Community Manager at EVERYDAYiPLAY

Following my internship, I was offered a full-time position, which I gladly accepted. At first I didn't feel any change, but after some time, I came to take more responsibilities.

I didn't immediately start a Wiki as expected. The Vikings Gone Wild community had grew to a point where I had just enough of one day to take care of all new requests since the day before.

Instead, we decided to start a new project: localisation. It was time to translate the game into several languages, the most represented in Vikings Gone Wild: German, French, Italian and Spanish. More recently we added Brazilian Portuguese.
Our first approach was to make it a community project, and search for volunteers in our player base, except for French: I would do it. Obviously we planned since the beginning to reward them with a great amount of hard currency, as well as exclusive non-published heroes wallpapers. Unfortunately, even though we found the players, the task was too big to expect a very throughout work from them. After a few months, once the translations done, we asked professional translators to review the texts, and it turned out they had to re-do most of them. Now, for each version of the game I contact them and make sure translations will be delivered in time.

As the company started to work on their second game, I prepared the communication channels: social media pages of course, but also external forum and in-game support tool: HelpShift. It's a way to quickly and easily chat with a player, without even leaving the game!

For the launch of the game, we decided to send an email to some of our VIP Vikings Gone Wild players, to give them early access. I worked on the template and the content with the Art Director. Due to the fact it was a mitigated success, our next emails were way simpler and worked better, and I didn't need the Art Director's input anymore. I did however work with him to create Heroes of Paragon's website.

Starting a new game was the perfect occasion to really build the brand "EVERYDAYiPLAY". I created the company's blog, intended to give players an occasion to discover what's happening behind the curtain.

Afterwards, I started managing the support for the two games. It was actually very interesting, because both games had a totally different approach even though they were both strategy games. Heroes of Paragon had a real story behind it, uncovered to the player as they progressed through the solo adventures, chapter after chapter. Its base-versus-base battle mode also made it more hardcore oriented: each player really needed to think about their attack and prepare a good strategy - then execute it properly!

At the end, if both games were of the same genre, and if we did have quite a population that came from Vikings Gone Wild to Heroes of Paragon, they remained very different games.

      > An example of blog post I wrote about the changes in Vikings Gone Wild's Guild Wars