Unannounced Multiplayer Vehicle Combat Game

Description

For two years of my time at Firesprite I was working on an unannounced multiplayer vehicle combat game using Unreal Engine 5. For half of that time I was acting Lead UI engineer, which meant I was taking part in roadmap meetings, and leading what the technical UI requirements are for the project. I also consistently created task lists for future work, providing a back log of work to production and helping prioritise, with the roadmap and deadlines in mind. With these tasks, I broke them down into small and manageable chunks and entered them into Jira, communicating with production, with the intention of tasks being clear enough to delegate to engineers other than myself.

I collaborated and worked with a small but diverse UI team during this project consisting of an intermediate UI engineer, Lead UI designer and Senior UI designer.

MVVM System

A large portion of my time was reworking the system responsible for our UI data flow, to be cleaner and easier to understand. This was building on some previous work and learnings made from a previous cancelled project at the studio. This rework drastically improved the time it took to implement new UI features into the game.

MVVM Tooling

On top of the new MVVM system built for the game, I invested a lot of time developing the tooling surrounding it. One of the main things was to allow designers access so they can hook gameplay blueprints to UI widgets in editor just through the use of blueprints. For this I gathered feedback from the relevant clients on how they felt using the old system and what changes they desired. The new system took a few iterations and rounds of feedback with the other engineers, before releasing it took the designers. After a fair amount of use by both engineers and designers, the new system was getting a lot of good feedback, with it being easy to get to grips with.

I am always trying to look for areas where tooling can be better, by understanding peoples pain points and consistently gathering feedback and new requirements.