Womenize! – Inspiring Stories is our weekly series featuring inspirational individuals from games and tech. For this edition we talked to Marilena Cassetta, Producer at Crytek. She speaks about the importance of team success and trust for motivation, the minimal impact of her early experiences on her current role, and the value of networking, volunteering, and continuous learning for aspiring game producers. Read more about Marilena here:
Hi Marilena! What aspects of your current role excite you the most, and how do you maintain motivation and creativity when facing the high demands and complexities of game production?

It excites me to see my team succeed and grow through development processes. Seeing a satisfied, efficient and motivated team means I’m doing my job correctly and that fuels me with more energy.

Maintaining motivation is a huge topic and different methods apply for each individual on my teams, however the most simple and yet powerful method is to let your actions you do for them speak for yourself in order to build trust. Unbroken trust and being a safety net for devs is what I witnessed to be very effective to keep motivation going. Additionally, I don’t make promises I can’t keep, but I try to get back to individuals with an outcome and try to make things work out according to the situation at hand. Other sources of motivation are retrospectives, as well as opportunities to show off work and recap the progress made in our team.

Retrospectives should not only be about addressing issues but to help forging plans to follow up on, in order to keep ourselves accountable and take action. Doing a Project recap on a regular basis helps everybody to get a glimpse of what other teams are working on and how every puzzle piece of the project comes together, which is an additional motivation spike. Other times, reminding people of natural consequences in terms of personal organization and reliability (for example reminding them that other developers could get bottlenecked) helps giving a little motivation as well.

How did your early experiences in 3D art and VR projects and educational background in economic sciences influence your approach to game production, and how do you integrate these skills into your current projects?

To be very blunt, almost all of it is very different from what I’m working in right now. 3D Art certainly helped me understand the basic pipelines to get me started on my first job in an Art Producer role, but everything else were student projects, where a lot of things run like a game jam, meaning the organisation could get a little messy and spontaneous. If anything, I have learned on the job, what not to do on the previous projects I worked on. I mostly took away soft skills, as I was working under high pressure with the dev teams and especially addressing feature creeps.

In what ways do you think your role as a jury member for the Deutscher Entwicklerpreis enriches your perspective as a producer, and what advice do you have for aspiring game producers who are just starting their careers?

I have been part of the innovation award for some years and in many ways it helps me a lot to think outside the box. Looking at new concepts and executions of innovative games make me reflect a lot on how they were developed, what pipelines they went through, how many people worked on what. The exchange with industry professionals is also very insightful and that has always helped to work on new ways of approaching certain problems during production.

I recommend to every aspiring dev to get connected with the industry and take every opportunity you can get to volunteer at conferences and events. You will get more access to people and a supporting community. Equally important is a portfolio for new starters. It doesn’t matter how small the projects, or how little you contributed. There are always insights and learnings to share that recruiters like to see. Put enough effort into your CV, polish it, get second or third opinions and make it shine. These materials were essential for me to get noticed and got me my first production job. And as the technology progresses, so do skillsets, whoch is why I recommend to build a technical understanding for game development processes. I’m still in the progress of learning more myself, as it can be tricky, however it’s full of benefits.

Thanks for this interview, Marilena!

Marilena’s links: LinkedIn

Womenize! – Inspiring Stories Feature by Madeleine Egger