From the women at King!
Maryna – Senior Game Designer at King
I am from Ukraine. Somehow people there still believe that games are for boys! So I didn’t get any consoles for my birthdays as you can imagine. I got my first PC when I was 17. And from then on my gaming experience started. My favourite game became Diablo 2. Then I started dreaming to create my own games one day.
I entered the tech faculty at my university and began to study programming. But I didn’t know how to enter gaming until I got an opportunity to become a Game Designer for a small company. They took me despite having much more experienced candidates. The games I was working on were mobile. And here at King, I am still on mobile games and I enjoy it a lot.
As a Senior Game Designer in King, I am creating ideas for games and features. It is a really exciting and creative job, but on mobile, you need to always think about the business side of games. So, design becomes a very multifunctional role. You need to know a bit of everything, and some things quite deeply. Every day I create documentation for developers, artists to describe how this or that feature is going to work. This makes me think about every little detail and almost “speak the language” of every role on the project to communicate ideas to every team member.
There are still not a lot of girls in the industry, but King is different. Here, I met a lot of wonderful girls from my speciality area and it feels great to share ideas and give support to each other.
So my takeaway will be to never give up on your dreams and keep trying. It might be hard in the beginning but you will enjoy it once you will be there, I guarantee it!
Belén – Agile coach in Technology at King
I was always a curious girl, looking at the latest trends in technological advances. I was a small child when the PC was accessible in my homeland, Argentina, and I quickly became passionate about games and what was behind them. That’s why I had no doubt in following the path of programming. At the age of 14 and 16, I was already involved in assisting one of the PC labs at school.
After being a Software Engineer for almost 10 years, I discovered my true calling was helping people, so I reshaped myself as an Agile coach. My mission at King is growing teams at all levels by building the right climate where each member can feel they are part of a great, high-performing team. I strongly believe in the power of people-first culture, self-organized teams and collaboration. I found King to be the perfect place to develop my potential and help people and teams to grow.
I encourage myself and others to discover new perspectives, insights and ideas for the individual and continuous team improvement. In this role, I learnt to embrace change; keep an open mind, to let go of knowing, don’t make assumptions, stay curious and believe you have the power to reach all your dreams :).
Lidia – UX Designer in Customer Ops Tech at King
I come from a very techie family and that granted me access to a computer from a very early age. I still remember typing the necessary instructions for my brother to run games on the console when I was 7 years old or helping him to open doors at some of the first person games even earlier. Games and technology have always been a big part of my life in one way or another.
I was always very interested in behavioural psychology and how different combinations of graphic elements can change our perception and actions towards something. That initial curiosity got me into Advertising, and gradually evolved into User Experience Design, a discipline that I’m in love with. It allows me to connect products with people and help them in achieving their goals through interfaces; making technology more human.
I’m still pretty new on the role but that has been made more evident for me, you notice the care and eye for detail that each team member has for their job. There is a huge importance in communicating with each other, with your team and the whole organisation. It is clear from the beginning that feedback, coordination and cooperation are taken very seriously across the whole Kingdom.
The best thing for me at King is the freedom in letting you choose how to approach a problem, to experiment, to research…and always having creative space for innovation within Hackathons where you can explore whatever you want or reserving time to tackle missions in a new way.
I was losing the faith in finding a place that truly took good care of its employees and gave them space and opportunities to grow. King is showing me every day that these can go together!
