online sales.- Planned, implemented and maintained automation test tools for a growing and continuously updated web platform.- Marshalled stand-up meetings, JIRA workflows and led a departmental effort to modernise development practices.- Drove QA efforts through significant feature updates, as well as a complete overhaul of publicly facing websites and ebusiness solutions.

Dundee, United Kingdom

- Worked primarily with outsource QA and recent University Graduates to build a QA Team for Axiom Soccer to take it from earliest prototype to full Early Access release.- Created QA budgets, test plans, internal and external version release notes, and publicly facing known issues lists. I was also responsible for organising daily playtests throughout the company and gathering feedback from these playtests.- Served as an interim Associate Producer on Axiom Soccer where I marshalled sprint planning, scrum meetings, stand-ups, sprint retrospectives and task priority management with rapidly shifting customer requirements.- Drove Axiom Soccer's test process and release cycle from earliest prototype through to Early Access launch. This included the addition of Online Networking via peer-to-peer and dedicated server, three user interface redesigns and several significant engine overhauls. I also helped drive the game from monthly releases to major feature releases on a weekly basis.- Designed initial Season Pass, Achievement system, Challenges system, In-Game Chat system, Competitive mode and Progression systems.- Organised and managed testing on highly customised Twitch API integration which included player/viewer cosmetic and gameplay interactions for large-scale E-sports spectators.- Extensive use of JIRA, X-Wiki, SVN, Git and AWS platforms.

Dundee, United Kingdom

- Mentored and coached senior, junior and embedded testers across multiple departments and projects.- Liased with Microsoft Publishing Partners, Studio management and outsource QA teams to ensure a quality product was delivered in as timely a manner as possible.- Conducted regular performance reviews with test team members at all levels, and helped set goals in both their careers and daily work.- Ran training sessions to bring all testers up to a high quality standard, and ran frequent update sessions to ensure testers were able to keep up with the increasing demands of development.- Worked with Microsoft and Ruffian Games QA teams to ensure that all test departments were organized, staffed and equipped with everything required to produce stable, playable builds on a regular basis.- Balanced financial and time budgetary constraints against development test requirements, including working with external QA partners around the world.- Created long and short term strategies for both the QA and Operations teams, including test plans for a large PC platform test pool, and the entire X-Box product family, both across multiple server environments.- Developed new testing methods to account for a complex server architecture and new, previously untested technology.- Carried out risk analysis, daily scrum meetings, and milestone postmortems, with regular status communication to studio leadership and other involved parties.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Experienced QA Manager currently leading a team working on social media tools, online profiles and on online entertainment projects for a variety of private sector companies.

Stirling

Content Editor and Creative Consultant- Writer for two unannounced Kickstarters, one of which is a multiplayer SHMUP being made in the Unreal 4 engine.- Creative consultant on two unannounced Next Generation games.- Writer for the APB Reloaded expansion 'The New Breed Part 3'

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

European Community Manager on APB Reloaded for Reloaded Productions.- Developed a long term feedback mechanism, gathering feedback on the first day, week and month of a features deployment to collate information on how reactions to those features changed as time progressed.- Year long community event planning and enactment, with contests tied to real world dates and with a variety of topics (July 4th Explosive Weapon Kill weekends, Winter is Coming costume contest). Budgeted for a years worth of contests and brought those contests in on time and on budget.- Developed the role of the Gamersfirst Blog from small scale, infrequently updated website to a more fully featured method of communication, including scheduled weekly updates, developer interviews, previews and Q+A's with the community at large.- Generated weekly patch notes that gave detailed but concise insights into changes that made to the game.- Responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the APB Reloaded Facebook and Twitter accounts.- Oversaw the development of Speedball, a community designed, created and voiced quest giver in APB Reloaded.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Lead Content Writer on APB Reloaded for Reloaded Productions.- Created six new contacts for high level characters to progress through, including biographies, progression emails, voice lines, and descriptions for items granted by those characters.- Created product descriptions as well as item descriptions for both in-game and cash-shop usage. - Conceived and directed the creation of a community driven contact in APB Reloaded named Speedball. His name, visual design and brief background were created by the community with refinement from development.- Updated loading screen tips, mission text and character progression emails to reflect retroactive progression changes.- Wrote the newly featured tutorial for APB Reloaded with an eye to encouraging new players to learn more about the game and to give veteran players a new perspective on the title. - Updated and expanded game lore to bring it up to date with environmental storytelling and player driven narrative.- Lead writer on the APB Reloaded blog.

Edinburgh, United Kindom

Operations Manager for outsourcing company Proper QA.- Developed written documentation for Test Angel test script library as well as contributing to redevelopment of that product.- Created a dedicated team of Customer Service representatives that offered outsourced CS solutions throughout the games industry. - Assisted with in-game marketing of new products and active in-game hype building of those new products.- Worked and lead an international team from Russia, China, India and the United States, including team building and training of new employees in both the CS team and the QA teams.- Initial community management work for APB Reloaded community where I helped steer the games community through a period of significant revenue growth and player base expansion.- Oversaw testing on three major gameplay feature patches for APB Reloaded, including testing and release of high value in-game assets, - Worked with both development and publishing at GamersFirst to develop seasonal activities that resulted in positive coverage of the game in both general gaming press and MMO specific websites.

Glasgow, United Kingdom

Tester on Unreal 3 Engine based animation toolkit that allowed users to create animations up to twenty minutes long by using a library of predefined animations that blended together procedurally to form smooth flowing animations.Responsibilities included: • End to end testing of the application including test matrix creation to help include all animations and all variables that could be applied to those animations.• Build management and verification.• Customer services that included answering CS tickets from individual users through to large scale corporate tickets from interested parties such as international animation houses, the BBC and the department of education.• Forum management and community relations including brand evangelism and community management during a period that saw a significant increase in size of the applications userbase. • During this 13 month period I helped move the application through 6 full release cycles.

Dundee, United Kingdom

Quality Assurance tester at Realtime Worlds working on APB: All Points Bulletin.• Advised on several alterations to game design, such as weapon balance, vehicle balance, customisation, equipment, matchmaking and upgrades.• Extensive testing of missions in APB with a focus on how weapons effected different play spaces along with randomly generated mission targets.• Team lead on major projects such as art passes on all play space, approach to beta release test script creation, initial EA certification process and white glove install testing.• Extensive script creation and assistance in creating game manual along with assistance in creating the knowledge base for the game.• Long term involvement with game narrative issues such as contradictions, historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies in lore.• Lead team in charge of gathering process monitor information to help reduce .exe size and file library size to manageable levels.• Contributed to the creation of several trailers for APB, providing voice acting and in game footage for marketing.• Extensive experience with Unreal Engine 3 testing and editors.• Extensive PC hardware compatibility testing.

Dundee, United Kingdom

While working at Realtime Worlds I was assigned the task of assisting the Creative Design team with mission narrative. I was brought in at the final stage of development to help 'punch up' the flavour of mission text and give rewrites (sometimes complete overhauls) of existing mission text that had to both explain to the player their goal and give them a strong reason to complete their task.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

QA tester on Grand Theft Auto 4 with a strong focus on single player game flow and environmental art. During my time at Rockstar North I developed a keen eye for attention to detail and strong understanding of open world gaming. I was moved from the main tester pool and placed in a Development QA position where I was assigned to the Interior Art team and the Cutscene team, where I was tasked with finding inconsistencies in interior art and cutscene frame rate issues across both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game.• Large focus on attention to detail in the games environment, especially on the areas of texture placement, prop positioning, audio effects, player collision and geometry. • Extensive destructive testing on single player missions.• Extensive scripted testing on single player missions.• Creation of test scripts for single player missions including rocket only and Reviewer Centric test scripts.• Developed a precise and repeatable system for testing frame rate issues during cutscenes and gameplay in environments that could be applied to both the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3.• Developed intensive test plans for both consoles in order to help development achieve the high quality standard required.• Assisted in the creation of screenshots for the in-game websites available to the player that evolve and adapt to the players action with a focus on keeping the screenshots believable as either promotional photographs or paparazzi photographs.

Glasgow, United Kingdom

Analysed and rebalanced a currently existing 3D real time strategy game with an eye to bringing attention to the games backstory and trying to bring a greater level of differentiation to the three 'teams' in the game.

Ba Computer Games Design, Computers

Education record