Humans Behind the Game: Bogdan Lucaci, Creation Manager

Bogdan Lucaci joined Gameloft Bucharest 17 years ago when he was a first-year student at university!

Full of ambition and confidence, he learned a lot over the years thanks to his supportive colleagues and eventually became the studio’s creation manager in 2007.

Find out more about his role, what he loves most about working at Gameloft, and his advice for would-be game makers below!

Hi, Bogdan! Tell us about yourself.

My name is Bogdan Lucaci, and I've been with Gameloft for about seventeen years now.

I got hired when I was 19, on what I suspect was a big gamble for my then and current boss Paul Friciu, for a position that was just invented at the time: a mobile game producer. I was just a kid with somewhat of a big mouth and a strong know-it-all vibe that was founded in nothing but a young guy's endless confidence.

What I truly liked then as I do now is the warmth with which people who were much more senior to me and knew more about making games than I do even now embraced and listened to me and did their best to share their knowledge and experience.



What is your role, and what do you enjoy most about your job?

I’ve basically had two jobs all my life: I was a producer for a few years for a bunch of platforms from mobile to console before I moved onto something called a creation studio manager. It’s a position that has evolved throughout the years that now manifests as a full-on studio manager role for the production side of the Bucharest studio.

What I like about it is also what I fear most, which is making a game from scratch. We've always done this in Bucharest and we still do. People talk a lot about the pressure writers feel when looking at a white sheet of paper but for game creators, making a game is like staring at a bus load of Xerox paper.

That thrill you get when you come up with a game design idea and implement it with a lot of pitching in from colleagues that works and is fun is really unique and like nothing else I've ever experienced.

To add to that, the thrill of inching closer and closer to having your game on every platform, from the ones your kids play on but also your mom, just compounds the excitement.

We've been talking for so long about convergence in the digital media space, about picking up a game while in line at a coffee shop and then resuming it at home on a console, and it really seems like we’re almost there.

It’s also fantastic to be able to work on the latest PC and console hardware that makes things like real-time raytracing, which were only seen in tech demos and R&D, possible for the first time.

What are some of your most memorable moments at Gameloft?

The moments I remember the most are the ones relating to the camaraderie, the esprit de corps of making a game, and the feeling of joy one gets when succeeding as a team: the evenings spent joking in the kitchen about a bug that just wouldn't go away, the time when a new image editor worked and we got lightmaps (really, lightmaps) in a 2D mobile game, the moment when we got our very first iPhone to develop our game on, and the time when got a really cool review on IGN for a game.

What advice do you have for people who wants to work in gaming in a similar role?

My advice to all would-be game makers, producers, and game designers is simple - be curious.

Question decisions in games, movies, and songs. Wonder about the redness of the door and the size of the sword and the speed of the horse. Be curious and then try as much as possible to get an answer and formulate a hypothesis.

The moment you move on from just consuming media to trying to figure out why that media is successful is the moment you take your first step towards being a professional.

Start making stuff as soon as you can, in whatever way you can, and let your pet project be your resume’s secret weapon.

This is a call to arms to both intrepid makers with that rocking prototype and to grizzled veterans that let their shipped titles speak for themselves. We're looking for people who play well in a team, like making stuff from scratch, and think tight knit groups of focused people can change the world.

Heed Bogdan’s call to arms and join us today! Gameloft Bucharest is looking to hire multiple positions for its new, unannounced cross-platform game, including a game designer, user acquisition manager, senior 2D concept artist, UI/UX designer, and game producer. You can also find all our job opportunities in our studios around the world here! Stay tuned for another edition of Humans Behind the Game!