Levelling Up: Chucklefish’s Caoimhe Roddy – “We see ourselves as a resource to be utilised by the indies we sign”

Caoimhe Roddy, publishing producer at Chucklefish, talks about the differences between indie and triple-A production and the importance of being self-sufficient

What is your job role and how would you describe your typical day at work?

I’m a publishing producer at Chucklefish, and work with all external creative and technical teams who are working on projects being published by Chucklefish. My role consists of helping teams build schedules and milestones based on their goals, managing any ratings, localisation or QA with external providers and aligning our developer’s schedules with Chucklefish’s marketing team’s plans. My role requires a robust understanding of the game-making process from conception to post-launch so that I can better support teams on their journeys to launching their own games!

I work with a lot of different teams, so my day to day doesn’t have any set structure.  However a lot of my tasks involve checking in with each team and identifying where they are progressing and where they may be blocked. I’ll also review project management softwares and update them according to the latest updates from the teams. From there, there’s a lot of communicating information between developers, marketing, platform holders and any other external partners.

What qualifications and/or experience do you need to land this job?
Production in indie publishing can look very different from development production in a triple-A environment. You might not be working as closely with the developers on their day to day but should still have a very good knowledge of the game-making process and have some completed projects under your belt.

There’s a lot of different routes into the role, whether it’s from managing projects in other industries, moving over from another speciality such as QA or Design or you could do a degree. Success in this role requires a lot of self sufficiency when it comes to your organisation and communication skills, so be sure to show those off in your CV!

If you were interviewing someone for your team, what would you look for?

We’re a small and focused team with each member bringing a particular set of skills to the table, and each of those skills massively contributing to what is required to successfully publish a game. Whether your area of expertise is marketing, community management, production or content creation, make sure you know your stuff well and take some time to consider how that role can support small indie teams.

At Chucklefish, we see ourselves as a resource to be utilised by the indies we sign and act as an extension of their teams. Having some knowledge of how indie teams function and also knowing a little about common external partners such as porting houses and platform holders would definitely help you stand out for interviews with publishing teams.

What opportunities are there for career progression?

Publishing production offers an insight into a significant number of roles and corners of the industry from a development, marketing and business perspective and the possibilities to grow within your career could be vast. Progression in this area depends on the kind of teams you want to support and what levels you’d like to support them at. The skills you develop could help you fit into teams with platform holders curating games for their consoles and stores, or the triple-A space working on larger budget games, or become a consultant in the indie space and help small teams achieve their goals of launching their own games.