Interest Areas
🥑 Devrel
🎮 GameDev
❤ Community
⚙ R&D
Skills
👨💻 Engineering
👨🏫 Education
🤗 Community Dev
📈 Marketing
📷 Video Production
❓ Interviewing
Liam Sorta
⭐ Forbes 30u30 ✧ 💻 MLH Top 50 ✧ 🏆 Alexa Champion
Bio
I'm Liam Sorta and I love building stuff. Games, communities, weird experimental projects, all of it!
I’ve given tech talks to developers around the world while at Unity/Amazon, founded a game development community, ran/sold a startup with over 1m users, and currently run a fully remote game studio called Acureus that I founded with my good friend Marco Hoffmann.
My skills span across various development ecosystems/engines, project management/strategy, and marketing.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a bunch of incredibly talented people across tech/games to work on products reaching millions of people; to now apply this to our own game with over 3.5M players is super intense, and comes with much higher stakes. By cultivating a wonderful dev team and actively listening/engaging with our players, we’ve been able to consistently release high quality updates that players love.
Previously At
Get in Touch
Things I Do
🥑 Developer Relations
As a developer, educator, and community builder, Developer Relations holds a close space in my heart.
Whether 1:1/1:many, every developer you encounter poses an opportunity to learn and improve your product, potentially impacting millions of other people!
So cool.
❤️ Community Building
Peer learning is a powerful force multiplier for any skill; by creating communities, you indirectly create new relationships, improve products, and advance accessibility.
Having grown communities at a personal + corporate level, I have seen many of these benefits first-hand over the years.
Other Stuff
Here is some information from various projects I’ve worked on/started.
🔊 Alexa
Towards the end of my time at University, I began working on a few small projects for Amazon's then-new voice assistant, Alexa. I became increasingly invested in the ecosystem, quickly rising to a leading voice 🥁 in the industry.
- Founded my first company while at University developing Alexa apps
- Over 1,000,000 users across 30 apps
- 6 figures in revenue
- 3 direct reports (2x engineers, 1x content developer)
- Approached by Amazon to become a managed developer
- Approached by Amazon to help write their AWS Alexa exam as a Subject Matter Expert
- Interviewd by Amazon on running a successful alexa agency
- Later joined Amazon, sold the company to avoid conflict of interest
- Created demo using Alexa in VR. Demo shown at talks by Amazon around the world.
🥑 Developer Relations
As a developer, educator, and community builder, Developer Relations holds a close space to my heart. There's a certain kind of magic in supporting creators, be that at a 1:1 or 1:many scale.
Outside of just personal projects, there are some projects I've worked on at various companies that I have LOVED being a part of.
🗣 Talks
👨💻 Delivered live talks to thousands of developers
💰 Deck development for major external stakeholder events
🗺 10 countries down so far
🐺 A bunch of fun IC stuff
❤️ Unity Community
Having run my own community, GameDevNetwork, for a little over a year prior to joining Unity, I was able to apply many of the skills I had learnt to an ambitious project proposal.
This gave me a super unique/niche skillset as a techy game dev community manager, which I was able to make use of during my time at Unity to help jump through the internal pitching of a Discord community + leaping through the PR/Legal review jumping hoops.
As of now, the Unity Discord Community has now grown to over 100,000 unique members, and is one of Unity’s most successful community initiatives!
Content Creation - Videos
🎮 GameDevNetwork
Figures last updated on 07/05/2021
- Founded an online community for Game Developers to support skill/career growth
- Grew to 50,000 members
- 3,000,000 messages sent
- Organised 13 game jams, 305 unique games submitted - teams of up to 4
- Custom tooling for creating a better user onboarding experience to overcome platform limitations.
- Sponsorship liason
👋 Come check us out for yourself!
💻 HackTheMidlands
Figures last updated 07/05/2021
- Attended my first hackathon, met my co-founder, decided we enjoyed the event and wanted to run our own as many hackathons did not allow under 18s (logistical, child safety, sponsorship obstacles)
- Sponsor-funded to ensure free attendance for all to maximise accessibility
- Year 1: 150 attendees
- Years 2-4: 300 attendees (Capped due to venue size)
- Year 5: 500 attendees (Digital event due to pandemic, retained high delight scores)
- Over £150k secured in sponsorships
- Grew team from 2 to 13
Other Cool Stuff
I was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list for 2024.
I was recognised as one of the first 10 European Amazon Alexa champions in light of my contributions to the voice industry/R&D with Alexa.
See 🔎 This Section for more information.
Supported Amazon with the creation of their 11th AWS Exam on Alexa by writing/reviewing exam questions.
I even got this sweet "Subject Matter Expert" hoodie so I an feel like a proud nerd in public
Not much else to add here, but it cost me £40,000, so I'll be damned if I don't include it here.
I regularly offer free mentorship as part of various programmes such as Limit Break, IntoGames, and other 1:1 support. Check out the mentoring link on the homepage if you’re interested!
In 2020 I made Major League Hacking's first Top 50 list. MLH is a global community of over 100,000 technologists around the world.
In 2018/2019, I was fortunate enough to be offered one of 50 spots at the Riot Games Hackathon hosted at their HQ in LA, out of 2,500+ applicants.
- Visualiser for watching livestreamers
- Kills displayed in left panel
- Shop purchases/sales displayed in right panel
- Tabletop simulator with champion capsules on the table, shows deaths, but not character movement.
🏆 Overall Winning Team
- Inspired by previous year project, though with more action emphasis to utilise AR.
- Character positions can be read in real time, allowing this app to connect to live championship games being played.
- Timeline scrubbing
- Movement trails for path visualisation
While at my first event in 2018, I had the incredible honour to meet ex-World Of Warcraft + Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan. I don't really have anything meaningful to type here, I just thought it was so cool, what a legend.
Awarded one of two available spots across our university for an honours scholarship to study in South Korea over the summer.
Study focus on (Grade A) Project Management / (Grade A+) C++ Engineering