James W. Rogers
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- Professional EXPERIENCE ELECTRONIC ARTS, Redwood Shores, CA 1995 to Nov 2015 Sr. Director of Product Development – Maxis Worlds 2014-4015
- Sr. Director of Product Development – The Sims 4 2011-2014
- Sr. Director of Product Development – The Sims Medieval 2010 to 2011
- Sr. Director of Product Development – My Sims Franchise 2007-2009
- Sr. Director of Product Development – Central Technology Group 2003-2006
- Sr. Director of Product Development – Auditor of EALA Goldeneye team. 2004
- Sr. Development Director – James Bond - Everything or Nothing 2002-2004
- Sr. Development Director – James Bond Agent Under Fire (PS2/Xbox) 2002
- Technical Director – Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2002/2003 (PS2/PC) 2000-2002
- Lead Software Engineer – Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2001 (PlayStation) 2000
- Lead Software Engineer and Engineering Manager – Road Rash Jailbreak (PlayStation) 1999-2000
- Sr. Software Engineer – Road Rash 3D (PlayStation) 1996-1998
- Software Engineer – Shockwave (PlayStation Launch) 1995
- Software Engineer – Virtual reality game authoring RD 1995
- AURORA SYSTEMS (A division of the Chyron Corporation) 1992 to 1995 Software Engineer Santa Clara, CA
- CAE-LINK SIMULATION CORPORATION (formerly Singer Link) 1988 to 1992 Hardware Software Integration and Test Engineer Binghamton, NY and Santa Clara, CA
- SCIPAR INCORPORATED 1986 to 1988 Computer Electrical Engineering Intern Santa Clara, CA
- EDUCATION
- Development Methodologies
- Software USER Experience
- Certifications
- PROFESSIONAL Associations
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James W. Rogers US citizen, California resident 
I have 29 years of experience in the computer industry with a focus on interactive entertainment (video games), real-time simulation, digital image processing tools for post-production, film and print, and content creation tools and pipelines for rapid iterative development. Until recently I was Sr. Director of Product Development at Electronic Arts working on new IP development. I am best known for assembling and managing the engineering teams and online development and operations groups for The Sims 4 franchise, which became the top selling franchise in PC video game history. Under my leadership The Sims 4 enjoyed a flawless launch in the fall of 2014 and the live service has been releasing new content and updates to passionate fans on a weekly basis ever since. Through my career I have combined my training as an Electrical Engineer with my applied software experience and passion for building and leading teams and processes to deliver results for a variety of challenges. Professional EXPERIENCE ELECTRONIC ARTS, Redwood Shores, CA 1995 to Nov 2015 Sr. Director of Product Development – Maxis Worlds 2014-4015 Lead development director of an as-yet to be released original title, which will be available for all major platforms including Apple iOS, Google, Android, Sony PlayStation, Microsoft, Xbox and Microsoft Windows. Led team from concept through green light as they built prototypes using C and C# on Unity 4, Unity 5, Unreal 4, and EA’s own Frostbite engines. Worked with business affairs, EA Maxis’ CTO and the licensor of Unity Engine, Epic Games to negotiate an option for a fixed cost perpetual license for the Unreal 4 engine. Responsible for budget and staffing plans for California and Shanghai development teams. Actively adapted the teams’ development processes and tools for speed and agility in a start-up like atmosphere. Employed modified scrum methodologies with sprints and managed releases in Jira. Specified and oversaw development of Excel-based custom scope, capacity and drift project management tools leveraging Jira data, which allowed us to make near, mid and long term priority and capacity management decisions, optimize project headcount, and support franchise business modeling. Partnered with marketing on qualitative and quantitative market analysis to verify and fine-tune product positioning and ensure data based design and product priorities. Member of Quality Execution Panel (Qx), a core group of worldwide senior directors charged to define and drive Qx directives through EAs teams and products. Ten Qx Practices were defined to drive higher confidence and predictability for both the quality and delivery of EA’s games. Focused on capturing and applying best practices in planning, execution, transparency and quality. Measurement and verification of success in the practices was telemetry based with metrics for design quality, execution, quality as measured by players, and quality as measured by QA (embedded quality assurance partnerships) and QE (automated test verification engineering). Sr. Director of Product Development – The Sims 4 2011-2014 The Sims 4 Launched in September 2014 and is available on Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac platforms with online sharing features for creating Sims and building blueprints for houses. In the year since launch in Fall 2014, 3.9 million players have played over 179 million sessions averaging 1.4 hours each. Players have created 92,800,000 Sims across 27,900 years of gameplay. The system has sustained 130K simultaneous users in production and 1.2M under end-to-end load and usability testing. The service has delivered dozens of content, gameplay, stability and engagement releases since launch. The Sims 4 – Member of Sr. Leadership Team While on The Sims 4, I was a member of the Sr. leadership team and accountable for online operations and core engineering development. I provided organizational, technical, operational and business leadership to ensure successful development, launch, patch and release of the base game and on-going digital revenue offerings to meet 10-year business goals. Prepared and presented regular project review and analysis to Sr. leadership for my teams.
The Sims 4 – Sr. Director of Engineering Responsible for 60+ developers including client and server engineering, online services, creativity game modes, tools engineering, DevOps, LiveOps, and the mobile companion application teams. I led a team of six development directors to deliver on the goals in these areas. Direction included setting group goals, targets and negotiation of resources with production and development direction partners.
The Sims 4 - Sr. Director, Online Services The Sims 4 was built from the ground up to be a live service with rapid metrics-driven development of updates and rapid release of patches and new content. Responsible for delivery of the technology, infrastructure and organization to support the franchise transformation from a packaged goods business to a live service business and to ensure a flawless launch of The Sims 4. I directly managed The Sims 4 server team through Alpha, and then recruited a reporting development director to final and launch. During this time I led team through a series of high profile simulations, tests, and player betas to fully validate the backend prior to launch. Drove evaluations and reports on 100% end-to-end testing from player to each service. Efforts rewarded with the first flawless launch of an EA Maxis title as measured by 99.8% uptime through the first 3 months of operations. Accomplishments of the online services teams under my direction:
The Sims 4 – Lead Development Director, Launch Readiness Process Launch Readiness was a rigorous process to audit, review and support a teams ability to launch online games and services. Beginning 4 – 6 months prior to launch, the Launch Readiness process assembled cross-functional stakeholders from across the company to actively plan, predict and mitigate risk around online services including launch, monitoring, patching, promotions, forums, marketing, community web site launches and support. Developed a gap analysis of our ability to end-to-end test The Sims 4 service and every connected EA or vendor stack and service. This resulted in either an augmentation of system testing capabilities, such as with a friends load test environment being established, or in the establishment of mitigation strategies for potential issues that couldn’t be tested fully. For example, even though we couldn’t test Auth at scale in the load test environment, we could test a portion of the traffic and then measure the ratio of capacity used per increasing load. We then worked with the Origin and system test groups to increase capacity in the production environment to meet the expected load. I oversaw the process from a project risk management perspective and audited partner plans, then ensured any discovered issues were addressed. This involved review and influence over partner group schedules, deliverables, test plans, milestones and support needs. The Sims 4 - Additional Examples of Technical Management and Leadership
Sr. Director of Product Development – The Sims Medieval 2010 to 2011 The Sims Medieval was a re-imagining of The Sims mechanics as a light RPG for Microsoft Windows. The core challenge of this production was to provide players a Sims game with a satisfying castle building experience within and RPG on a non-accommodating tech base without experts on the engine, and to complete the project in only 9 months. I mitigated potential issues by providing access to expert consultants, fostering group learning and knowledge sharing, and ensuring that the design could be accomplished using existing strengths of the engine. Castle construction tools were built via a novel approach of allowing players to assemble and customize pre-built components of castles thru a unique shell-fitting technology and to tie the unlocking of castle components to the story progression. This meant that users indirectly accomplished their goal of building by playing the game. I was responsible for team assembly and hiring, as well as staff and development plans. I was also responsible for vendor capability vetting, contract negotiation and deliverable sign-off. Worked with legal and business affairs stakeholders to create and update vendor agreements. Prior to this I was Director of Engineering for The Sims Medieval base game then on the Pirates and Nobles expansion pack I was the Lead Development Director with 3 Art and Engineering Directors reporting to me. Managed spending carefully and launched the project on time and $1 million dollars under budget. Sr. Director of Product Development – My Sims Franchise 2007-2009
I was responsible for development direction and project management of 3 different releases of the MySims IP from Electronic Arts. MySims was a market opportunity franchise designed and targeted to break into the Japanese video game market as well as expand the Maxis/Sims customer base to include more kids. MySims combined creativity tools, iconic characters and storytelling. It was built from the ground up to leverage the innovative Wiimote controller of the Nintendo WII platform. Code was written in C++ and Lua. Asset conditioning pipelines were written in Python 2.3. Innovations included a unique and intuitive construction system that allowed players to fully customize their world while simulation continued. Regions of continuous physics and build ability were defined to support this goal. We also ported the base game to windows for a co-operative multiplayer experience. Sr. Director of Product Development – Central Technology Group 2003-2006 Served as an ambassador of change and collaboration across EA. Building on the success of the tools group I created for the James Bond – Everything Or Nothing production, I was asked to form and run the Central Technology Group (CTG) to provide common infrastructure, tools, and workflows across the EA Redwood Shores studio. Responsible for directing a team of 30-50 engineers and technical artists to develop a shared set of tools, pipelines and engine runtime components for all games in development at the Redwood Shores studio. Responsible for organization design, team hiring, budgets and financial planning. Provided leadership and mentoring to three reporting directors, a senior architect, a group technical art director and an administrative assistant. I created financial models that calculated the worth of technology we provided. I created an embedded model in which CTG staff rotates onto client teams for some or all of a project. This ensures that the technology is appropriate for the problem and that we have trained a local expert to support the team going forward. This financial model was a valuable tool to communicate value to the studio and team leadership and to gain support for further spending against studio shared technology and the CTG group. Served as a founder and advisor to a group of worldwide central technology development directors charged with driving technology sharing and convergence across Electronic Arts. This group consisted of the WW CTO and the lead directors from each EA studio’s central technology group. Participated in quarterly summits at host EA studios to compare portfolios, needs, wins, challenges, and opportunities. The output was an assessment of technology convergence and sharing across the company with tuned up strategic and tactical plans to further savings and convergence. My CTG team built technology that evolved and remained in use for five years at Redwood Shores and later the Visceral game studio. Games leveraging this technology included James Bond – Casino Royal, The Godfather, The Godfather II, the Dead Space series, and the Dante’s Inferno series. Key technology created by these teams included:
Sr. Director of Product Development – Auditor of EALA Goldeneye team. 2004 I was sent by EA executive management in 2004 to join other game development experts at the L.A. Studio to perform a comprehensive project review and audit of the development and technical health of the team developing Goldeneye: Rogue Agent. I wrote a report with recommendations for turning around the fledging production; the recommendations were implemented and the game shipped later that year. Sr. Development Director – James Bond - Everything or Nothing 2002-2004 At 140+ developers on the action/shooter side of the game alone, the James Bond EON production was the largest team we had seen up to that time at EA Redwood Shores. This ambitious investment into the Bond franchise leveraged the character action technology from EA Redwood Shores with the racing engine from Need For Speed at EA Canada. The dual racing/shooter engine told the elaborate EON storyline through game action and dozens of cutting edge cinematic scenes rivaling movie quality renderings. I was charged with modernizing and expanding the way we built games at Redwood Shores through the creation of an embedded cross functional tools, technology and process team. The team’s mission was to maximize results from art and gameplay content iterations and to improve workflows and development infrastructure. I managed a team of 12 technical art directors, artists and engineers to focus on workflows and team productivity. Prior to this, the primary focus of game development had been the creation of engine technology along with basic tools for content creation. It was clear after Agent Under Fire that the art in video games had become as sophisticated as films from Hollywood. I had a both technical and management roles in leading this cross-functional team. My roles included development direction, program management, technical direction, and content workflow architecture. This approach was a success, allowing us to approach game development with a balanced emphasis on art and content in addition to game engine technology. This helped us make better quality games as well as attract and retain a higher caliber of digital artist to Electronic Arts. Some achievements included:
The team and technology that my team developed for the EON production became the backbone of the Redwood Shores Central Technology Group that lead the following year. Sr. Development Director – James Bond Agent Under Fire (PS2/Xbox) 2002 Assembled and directed a top-notch team of 5 Senior Engineers to rapidly learn the project code and fix defects between Alpha and Final releases while the rest of the 75+ person development team continued to add features and iterate on gameplay and content. This effort was designed to mitigate shipping risk while continuing to address quality issues and increase depth of the product far beyond traditional code and content lock down dates. This novel approach proved to EA executives that, when needed, we could take mitigated risk to successfully continue to polish a game far beyond what had been considered possible to date. Technical Director – Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2002/2003 (PS2/PC) 2000-2002 Group Technical Director for two development teams producing the PS2 and PC versions of these products respectively. The internal team, at Redwood Shores, was responsible for the Sony PlayStation 2 SKU while a team from Salt Lake City Utah based Headgate Studios developed the Microsoft Windows version of the game. At the time the PC and Console engines shared little code. Reviewed, audited and approved technical and project management plans for internal and external teams. Provided technical guidance and feasibility assessments in design discussions. I advocated for and drove an initiative to increase development iteration speed through reduction of the time to build and deliver targets for review. I focused efforts on creating deterministic builds rapidly with automated publishing of builds to QA and production staff for review and feedback. An adage in the games development is that iteration is king. I brought these industry best practices we perfected with the internal team to the PC developer reducing the time required to achieve a working build from 2-3 days to a few hours. On this project I also applied my music production background and worked with composers and sound designers to bring a more modern feel to the Tiger Woods Series sound track. Traveled to Tokyo Japan with a group of EA technologists for the very first developer access to the PlayStation 2 hardware prototype at Sony Japan. Spent a week learning the architecture and programming on the PS2 prototype learning Ring buffer DMA and GPU graphics hardware usage. Lead Software Engineer – Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2001 (PlayStation) 2000 I was a technical co-lead on this important transitional project that moved the PGA franchise completely to 3D. This was a challenging period for the industry and EA. I was responsible for overall technical direction, planning for the game, and engineering management. Responsible for engineering schedules and engineering staff development and coaching. Provided talent evaluations and recommendations on artist and engineer placement and retention for 3D development. Lead Software Engineer and Engineering Manager – Road Rash Jailbreak (PlayStation) 1999-2000 As lead engineer on this project, I was responsible for the creation, management and deliverable tracking for all engineering schedules. I directly managed five engineers at this time and was responsible for the asset conditioning pipeline and graphics, and vetting technical plans put forth by the team. I also worked with art, engineering, production and design to develop implementation solutions to realize the games vision. Responsible for regular defect triage and assignment. Worked with quality assurance team to ensure all systems were fully tested and defect-free. Sr. Software Engineer – Road Rash 3D (PlayStation) 1996-1998 I was the lead for graphics, animation and tools engineering on this team of 35. This was the title that moved Road Rash from a sprite-based engine of the 3DO and early PlayStation port to a true 3D engine. I wrote the asset conditioning software and tools for artists to integrate their animations, characters, world, and vehicle art into the game. The model and animation pipeline software ran on Silicon Graphics workstations with IRIX OS. Tools were written in C; batch processing used C shell. Models were created using Alias Wavefront. Textures were authored using Adobe Photoshop. I was also responsible for visual effects programming. This title was unique in that streaming the course data while streaming a CD quality soundtrack pushed the practical limits of the CD hardware/software of the PlayStation console. We got every ounce of performance out of the PlayStation console. This installment of Road Rash also carried on the tradition to incorporate an original soundtrack of up-and-coming artists against the backdrop of racing and combat. Software Engineer – Shockwave (PlayStation Launch) 1995 Delivered one of the ten initial EA titles in that shipped at worldwide launch of the original Sony PlayStation. My responsibilities included learning and keeping up with changes in hardware and operating system design of the PlayStation as Sony moved towards launch. Often this involved reverse engineering poorly documented and translated systems, reverse engineering library functionality, and measurement and analysis of hardware performance. Performance and operation was continually compared to Sony’s published specifications to ensure our games pushed the limits of the platform while still working well on the early development hardware, debug stations, and production units. I was one of two engineers responsible for providing platform specific functionality and porting the C codebase from the 3DO release to the Sony PlayStation. Software Engineer – Virtual reality game authoring R&D 1995 Primary engineer working on an R&D project to explore the feasibility of using cutting edge Virtual Reality technology for authoring tracks for a ribbon based game. Used Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 and Onyx computers to run MultiGen SmartModel Virtual Reality software and proprietary game prototypes. This project was the first usage of virtual reality by Electronic Arts. AURORA SYSTEMS (A division of the Chyron Corporation) 1992 to 1995 Software Engineer Santa Clara, CA Wrote and extended digital image processing and video production tools for post-production, film and print for Aurora’s flag ship product, Liberty Paint, on Silicon Graphics IRIX workstations. Specialized in machine control and digital video streaming. Highlights included processing 30 frames per second uncompressed video streaming from striped disk array in real time at 1993 NAB show floor. Liberty was unique in that is was hosted on off-the-shelf Silicon Graphics workstations instead of on a proprietary computer graphics hardware platform as where competitors like the Quantel Paintbox. This allowed Aurora to deliver best of class graphics authoring technology with broadcast production features for $30K vs. $100K. Other competitors in this arena included Discreet Logic’s Flint/Fire/Flame and Parallax Matador. Autodesk and Softimage later marketed these products, respectively. Rotoscoping is a classic compositing technique in which animators trace over film or video footage frame by frame, for use in live action and animated films. I wrote rotoscoping software in ANSI C that allowed artists to apply and record digital cel(luloid) animation created with Liberty over live video for composition of broadcast television video and digital film recording. I implemented frame buffer merging, buffer and layer management and control and communications protocols to talk to a number of video recording devices including the Abekas A62 digital video disk recorder and Sony Betacam video recorder. Gained working familiarity with film, video and broadcast TV technology and concepts such as NTSC, PAL, 3:2 pull down for film to video conversion, SMPTE color bars and calibration. Assigned to a skunk works project to port Liberty from Silicon Graphics to the Chyron iNFiNiT! character generator system, which was very popular in broadcast at the time. John Madden used the iNFiNiT! to overdraw marker over live video to illustrate plays on football broadcasts. This was quite a challenge as I was working alone with only fragmented documentation to the iNFiNiT! and had to intercept boot up sequences, reverse engineer drivers and develop a number of optimizations to get a program designed for RISC based workstations to run reasonably on a Motorola 68000 based architecture running the pSOS real time operating system with proprietary embedded components. I impressed the Chyron executives by completing this port in 6 months and showing Liberty running on the iNFiNiT! on the NAB show floor in 1994. CAE-LINK SIMULATION CORPORATION (formerly Singer Link) 1988 to 1992 Hardware Software Integration and Test Engineer Binghamton, NY and Santa Clara, CA Held confidential level security clearance for 5 years at Link. Integrated the simulator software with the hardware according to US Air Force specifications. R&D Engineer: Developed real-time executive and interface software for Silicon Graphics and Sun Workstations that interfaced graphical mock control systems with multiple simulation clients. The finished applications provided rapid generation of off-line interactive test systems. Provided bindings to ANSI C and Fortran IV. Member of team developing high-performance real-time computing technology for rapid computation of terrain information for simulators. This terrain information system was built using a sophisticated and novel parallel computing and distributed client server architecture. Used proprietary hardware, including the Inmos transputer, which allowed the system to perform well for demanding simulations. Hardware/Software Integration and Test Engineer (Lakenheath England, New York, New Mexico): Worked on a series of implementations and installations of Link’s F111 flight simulator for the swept-wing fighter-bomber. An installation consisted of a room full of computer systems for simulation, graphics, instructor operating and training systems, simulator hardware platform, radar management, bombs and projectile simulations. These systems accessed local memory as well as a shared disk based database. Responsible for on–site development, hardware/software integration and support for 150K lines of code through air force acceptance test of simulation systems. Experience included:
While assigned to airbases I was also responsible for management and oversight of the configuration management, CM, team. Managed 1-3 direct reports at various installation sites to ensure all software releases, backups and version control processes were implemented to military standard and security requirements. SCIPAR INCORPORATED 1986 to 1988 Computer Electrical Engineering Intern Santa Clara, CA As an intern, I spent two summers working at an upstate NY firm that built power monitoring and control systems. Typically these systems where employed by regional power companies to monitor and control, gates, turbines and locks and along the Niagara gorge. My first summer, I primarily performed assembly of the products, diagnosis of defects, and assistance for other engineers with their work on the larger monitoring and control systems. The second summer I was able to put my computer hardware design skills to use and was charged with a ground-up design for compact and cost effective control and data acquisition system. Dubbed the RTU-2000, my design was based around an Intel 80188/86 or Zilog Z80 based platform. The design provided a proof of concept that a low cost entry to the market could be created using many of the parts already on hand for the larger systems. EDUCATION Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering, 1987 – State University of New York at Buffalo Technology Experience Developed or managed teams that developed embedded software, enterprise software, software tools, desktop applications and server software using the following technologies:
Development Methodologies Used Visio, Microsoft Project, Excel, Hansoft, Jira and other tools with the following methodologies:
Computer Hardware Experience
Operating Systems Used
Software USER Experience
Certifications Completed Mark Cohn’s Scrum Master training in 2007 at Electronic Arts TECHNICAL WRITING RTU-2000 System Design and Documentation for a Remote Terminal Unit system for controlling locks and water levels in the Niagara Power System. – Dec 1988 PROFESSIONAL Associations
James W. Rogers / Expert Resume Directory: about about -> Request for Quotation (rfq) Number: doc52papt1000018 about -> Review of 2004 contents about -> Annual InStructional unit plan about -> Annual InStructional unit plan about -> Unit: Automotive and Auto Body about -> United Nations Children’s Fund (unicef) Phnom Penh, Cambodia Vacancy Nº cp/15/006 Terms of Reference Individual Consultancy: Monitoring about -> Response to a letter from a recovering addict’s wife with concerns about 12-step groups about -> Analysis of Law in the United Kingdom pertaining to Cross-Border Disaster Relief Prepared by: For the 30 June 2010 Foreword about -> About perkins compiled by about -> United states department of education Download 65.75 Kb. Share with your friends:
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