Meet the Team — Kent Byers
GM fren of Civitas, it’s your community guy Error 404 writing. Today I want to talk to you about one of the most sought-after qualities of any blockchain project: transparency.
Transparency is one of the reasons why many people seek crypto and NFT over traditional finance. Whereas banks and institutions often appear as faceless entities with obscure rules, blockchain projects offer publicly available contracts for their tokens, and they do not shy away from putting the names of their contributors on their whitepapers.
And it is for the sake of transparency that we are starting the “Meet the Team” series on Medium: each issue of the series is an interview I’ve done with a member of the Civitas development team that will allow you to get to know better the people behind our 4X strategy game.
The first interview is of our one and only Kent Byers, Chief Product Officer at Civitas. Kent is a longtime veteran of the digital entertainment and media industries with almost two decades of experience working on IPs as huge as Star Wars, Avatar, Transformers & Battle Angel Alita and he’s unarguably the spearhead of our entire project. So let’s dive into the interview!
— Error 404
Let’s start from the basics: what’s your role in Civitas?
I am the Design Director/Project Lead on Civitas; I was the one who designed Civitas, and my role on the project is guiding the vision of the product and working with our fantastic team to help deliver a great game.
Tell our community about yourself: what’s your background?
I have been working in the Games & Film combined for about 18 years now, working in many different roles but mainly in leadership roles. Like most, I got into the games industry, because I am a gamer, grew up playing games and going through the experiences that developers crafted for us, the friends we met while we played together or co-op on the couch with friends are all memories that I really cherish. All of this influenced me to want to spend the greater part of my life making games. I am still an avid gamer, and that also drives me to continue trying to innovate and make better experiences.
The blockchain space: what brought you into it?
I have been looking at the blockchain space since 2016, I didn’t see any applications for it in gaming till about 2018 I think it was, it was from Facebook posts from Gabby Dizon who was tinkering around on one his first games/nft. I started getting more into the development side of it in 2020/2021. One of the things I love about the Games industry is you are always a student and growing. So the blockchain space felt just as exciting and gave me the chance to contribute to developing into a new space in its infancy.
The more I learn about the space, the more I feel confident this is the right direction, with the potential to make different and new types of experiences happen.
What do you think about the future of NFT gaming?
Just like when a new console comes out, it takes time for developers to adjust to the new technology available to them to make the best games possible as they learn to maximize the potential of the hardware/software.
Blockchain is like that to me, we are in the early stages, and nobody has yet been pushing what is possible. However, with each cycle and more talented developers entering the space, we will see the quality increase and the depth of game experiences also expand.
Seen this when other cycles, for example, when mobile gaming was at its early stages, and now we see great games on mobile enjoyed by hundreds of millions of players, and it will be the same for blockchain games in time.
What’s your favorite NFT game out there?
Right now, I have been playing Illuvium Beta and have been pretty impressed with it so far. Still, many features and development are needed, but for what is there now, I can see they have a vision, and if it meets the same standard as the beta game, I will be quite happy with it.
Also been playing Fancy Birds; sometimes, you are just really busy and need a casual experience to play for 5–10 minutes and put it down, and it fits into that “anytime and anywhere” kind of games bucket.
Lastly, what do you do when you are not busy creating or playing games?
Photography has filled a spot in my life to have something simple I can enjoy. I am just into film photography and really enjoy the slower pace of shooting pictures and the more manual feel of taking a shot. It has also taught me a lot more about composition, lighting, and really trying to think about what I actually want out of the photo before shooting.
