Our Team is Expanding!

Alex Earle – Community Manager

Hello! Alex here. I am the new Community Manager for Cooperative Innovations. My main focus will be launching and supporting Spaceteam VR. This means I’ll be busy operating social media channels, talking to players, editing trailers, attending events, running tests and collaborating with the team to help develop the game.

I’ve been working in the games industry for the past 2 years. The bulk of my work has been doing Freelance PR and Events work. You may have seen me at gaming events across Europe representing either Nintendo, Payload Studios/Tentacle Zone or Muse Games.

Parallel to my games work I have years of experience being the Digital Producer for BE FESTIVAL (a European Theatre/Arts Festival), as well as working on numerous film and music projects.

I have been following the development of Spaceteam VR for the past year as I’m a huge fan of both cooperative VR games and the original mobile game Spaceteam. So, when the opportunity arose to apply to join the team, I leapt at it!

Leeds is a fantastic city and Yorkshire has such a vibrant culture scene + games community. I feel very at home here.

I’m looking forward to creating content, interaction with the community and showing off the work of our talented team to the rest of the world/universe

Dave Price – Game Designer

Alex: Introduce yourself!

Dave: My name is Dave Price. I am Game Designer at Cooperative Innovations.
Basically I create the documentation, the levels that need to be done, look at mechanics, the flow of the game, fix anything up, generally a bit of everything really

A: What did you do before you started working here?

D: I initially worked at a developer called JAW (Just Add Water)
I was a Junior Designer there and I worked on ‘Ice-Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure’
Before that I did a game called ‘Monitor’ which I developed while I was a student. The game earned me 1^st place at the Game Developer World Championships 2017

A: What do you looking forward to doing with Cooperative Innovations  in 2020?

D: I’m looking forward to doing more stuff in VR because I’d only done a little bit of that in my previous job. I’m interested to see how we can design new games and new types of worlds with unique narrative experiences.

A: How have you found working on Spaceteam VR/ working for Cooperative Innovations?

D: It’s been very interesting! It’s not like anything I’ve ever worked on before. It presents a lot of new challenges game design wise. I started here at the beginning of October. Yeah, the office is pretty relaxed. It’s nice. There’s a lot of nice people here and there’s no crunch which is really great, we are all working together to try and make a good game!

A: If you could teleport home right now, sit on your sofa and play a game what, what game would you play?

D: Ok, it’s a game you probably never heard of that is called ‘Burn Cycle’. I had a Philips CD-I growing up and basically there was a game that was about a guy called ‘Solcutter’ who had a virus in his brain and you had 2 hours to finish the game or the game restarted and it was similar to Blade Runner. It was great.

Marian Felix – Office Manager

Alex: Introduce yourself!

Marian: Hi I’m Marian Felix. I’m the Office Manager for Cooperative Innovations.
I graduated from the University of Hull studying Law and Business last July and I’m now doing my LPC (Legal Practice Course) which is the vocational training required to become a lawyer; whilst also working for Cooperative Innovations.

A: How have you found jumping into working in the games industry compared to previous jobs/education?

M: I have really loved it. I don’t think I’ve had a job where I’ve enjoyed it so much. Just because, I’m not doing the same thing every day. Which is a problem I’ve had in previous jobs as I get bored very, very fast. Having different tasks every day and new challenges is really good for me. I can go from sitting on a computer and doing paperwork, and the next thing I know I’m demoing/testing in VR, it’s very varied.

My job is very HR/Admin/Legal based so while I’m not a tech expert like the devs, I make sure all the boring paper work and logistics stuff is done so the team can focus on making magic. Seeing people have ideas and watching them progress from that idea to it being a reality that I can play/experience. I think that’s really cool. It’s fantastic!

A: What do you looking forward to doing with Cooperative Innovations in 2020?

M: I’m excited for Spaceteam VR to release and for everyone else to play it. I hope people enjoy it as much as I did the first time playing it as I had so much fun! I love games that are easy to jump into and have fun. I hate always having to read up controls or learn complicated systems. That’s why I love Spaceteam VR you can just jump in, get it and have fun

A: If you could teleport home right now, sit on your sofa and play a game what, what game would you play?

M: Sims. My attention span for game is that I’ll play them for hours and hours on a little binge then stop for a while, but with Sims I just want to play it for hours all day, every day. It started when I got my PSP when I was younger, and I’ve been obsessed with Sims since.
If I’m on my PS4 I’m playing Sims 4 and like I have all the expansions and the item packs, but if I’m on my DS I love to play Pokemon.