Meet The Magnopians: Ceri Llewellyn
A veteran senior creative producer, Ceri Llewellyn has been working in the interactive media industry for more than 25 years. Before joining Magnopus, Ceri worked for EA, Playfish, and King where he led teams involved in some of the most successful casual gaming franchises of all time, including Farm Heroes and Candy Crush.
What do you do at Magnopus?
I'm the Director of Production in the UK, and production is essentially the first line of communication with clients after business development. It's our job to work with clients to understand their needs, and the success factors of their project and communicate them to the Magnopus team. After this point, it’s up to the team of artists, engineers, and designers to decide how they're going to build that.
The production team also maintains the relationship with the client over the lifetime of the project, keeping them updated on the progress of things, checking in with them to see if there are any changes, managing those changes, and understanding how that affects budget, timeframe, etc. Essentially, producers keep the project in line and moving forward toward a successful outcome for everyone involved.
At its core, it's about communication. It's about being a good listener on the client side and being able to succinctly summarize and relay that back to the team so they understand what it is we're trying to accomplish.
What made you decide to pursue a career in this field?
I've been working in the industry (or adjacent) for 26 years. I started as an artist back in the day, and I actually got into games because it was a lifelong interest of mine, I suddenly realized, making games is a real job you can do!
I worked my way up from there until I ended up doing more and more practical organization work. I found myself in production and project management, which is what I’ve been doing ever since. It's just great to be able to work on a game or a project at a high level and help a huge team deliver something amazing.
What's the biggest lesson you learned throughout your career that you still carry with you?
I have learned so many lessons, many of them through failure. The main lesson is that it's the people and the team that makes things work. For a team to do their best work, they need to understand which direction they are going. Having a very clear vision, being transparent about what you're trying to do, and being able to communicate that effectively is the single most important thing you can do.
What's been your proudest moment whilst working at Magnopus?
I don’t have one specific moment, because I am always proud when the team delivers something amazing that I have helped oversee. If I've coached people well, helped them grow in their roles and they've gone on to deliver something great, that makes me proud.
What are you reading or listening to right now?
I'm listening to The Kingcast, which is a podcast about the comparison between Stephen King's books and the movies that are made of them. It's done by two guys, Eric Vespe and Scott Wampler, and they give insights into the different translations between stories in books and films.
I'm also working my way back through the Culture books from Iain Banks - I'm reading Excession right now. I haven't managed to find anyone that writes quite like Banks does, and since he has now passed away there aren’t any new books. I'll go back and reread the nine books in that series every other year or so.
