Gameplay Engineer
Sept 2022 - Mar 2024
Worked on the weapons and player mechanics team during our CCC hardening up to vertical slice with our pod carrying a large amount of production momentum. Prior to that worked on metagame UI systems, as well as R&D enemy AI technology. <br/><br/> I went down with the ship.
Systems Experience
Worked on implementation of multiplayer networked systems including:
- procedural, server-driven weapons
- client predictive projectile system
- client predictive net-synced timers
- client predictive player abilities
- designer tooling
- weapon abilities
- net synced UI widgets
- client predictive enemy health systems
- player metagame for create-a-class like system
Highlights
R&D Team
I got the opportunity when I joined to work on our R&D enemy tech team when i joined the company. Sadly, this is mostly under NDA and cannot disclose.
CCC Team
After the layoffs, joined the newly formed, much smaller weapons team where we were focused on CCC (Character, Camera, Controls) quality. We cleaned up systems, did a deep asynchronous loading framework to make sure we loaded things predictively, and opened up the ability systems for the upcoming production cycle. Heavy refactor of our core weapons system to support a more expansive weapon ability/feature set.
We maintained timelines effectively and delivered full feature sets and system extensions under well-planned production pipelines, while actively cleaning and repairing tech debt.
The project was heavily focused on achieving AAA polish with our CCCs (Character, Camera, Control) comparable to games like Call of Duty.
Unreal Networked Projectile System
The largest system I was given the chance to create at Deviation was our new projectile system framework to take us into the final stages. It is one of the two coolest systems I got to work on at Deviation. (sadly the other one was R&D and under NDA)
I was quite happy with us setting slightly ambitious goals for the implementation and tooling, including:
- Client predictive server driven architecture
- Designer/Blueprint Facing Projectile Creation Kit in Editor
- Projectiles as Actors architecture with auto-scaling and pooling
- Supported many client-simulated systems with server authority.
- Bullets emerging from barrels to then align with the straight camera sight that server can predict.
This was one of the few systems I owned for its whole lifetime and got to see integrated. Felt like this plugin was generalizable to any project.
Gameplay Ability System Expert
At the company we quickly started using the GAS system for our player abilities. It has a harsh learning curve and a rabbit hole effect where you never feel you fully understand how all the data works itself out due to its many layers of optimizations and networking support.
I often was a major goto person for expanding knowledge of this system to others and ensuring that newly added abilities were network safe, as well as implementing design for some of the more advanced ones technical designers couldn't implement.
Team Quality
I just want to give a major shoutout to the dev team in this process. I write about my impacts on the team, but I gained so much from having such tenured experience around me, it was amazing to be able to integrate into the company so well. The talent here was truly stacked.
History Article
the company history + closure.
Work Delivery
Our team was able to achieve and exceed expectations while actively improving our codebase and designer tooling for nearly three straight milestones until the company closure. In response to my scale of ownership on the product, I was given notice that I was to receive a promotion to Senior Gameplay Engineer during the next performance review round, which was delayed by three months and then cancelled due to the company shutdown.
Studio Closure
Sadly, due to the nature of how Deviation Games shut down, not much further information can be provided on the game publically.