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Hi there! My name is Jordan Garcia. I am a Video Game and Tech Journalist as well as a Video and Audio Editor currently based in Sydney, Australia. I have been writing about games since August 6, 2015, with my very first published article being a breakdown of Destiny: House of Wolves’ Prison of Elders activity for WellPlayed.
News, Reviews & Guides
Since my start in 2015, I continued to write for WellPlayed as a main contributor until February 29, 2024. During that time I had taken on multiple roles during various periods. I learned how to manage being a News Editor, a Game Reviewer, a Tech Reviewer, and a Guide Writer.
If you would like to see all my contributions to WellPlayed, feel free to visit my author page. Otherwise, here are some standout pieces from over the years.
In all this time being a Game Journalist, I have managed to befriend developers at various development studios, allowing me to learn more and more about game development. I’ve been able to take that knownledge and apply it to my criticism of games, but it also provided some news reporting benefits like with the 4A Games acquisition article shown above. I was one of the first English-Speaking Journalists to report on it, making it an incredibly successful news piece at the time.
Additionally, I learned a lot about PC and game technology to the point where I felt I could reliably write articles and reviews focused on the more technical aspect of games. On top of the laptop review displayed above as an example of my more technical-focused tech reviews, I also more recently did an article detailing the PC version of Bethesda Game Studios’ 2023 Space RPG, Starfield.
I have also dabbled in some freelance writing, with various guides that I have written being published on Kotaku Australia and currently looking to do more. These guides have covered a variety of games and topics, displaying that I feel confident in my writing skills and knowledge of certain games to write detailed-yet-succinct guides for others to enjoy.
Here are the four that I currently have published with Kotaku AU.
Video Editing & Script Writing
After spending quite a while in the written content creation scene, I began to expand my skill set to include video editing. This originally started right here with Chillesauce. I had a few reviews that I had written to sit here and ended up turning them into video reviews. The first of these was a DOOM Eternal review, which was created and edited in Vegas Pro 14, but not long after that I did a review for Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II using Adobe Premiere Pro, and I have been using Premiere Pro ever since.
My skills as a video editor quickly grew and I was able to make use of these skills for WellPlayed, with the very first video edited for the site being 12 Aussie-Made Games To Have On Your Radar In 2022. This video project proved to be challenging as I was asked to try and subtitle the entire video while also ensuring that the production of the video itself didn’t take too long. On top of this, I was also tasked with finding all the associated footage and images that were used in the video. After some back and forth, we eventually settled on the finished product that we see now, with subtitles being presented next to a small portrait of the narrator, putting a face to the voice that the viewer would be listening to at any given moment in time during the video. I continued to make two more videos of this style for WellPlayed. They are as follows:
In 2023 there was a more concerted effort at WellPlayed to produce video content, especially reviews, to go alongside the written works. While I was not a part of the initial wave of video production, I was eventually brought into the production of various videos, starting with WellPlayed’s video review/preview of Final Fantasy XVI and The Crew Motorfest, respectively. More recent examples of my work with WellPlayed videos are below.
These two videos presented a unique challenge, as they both had embargoes that lifted very close together, and there were outside, extenuating circumstances that both resulted in me editing the Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth review video the night before the embargo lifted and the delay of the TEKKEN 8 review until the next afternoon. Regardless, I got both of these videos out in a timely fashion, demonstrating that my understanding of Premiere Pro’s tools, as well as WellPlayed’s design language for their videos, had noticeably improved. My video reviews of TEKKEN 8 and Forza Motorsport were also great demonstrations of me being able to convert written reviews into scripts, as a written review often does not make a good video script and vice versa. Writing these scripts this way allowed me to create dialogue within the associated videos that made use of various tones and inflections that would be lost if I were just reading my original written review word-for-word.
The entire list of my of video works with WellPlayed are as follows:
Before this, however, I did also do some video edits for Laymen Gaming, the brother of popular Australian YouTube Game Critic, Skill Up. This was a style of video I had not really done before, but it was a welcome change to the more formal videos that I had done prior. The videos that I had done for Laymen Gaming are as follows:
Not every video edit that I have worked on is in a published video, however. One edit that I was incredibly proud of making is one that I tried to do with some dummy footage of Star Citizen. I had the idea to use the hand wipe animation that is used when wiping down your helmet during the game as a transition. It took quite a while to get it right, but the results speak for themselves.
Admittedly, the way I did this was unconventional and not recommended, but had I not done it this way, I never would have figured out a faster, smarter way to do something like this. I challenged myself with this transition and it paid off as it had a dramatic effect on my productivity within Premiere Pro.
That increase in productivity within Premiere Pro immediately paid off when it came to bringing WellPlayed’s biggest video segment to life; WellPlayed Talkthrough. Currently sitting at three episodes, I’ve been responsible for the editing and production of all three episodes. The first episode proved to be a challenge in and of itself, as the design language for the segment had not been set in stone yet, so there was a lot of back and forth with the other people at WellPlayed to figure out what would work best for the segment.
There were additional challenges presented with the very first episode too, as during the editing process but after the first draft was complete and submitted for feedback, the game in question, Broken Roads, was delayed indefinitely. This was an issue because a lot of the language in the recordings either directly mentioned the release date or inferred a release soon; language which was now false and we were asked by the publisher to do our best to remove all language referring to the now old release date. A frustrating situation for all, but we eventually managed to get it done, and while imperfect, the finished product is the best we could do short of recording the entire segment again which was just not feasible.
Launching on November 10, 2023, WellPlayed Talkthrough – Broken Roads was uploaded to YouTube and was the first episode of the new segment. On December 5, 2023, the second episode, WellPlayed Talkthrough – Lords of the Fallen, went live on YouTube after a considerably smoother editing process where the first complete draft was accepted. Given that I edited the first two episodes of such a significant segment, I also created a design document/style guide for any future editors at WellPlayed to refer to, making the process easier for whoever else might edit the segment. This design document included keyframe animation timings, display/asset sizing, volume levels, and more. The first two episodes are below.
Audio Editing
Ever since May 10, 2019, I have been the editor of WellPlayed’s gaming podcast, the WellPlayed DLC Podcast. This came about because, prior to my joining WellPlayed, I had a background in audio production. This was mostly to do with music, but the skills could have easily been translated to the scenario of podcast editing/production.
Starting out, I edited the podcast in Apple’s Logic Pro X software as that was my program of choice and I didn’t have anything comparable on PC. This worked really well until my MacBook Pro began to really show its age and was slowing down more and more. So, after acquiring a cheap licence for Vegas Pro 14 through a Humble Bundle, editing of the podcast shifted to my PC through the aforementioned program.
I continued to edit the podcast for around six months before finally making the transition to Adobe Audition, and I have since become incredibly proficient at both editing the podcast itself and using Adobe’s audio editing program. Over the almost three years since the podcast’s introduction, I have edited over 200 episodes of the podcast, this also includes me making three E3 episodes in one week during the podcast’s first year, as well as a few of the other smaller podcasts that WellPlayed has done; the WellPlayed DLC Spoilercast and the WellPlayed VHS Podcast.
Over time there have been a lot of changes to the way I edited the podcast. At first, it took a long time to edit, then eventually I created some EQ presets for each member of the podcast to create as good a listening experience as possible. After editing the podcast enough I was able to identify what people’s waveforms were, discerning between background noise and actual speech, just by looking at them. This, in turn, allowed me to become incredibly efficient and flexible with editing the show.
Episode #208 was the final episode of the podcast that I had edited.
Thank you for checking out my portfolio. If you are interested in my work, whether it be my writing works or my video/audio editing services, please feel free to contact me via my email: jordan@chillesauce.com