Having been brought over to support this project after previously working on
another unannounced project within Firesprite for over two years, I was tasked with working within a relatively lean group on the project’s prototype team. My main focus within this team was acting as one of two programmers that would work heavily in tandem with a number of designers, helping to realise their ideas for novel gameplay set-pieces.
My two key goals in building these systems was to implement them such that they would be performant for the hardware we were working on, as well as modular to a point where it could be easily brought into other branches of the project or areas of the game.
The former’s goal was particularly pertinent at times, with a unified focus being 60 fps at 4K resolution on the PlayStation 5. As such, many of these prototypes required a high confidence working with both our own internal and unreal’s graphics pipelines. At times, where necessary, this also meant communicating with graphics programmers to coordinate with developments happening elsewhere in the project, and with technical artists when prototypes were to be taken further and required an additional layer of polish to be brought inline with the visual quality of the rest of the game.
I took particular care to make sure that all prototypes that I worked on would be packaged such that they would be as modular and flexible to any number of foreseeable uses in the project. To allow for these prototypes to be ready to be handed over to a dedicated level design, world building, or, as previously mentioned, tech art team, I ensured that these prototypes were as user friendly as possible. This was noted by multiple recipient teams on implementing my work, which required little additional technical input from myself and allowed me to dedicate focus on my next prototype task.
All in all, I found working on this title a very rewarding experience, working closely with a team of clearly passionate people that were confident bouncing ideas off each other in open dialogue, and who felt invigorated by a quick turnaround time from ideation to production. I, too, feel I’ve grown stronger as a programmer having rapidly iterated on what were frequently evolving specifications.
