Blake McClaren Producer
Blake McClaren

// About

Hard on the problem, honest with the team.

I've spent twenty years delivering games at scale, from live-service operations to new IP to franchise turnarounds. I started in QA at Sony, ran release management and production for FarmVille through its global peak at Zynga, turned around a live mobile RPG at Warner Bros. Games, and co-founded my own studio for six years. I write enough code to sit with engineers, understand the real cost of a feature, and build plans that survive contact with a build.

The people part is the craft. At Zynga I trained incoming producers as the studio scaled; at Warner Bros. I rebuilt trust with a burned player community; at Big Byte I coached my co-founder through their first launches. Pressure belongs on the problem, not the people — teams ship better that way.

The rigor travels. At First Republic Bank I drove remediation of 200+ technical risks for a technology org supporting 8,000 employees and 1M+ customers, and at Google Workspace I ran program management on AI integration work. Lately I'm pointing all of it at my own desk — building a real-time football simulator solo in Lua, with AI as a team I produce rather than a tool I prompt.

What I run

  • Live-service operations
  • Schedule & milestone planning
  • Scope & risk management
  • Quality & certification gates
  • Change management
  • Cross-discipline coordination
  • Build & release management
  • AI-assisted development workflows
  • Executive / stakeholder reporting

Tools

Production & planning
Jira · Hansoft · Confluence · Scrum / Agile
Risk & reporting
ServiceNow · Archer · Tableau
Engines
Unreal Engine · Unity · Defold
Code & web
Swift · Lua · Node.js · Astro · Git
AI-assisted development
Claude Code · Codex
Design & video
Affinity Designer · Wondershare Filmora

Resume

View resume ↗