Aubrey Edwards may be one of AEW’s most popular referees, but video games will always be her passion.
Edwards recently spoke with Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp about her background in video game development, and how she oversaw development on the AEW Elite General Manager mobile game. Check out some backstory on the early days of her career in the interview highlights below.
How she went to college for computer science:
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.
On her career as a game developer:
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. 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.
How she oversaw development on AEW Elite General Manager on mobile:
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.