Professional Games Work

A 2024 Victorian fantasy survival crafting game developed by Inflexion Games. I worked primarily in C++ and Blueprint in Unreal Engine 4.

My largest contribution to the project was a utility-based AI decision-making system which I built from scratch. This system was actually my first time working with Unreal, but I was able to get it up and running within a few months. It was very well received by designers and required minimal programming support after that point thanks to its flexibility. My work included:

• Closely collaborating with the game designers who would be using the system, which resulted in a system that was intuitive to its users and full of quality-of-life features based on their feedback.
• Creating a Blueprint API for creature logic, which was flexible and easy-to-use for designers while abstracting away hairy performance and networking problems to a highly optimized C++ layer.
• Building visual debugging tools so that designers could tell what was driving AI behaviour, even when that AI was being run on a remote server.
• Developing an architecture that allowed for reusing behaviours between many types of AIs, speeding up the process of creating new creatures.

I also worked on other aspects of the game, including:

• Owning the code for the game's character customization systems, which involved bridging the gap between members of the design, tech art, and user interface teams.
• Optimizing and diagnosing performance issues in Blueprints built by designers, reworking their logic or moving it to efficient C++ implementations.
• Implementing a cheap but convincing flanking system for enemy pathfinding, which helped to sell a sense of scale when fighting swarms of enemies.
• Solving complex networking problems which allowed multiple servers to run different areas of a single, seamless game world.

BioWare's 2024 followup to their hit Dragon Age series. I worked primarily in C++ on the Frostbite engine, with some C# for editor tools. My work included:

• Ownership of several major gameplay systems, including camera controls and weapons.
• Creating a new system for tracking networked character stats like health and mana. This let us reduce code duplication, made the game easier to debug with new tooling, and improved both flexibility and ease of use for designers thanks to their feedback informing the system's design.
• Coordinating with the Anthem team to flesh out their systems for use in a medieval fantasy context while maintaining backward compatibility with the Anthem branch of Frostbite.
• Writing utility scripts in Python to help designers quickly migrate assets from an earlier version of the project. (I was personally thanked by a designer for how much time this one saved!)
• Helping to upgrade our game engine to a newer version, including integrating all of BioWare's engine modifications.

BioWare's 2018 looter shooter featuring a mysterious fantasy/sci-fi world and mech suits with guns.

Anthem shipped while I was working on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, so I occasionally helped out with bug fixes to gameplay systems when extra hands were needed.

Both games shared an engine, so I also contributed some workflow improvements to debugging tools for designers on both projects.