Regina Vyshnevska on Mobile Games, Live Ops, and the Work Players Never See

Context

Regina Vyshnevska is a Senior Game Producer and Product Owner with long experience across mobile games, live operations, outsourcing management, and team production.

Her background includes PortalOne, Pow Wow Entertainment, Paladin Studios, Goodgame Studios, Gameloft, and Absolutist. She has worked on projects connected to mobile games, live TV gaming, multiplayer production, casual games, and the Asphalt series.

What makes this interview interesting is Regina’s path across different sides of production: from managing teams and mobile titles to outsourcing, product roadmaps, live ops, and bringing external partners into real development workflows.

The conversation is aimed at indie developers, producers, founders, art leads, and small teams who want to understand how production actually works when many people, priorities, deadlines, and external contributors are involved.

Main Topics

Mobile Game Production
Live Ops
Game Outsourcing
Product Ownership
Production Planning
Team Communication

Interview

A conversation about mobile game production, outsourcing, product ownership, live operations, team communication, and what it takes to keep game projects moving.

Q: You have worked in game production for many years, across different companies and types of games. How has your understanding of production changed over time?

When I started as a producer at Absolutist, I was given a prototype and a team and was basically told:
make a game. My creative director, Vitaly Khit, knew it was my first project, so he did not expect me to
magically know the timeframe. He told me to figure it out with the team — how many levels, how many
assets, what we needed, and how long it might take.

What I understood very early was that I needed to connect with the people doing the work. I wanted to
know how they saw the assignment, what they thought about the prototype, what they could imagine for
it. On that first project we did not really have a dedicated designer, so the 3D artist Oleg Ivchenko and I
bounced ideas off each other about worlds, levels and visuals, then checked our direction with the
creative director..

For a while, I thought my job was primarily scope, budget and timeline, because those are naturally the
things stakeholders ask for. I no longer think that. Those things matter, but they are secondary. My first
priority is to get the machine running: connect the people, create the right conversations, make sure we
know what we are trying to build, and get the team moving as one vehicle rather than as separate
individuals completing separate tasks.

Vitaly told me something on that first project that stayed with me: you can have the best people, but one
person makes the jacket, another makes the buttons, another makes something else, and when you put
it together it may not match at all. The producer’s job is to make the pieces come together.

Once that machine is running, timelines and estimates become much easier to answer. I will still give
stakeholders projections because they need them, but I will not spend enormous amounts of the team’s
time chasing false precision. I would rather make the best reasonable estimate we can and spend most
of my energy creating the conditions in which the team can actually deliver

Q: What is the difference between “managing tasks” and actually helping a game team move forward?

Managing tasks can become a checklist: create the tasks, assign them, and tick them off. But that is not
the same as helping a game move forward.

A game team is a group of experts and creative people. If I treat them like pieces on a board or
numbers in a spreadsheet — “here is your task, tell me when it is done” — I am throwing away a huge
part of what they can contribute.

Helping the team move forward means trying to get the best out of every expert who is there. I want to
ask: How do you see this? How do you envision it? What do you think this game is really about? Where
is the fun?

Then my work is to connect those perspectives with the larger product goal and with each other. Front
end and back end need to work together. Art, design and technology need to support the same product.
Stakeholders may have a different view again. There will always be friction and decisions to make.

The producer’s job is not simply to distribute work. It is to connect the dots so all of that expertise
becomes one product.

Q: You worked on mobile games and the Asphalt series at Gameloft. What makes mobile game production especially demanding?

Mobile changes the experience because the device is literally in your hand. The way you interact with it,
the context in which you play, the controls and the session length are all different.

I started with desktop games and later worked on mobile, Nintendo Switch and Xbox 360. When mobile
was still relatively new for us, we talked about a very concrete scenario: imagine the player is
commuting, holding the phone in one hand, and all they really have available is one thumb. Can they
reach the important controls? Where should those controls sit? That changes the whole UX.

Session design changes too. A player may keep a mobile game open for thirty minutes and play
several matches, but that does not mean one match should last thirty minutes. A two-to-five-minute
gameplay session can fit much more naturally into the small windows people have during the day.

You are designing not only the game, but the game inside a very particular physical and everyday
context. You have to respect how little time and attention the player may have at that moment.

Q: In live ops, what do teams often underestimate before the game is already running?

For me, one of the most valuable things about live ops is that the product finally meets reality.

Stormbound was a particularly good experience because I joined very early, helped develop and launch
it, and then stayed through a substantial period of live operations. Before launch, even a very good
team is still building partly in a vacuum. You have lived with the game for so long that you are all, in a
sense, married to the idea.

Then real players arrive. Suddenly you can see whether they care about progression, whether they
want to collect the cards, whether they come back every day, what excites them and what frustrates
them. We had a community on Discord and could announce new dragons or show concept art for
upcoming cards and immediately see what people responded to. Sometimes that feedback influenced
our decisions.

Of course, you also get negative and sometimes toxic reactions. That is part of putting a product into
the world. But it is an incredibly valuable reality check: is the product actually strong enough? Did
players perceive it the way we hoped they would?

The best moments are when you discover that they did — when players love the characters, care about
the collection, or even listen to the soundtrack outside the game. It is like discovering that the baby your
team loves is loved by other people too.

Q: At PortalOne, you worked around the intersection of mobile gaming and live TV. What production challenges appear when a game is not just a game, but also a live experience?

The intersection of games and live TV was completely new for me, and that was exactly what made it
exciting. I have always been drawn to experimental projects where you are trying something that has
not quite been figured out yet.

Even before PortalOne, I had thought about how interesting it could be to bring live action into a game
and connect the digital experience more directly with the real world. There is something powerful about
combining real people with CG and interactive content.

At PortalOne we explored part of that territory. The live element also creates a different production
pressure because there is less room for mistakes: timing, reliability, coordination and preparation matter
enormously when content has to work as an experience in the moment.

What stayed with me is that I still think there is much more to discover in this space. PortalOne explored
one version of that combination, but I do not think the full potential of live action plus games has been
exhausted at all.

Q: You also worked as an Outsourcing Manager. What makes collaboration with external partners actually work?

The principle is similar to working with an internal team: you have access to experts, and your job is to
get the best out of that expertise rather than treating people as a content factory.

At PortalOne, for example, we worked with VSquad on the model, rig and animation for a roller-skating
girl who became an important visual representation of the brand. What made the collaboration work
was not simply a brief or a list of deliverables. There was an effort to understand each other.

I think some kind of human connection is essential. If outsourcing becomes purely mechanical —
produce this fence, this house, this asset — you can technically have good documentation and still end
up disappointed. Everybody interprets things differently.

I do not necessarily need to speak directly with every artist every day. The connection can happen
through a strong lead. But communication has to flow, feedback cannot disappear for days, and
somebody needs to translate the product vision into a language the external team can really work with.

Ideally, the outsourcing team falls in love with the product too. Once that happens, they stop feeling like
people who are simply receiving tasks and start contributing as part of the creative team.

Q: What are the most common mistakes teams make when working with external freelancers, studios, or agencies?

The biggest mistake is treating external people as if they are outside the team in every sense.

If the work is truly standalone — one trailer, for example — that can be fine. But if you are outsourcing
game content, a DLC, a new chapter, or a substantial stream of assets because you want to scale
production, the external team needs some way to become part of the same body. They may join
relevant stand-ups, have access to Slack, or work through a lead who is deeply connected to the
internal team. There needs to be at least one strong bridge.

Across different projects, another mistake I have seen is bringing in external capacity before the internal
direction is clear. The clearer the internal vision is, the easier it is for an external team to contribute
effectively and become a real extension of the core team.

Cost matters, but workflow and communication matter just as much. Outsourcing adds another layer of
complexity. Once the workflow is established and the external team genuinely feels like an extension of
your own team — almost like an extra arm — it can become a very smooth machine.

Q: From your experience, what should a good production roadmap include beyond just dates and features?

A roadmap should tell me much more than what feature happens on what date. I need to understand
the team’s actual capacity: who is available, what skills they have, and what kind of work this particular
group of people can realistically produce. A 3D artist and a UI artist are both artists, but they are not
interchangeable resources.

More importantly, the roadmap should be built around the next meaningful decision point. What
question are we trying to answer? Are we establishing the core gameplay? Reaching first playable?
Building a vertical slice? Preparing for soft launch? Improving retention through time-limited events?

That goal should be explicit. Then we ask what we actually need to reach it: how many levels,
characters, features, pieces of content or technical systems. I like to break those into trackable entities
so the team can see what is moving and what is stuck.

I also do not believe in over-planning the distant future. You can show a rough longer-term direction, but
detailed planning should take you to the next pivotal point where you can assess the product and make
a decision. What you learn there will change what comes next anyway.

For me, a good roadmap connects capacity, concrete work and a question we are trying to answer. It is
a living tool, not a prediction we pretend will remain true for a year.

Q: How do you keep different disciplines aligned when everyone sees the project from a different angle?

That is one of the central things a producer does. People will see the project differently. I have never
worked on a project where two people interpreted everything in exactly the same way — and that is
completely natural.

The goal is not to eliminate those perspectives. It is to bring them together and make a choice.

Take character design. You may have a concept artist doing the actual work and a lead artist or creative
director holding the larger vision. I want the people making decisions to genuinely look at what the artist
has brought, not jump immediately into correcting it.

There is an art to giving feedback. Before I impose my own interpretation, I want to understand theirs:
this is how you saw the brief; this is something I did not see before; what can we learn from that?

Alignment does not mean everybody sees the same thing from the beginning. It means we are able to
see through each other’s eyes, take the best of those perspectives, and then converge on a direction
together.

Q: What do small teams and indie developers often misunderstand about production?

I would frame this less as a small-team problem and more as an experience problem. A small team
made up of very experienced people may understand production extremely well. But when somebody is
starting out — sometimes alone or with one or two friends — there is an enormous amount of invisible
work they may not yet know exists.

Often the starting point is love for games. You are a player and now you want to create your own. That
is exciting. But suddenly you are learning all the processes that, in a larger team, would be distributed
across many specialists.

People sometimes say, especially when cutting budgets, “we don’t need a producer; we can plan
ourselves.” Of course you can. You can also test your own game, talk to publishers yourself, design,
market, organize and do everything else yourself. The question is what that does to your focus and
momentum.

I have worn multiple hats on the same project — producer and designer, for example — and it is
difficult. Having different disciplines lets people focus and lets the team speed each other up.

AI is changing this equation and making it possible for individuals to experiment across more
disciplines, which is very interesting. But the cognitive load of thinking like many different people is still
real. Making the game is only one part of getting a game to the finish line.

Q: When a team brings in external art, design, or development support, what should be decided before production starts?

First, be clear about why you are bringing the external team in and what you want them to help you
achieve.

Sometimes you genuinely want exploration. Maybe the internal team is stuck and you want fresh
designers or artists to bring ideas you would not have generated yourselves. In that case, you can
deliberately keep part of the brief open.

But even creative exploration needs boundaries. In my experience, “do whatever you want” is rarely a
useful brief. Creative people usually do their best work inside a meaningful framework: this is the brand,
this is the problem, these are the constraints, this is what has already been tried, and this is the area
where we want you to explore.

Share context. Give them the vision, references, guardrails and relevant history so they do not
unknowingly repeat the same mistakes the internal team has already made.

If the reason for outsourcing is simply capacity and the internal direction is already clear, the chances of
success are much higher. Either way, clarity about the purpose of the collaboration should come before
production starts.

Q: What advice would you give to producers or founders who want to build better production habits before the project becomes chaotic?

Trust your experts. And at the same time, do not become overly confident or overly optimistic about the
product itself.

Positive energy matters. It is useful to have somebody who says, “yes, we can do this.” But a founder or
producer also needs to develop a feeling for when to step in and when to get out of the way.

If the team is good at something, let them do it. See their talents and give them room to create. If there
is a real weakness — perhaps nobody is covering marketing, or the team needs support in another
area — then help where help is actually needed.

We all have an ego and ideas we are excited about. You can throw an idea into the room: “Wouldn’t it
be cool if…?” But you do not always have to occupy the space after that. Let the experts take it,
transform it or leave it.

I think of it a little like watching people cook. Let them cook. Your job is to pay attention to what is
emerging and help the team keep iterating until people taste it and say: wow, this is good, I want more.

The dangerous moment is when we want so badly to see positive signs that we convince ourselves the
product is already working. Pep talks cannot replace the reality check. Sometimes the product is simply
not there yet — and that is okay. Give the team the space to keep exploring until it is.