Aubrey Edwards Talks Video Game Development, AEW Games Division & More

Aubrey Edwards was recently interviewed by Fightful, where she spoke about her history in video game development.

"I went to college to get my undergrad in computer science. So I’m traditionally a programmer. In my first job, I started as a programmer. We were working on tools for art pipelines and stuff. So as art goes from what the artist makes to what the video game actually renders, there’s a bit there that needs to run, and I was building that bit. So I did that and then eventually moved into what we call production in video games. Which is a lot like manager focused on both resource management and people.

"So you have a limited number of resources to make the games and people, you have a particular scope that you’re trying to make, and then you have a limited number of money to bring in more people," she added. "So you’re sort of playing that puzzle constantly and trying to just make sure that you can get this game on time and on budget and not having to hire an army of people that you then have to lay off after. So I did that, primarily for my entire professional career. So I worked at four different places, I worked on twelve different games."

She continued.

"AEW Elite General Manager was built by a team called Crystallized Games. They’re based in Toronto. I actually got to visit them for the first time when we went to Toronto. Those guys basically pitched the game to us—very, very early prototype. When you see an early prototype in a game, it’s not pretty. It’s just a lot of photoshopped art to get the idea across. They pitched it to us, we negotiated a contract, and I oversaw the development of that game.

"So I worked a lot on making sure that they were making the best decisions to hit their time and budget. So if they wanted art to go in one particular direction, I used my experience to guide them where we needed to go. I also worked a lot on the creative aspects, which is not something I had a lot of experience in. So when we were doing the Season Passes, I was the one writing all the scripts for those."

Finally, Edwards had this to say:

"It’s nice ‘cause they had about two guys on the team that were big wrestling fans. So they were very, ‘Okay, this is how this is going to go, this is how this is going to go.’ The other guys, it’s always interesting to introduce someone to wrestling, where you’re kind of showing them the ropes, so to speak. But saying, ‘No, we don’t really do that. We do this,’ sort of thing. They were all big wrestling fans by the end of development," she said.