Name: Megan Hughes
Megan Hughes
Designation: Brand Manager
Company: RetroEpic Software
What do you do every day? While my role officially at RetroEpic revolves around marketing our own games and games we’re making in conjunction with partners (which involves marketing strategising, social media marketing, media liaison, press releases and so on), I’m also involved in game design and documentation, level design and testing, and in-game copywriting. We’re a small team so everyone wears as many hats as possible (and necessary) to get the games out the door.
How did you get into the tech space? I’ve been involved in the game development community from around the time I was in high school. I started participating in local game dev challenges towards the end of my high school career and then fell in love with boardgame design (one of my pet projects now has its own website: http://worstwarriors.weebly.com/) because of my parallel interest in social psychology. After high school, I studied communications and psychology and then moved to Cape Town to pursue a psychology honours degree. After that, I landed up in marketing, working in agencies as an intern and then as a variety of different positions – gaining a broad spectrum of experience. In the mean time, I got more involved with the Cape Town community and started sharing what I knew about marketing to help the local developers. After doing a talk at one of the meetups, I was approached by co-founder Niki Boschoff to help RetroEpic out a bit with their marketing on a freelance basis. Eventually, I suggested that it would be more useful to have me full time on the team and voila, here I am.
What was the best advice anyone ever gave you? I don’t know if it counts as advice, exactly, but RetroEpic is run in a way where it’s okay to fail. In fact, Niki told me before joining RetroEpic that he wouldn’t expect me to be perfect straight off the bat. We all know that we’re all going to be making mistakes – we’re all trying to figure it out as best we can – and that’s okay. Knowing that it was okay not to be perfect – in a space that provided that, truly – has been almost life changing. It’s certainly allowed me to be a lot kinder to myself.
What advice would you given someone wanting to get into the tech sector? The successful game developers – those who have made a smash hit game – are outliers. Don’t compare yourself to the outliers and don’t get too upset that you haven’t yet made your smash hit game just yet. It’s okay. Keep working at it. Keep trying. But also be realistic about each of your games and their likelihood of success. You may very well be better off not giving up your day-job just yet! (And, again, that’s okay. Most of the game developers in South Africa are making money through other means).
What motivates you to get out of bed everyday? RetroEpic feels like family to me. While not every aspect of my day-to-day work is super exciting or stimulating, I get to work with great people on projects that are exciting. That’s worth getting up and going to work every day, in my opinion.
Who do you want to be when you grow up? I’m still trying to figure out who I am – before trying to emulate anyone else!
Twitter: @retroepic Website: http://retroepic.com/blog
LinkedIn: https://za.linkedin.com/in/meganahughes
About The Author: Samantha
Samantha Perry is the owner and founder of SJ Perry PR, a small, independent agency that specialises in providing public relations and media relations services to small to medium-sized businesses. She recently served as the JHB Agency Lead for Irvine Partners, an integrated public relations and marketing agency. She has over 20 years' of experience writing for a range of media - print and online - mainly in the ICT sector including Computing SA (editor), ComputerWeek, and Brainstorm magazine (editor). In her capacity as a PR professional and consultant, she has and does work with a variety of companies including Google (South Africa & Nigeria), Salesforce, CLEVVA, Euphoria Telecom, Paymenow and Tiger Content (UK). She also has a Masters degree in ICT Policy & Regulation. She served on the IAB SA Marketing Council as the PR rep, has worked as an independent telecoms researcher for some of the analyst houses in that field and was regularly called upon to comment on telecoms issues in the press. Nowadays she can be found commenting on women in tech issues in the press and speaking at conferences on the subject and the issues women in the sector face.
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