Blake McClaren Producer

// Experience

Where I’ve worked.

Twenty years shipping at scale — across games and enterprise technology. The products themselves live in Projects; this is the through-line.

  1. Independent

    2025 – Present

    Solo Developer · AI-Assisted Development

    Building a real-time football simulator solo in Lua, AI-paired — ~36K lines of production code at an estimated 4× velocity, applying producer discipline to a codebase rather than a team.

    See the case study →

  2. Google Workspace

    2024 – 2025

    Program Manager · via Where the Buffalo Roam

    Drove retrospectives and weekly design reviews across an AI prompt-integration effort spanning ~24 initiatives, and built an internal portal to train Product and Engineering on release and launch processes.

  3. Big Byte Studio

    2018 – 2024

    Co-founder & Producer

    Co-founded and ran an independent studio for six years — shipped two mobile titles on iOS and Android and led a two-year ARPG through to a disciplined cancellation.

    See the projects →

  4. First Republic Bank

    2020 – 2023

    Senior Program Manager

    Drove down the IT risk & security backlog for an 8,000-person technology organization serving 1M+ customers — 200+ technical risks remediated in two years, with CIO-level reporting on risk and progress.

  5. Warner Bros. Games

    2017 – 2019

    Senior Producer

    Turned around DC Legends — built an automated anti-cheat program that cut cheating reports by 99.5% and lifted the store rating from 2.2 to 4.4★, then managed a studio transition that extended the game’s life.

    See the case study →

  6. Zynga

    2010 – 2015

    Senior Producer

    Produced FarmVille at its global peak — 36M daily players and $1M+ in daily revenue — and built CMS tooling that saved 90+ development days per quarter for a 100-person content team.

    See the case study →

  7. Sony Computer Entertainment America

    2006 – 2009

    Senior QA Analyst

    Managed QA teams of 40 across concurrent AAA launches and designed pre-launch test strategy that improved efficiency and release predictability.