creativeForge

Writings about Project Management and Marketing

Welcome to the Project Management and Marketing corner! Here, I dive into topics that just beg for exploration in the world of business. From unraveling the mysteries of Critical Chain Project Management to mastering the strategic game of Markstrat, and even delving into the hidden world of in-game advertising, each adventure is a blend of fun and insight. So join me on this journey where we make business a little less daunting and a lot more exciting!

Critical Chain Project Management

CCPM is a technique for planning and managing projects that was developed by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. CCPM takes into consideration not only the tasks, but also the resources involved (hence critical chain, and not critical path). I found this methodology to be quite effective. However, when searching the Internet, I never found simple, easy-to-understand examples of critical chain project management. That's why I wrote a little case study: "The Barbecue". You can download the PDF below. I have to thank Buzz Beyer for his additional input and proof reading. NOTE: currently under revision, will update soon.

CCPM Case Study: The Barbecue (pdf, 2010)

Mastering Markstrat

Markstrat is a market simulation computer game, developed by StratX and is used by business schools worldwide. In this simulation different student groups represent consumer product companies and compete with each other under realistic market conditions. The team with the best performance wins. When I played the game back two decades ago, I found relatively few information on the Internet. That's why I created a comprehensive guide. I haven't played the game since, but with all the experience I gained in the meantime, I decided that it was time for an update. So here is the 2024 revised edition of the guide! NOTE: currently under revision, will update soon.

Mastering Markstrat (pdf, 2006)

Product placement in electronic games

When you play a game and you suddenly realize that you just saw an ad for Burger King, then you have just experienced an example of in-game advertising. In-game advertising, or product placement in video games, is now a common practice, but back in 2005 academic research in that field was very sparse. Placements were rarely done as a result of a carefully planned brand strategy and usually consisted in simple billboard-like in-game advertisements. This is why I decided to write my thesis for the Master's degree in Marketing and Communication on that subject. In my thesis I analyzed the possibilities and acceptability of alternative placement strategies. Although the references are a bit dated by now, the thesis provides valuable insights even today.

Product Placement in video games (pdf)

From Pixel to Profit: Decoding every stage of the video games lifecycle

Over the past decades I have had a deep dive in nearly every aspect of the game development, publishing and sales cycles. This led me to not only use existing business frameworks, I also created a couple on my own. My goal for this section is to document every single process of the game lifecycle in an easy-to-understand "cheat sheet" and make these sheets available here. My reference for this endeavour is the "Accounting Equation Cheat Sheet" from Accounting Stuff, that neatly explains and summarizes two financial statements (Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet) and their relationship with each other. This will probably take a long time to complete, so check back regularly to see the new additions.

All diagrams on this webpage are under the Commons BY-SA license. Feel free to use, share, and adapt them, as long as you credit the original author and distribute your modifications under the same license. If you make changes, just add yourself as an additional author. And please do feedback if you have suggestions or improvements to make!

Process Map

Video Game Processes

Overview

Documents in the game lifecycle

Marketing & PR Strategy

Marketing Channels

Strategy

Marketing/Sales funnel

Create your very own game from scratch

Did you ever wanted to code a simple game? Well start today! I created a series of little tutorials to get you started on programming online video games. All you need is a computer with Internet access. And since you are reading this, you probably are good to go already!

Please note: I decided to remove the tutorials and completely rewrite them from scratch. I took this decision after playing around with the latest generation of AI assistants. They do not only generate a much cleaner code than I ever could, they are now also able to architecture it better. I don't think that humans will be able to compete with them much longer. However the AI's do not reason (yet), and probably won't be for some time. So instead of learning how to code, let's maybe focus on learning how to lead a team of antisocial savants! My AI friends already helped me in fleshing out the curriculum for this. Stay tuned, this is going to be exciting!

Lesson 1: Your toolset

Coming soon

Lesson 2: Game Loop

Coming soon

Defend or die!

GravityWell is a little JavaScript game that I am working on during my (limited) free time. It is based on a little workshop that I organized in summer 2023 with the neighbourhood children. The goal was to create a little Asteroid clone. The kids made some crazy cool artworks:

After the project had ended, I felt quite energetic and created a fully fledged scriptable game engine out of the project. GravityWell was created with that game engine.

GravityWell is work in progress and will be for the foreseeable future. Especially considering that I a just started learning how to draw pixelart! The game is a mix between Asteroids (1979), Ebonstar (1988) and Gradius (1985). I have some cool ideas that I would like to implement. I make sure however to only upload a working version on this website, so that you can play it. Oh! If you have a feedback or suggestions, don't hesitate to leave a comment. (Don't expect it to be implemented immediately though, as I spend very little time on this.

The code is available on GitHub so feel free to clone it if you like.

Play GravityWell!

About me

Georges Camy

Management Consultant
BPM & Video Games

I am a seasoned IT engineer with a broad consulting experience, especially in the fields of IT governance, business reorganization and business process modeling. I also have a solid professional background in Marketing management.
But most importantly - to paraphrase a paragon of mine: I am a gamer at heart.

I started my career as a programmer/artist for multimedia agencies and game developers across France and Germany. Yet, my passion for the broader scope of business led me to pursue an additional degree in marketing management and eventually transition into management consulting—a path I've found deeply fulfilling. But as fate would have it, the gaming industry claimed me back.

My vision is to make game development accessible to all, and that as an economically viable long term prospect.

What I can help you with:

Business Strategy & Analysis
Business Process Analysis & Optimization
(International) Project Management
Interim / Change management

My skills:

Video Games
Marketing
IT Management / Strategy
Coding / Engineering

My qualifications:

2024 Google BI Professional certification
2005 Specialised Master in Marketing & Communication (ESCP-Europe)
2003 Master's Degree IT/Multimedia Engineering (IMAC, Université de Marne-la-Vallée)

About this website

This website uses JavaScript for the frontend and PHP for the backend. Fonts are provided by Google Fonts, the icons by FontAwesome. To allow you to have a look under the hood, I added comments and refrained from minifying any of my own files.

Protoyping was done using the W3.CSS framework. The final site uses custom CSS however (except for normalize.css of course). A necessary drawback of using CSS frameworks is that they require formatting to be directly embedded into the html. And that is in essence not very different from the late 90's, when we put everything in tables and sliced and diced images. I generally propone that content and form should be strictly separated, to allow for a maximal reusability and adaptability. I did take some shortcuts with this site, but I tried to respect this principle as best as I could. This "content-separated-from-format" philosophy stems from the early 2000s. If you want to learn more about its origins, check out CSS Zen Garden or my website from 2006. A modern take on this is the BEM naming convention which has been used for this site

This site is compliant with most of the web recommendations (state: 2024). You can confirm that by checking out the Lighhouse report in your browser or have a look at Google's PageSpeed report.

I am no longer a professional website developer, but if you ever need some advice with your own site, let me know!

Let's get in touch!

linkedin.com/in/gcamy

Leave me a note, or invite me for a :
(I live in the tiny country of Luxembourg):