Project witchstone

“In a living and reactive world, players will be offered unprecedented options to role-play their character and influence their environment, capturing the fun and freedom of a pen & paper RPG campaign.”

Shape the world with your own narrative choices !

The game has not been released yet, but once it does, it will be sure to make ripples in the CRPG genre with its innovative approach to storytelling.

I joined the team as a Senior Game Designer. The posting was extremely appealing to me due to my love for CRPGs. Having spent thousands of hours (not exaggerating) in modern CRPGs the last few years, it was a no-brainer for me when I was offered the chance to design the combat systems underneath this title.

The project has unfortunately ended due to the publisher (SEGA) pulling out of most of its 3rd party indie titles.

About Realworld One

Realworld One is a company specializing in the development of VR experiences designed to provide industry workers with lab training in the field of Biology in virtual reality.

My role was that of a Senior Developer, leading a small team of 4.

A lot of blueprints scripting, but also any parts of design that needed to be done to get the experience integrated from A to Z. Animation graphs, simulations, step by step goal implementation, etc.

In joining, I was specifically looking for an assignment that was more technical, and involved a lot of blueprints. The project being in VR was also a new interesting challenge.

My role

At Realworld One, my role consisted mainly of the following :

• Blueprint Scripting & full design integration for VR experiences.

• Materials / Shaders creation. Had to be well-optimized; It had to run on the Quest headset.

• Level design either from scratch, or from laboratory references.

• Animation for exploded schematics, machine parts moving, VR avatars. Some of it was sequencer, some of it was blueprints.

• Step by step objectives, various VR mechanics.

• Multiplayer Replication.

• Working with UX to stick to the right methodology. It had to match real life laboratories and procedures.

• Led a team of 4; On-boarding, best practices for new hires, scheduling daily meetings, client presentations, performance evaluations, etc.

• Write technical breakdown documents before any new projects to plan out the technical approach.

• Go through the build and deployment pipeline (Jenkins / Azure framework) to get the projects ready for use (Test / Final builds).

Having a game design background while in this position proved to be valuable. Several aspects of programming and design had to be covered. We delivered several projects as a team, and the reactions were very positive. It was a great experience.

My role

At Aspyr, my duties were the following :

Cinematics & Dialogue

• Author Unreal Engine sequencer-based, reusable cinematics that sync with branching dialogue options.

• Prototype and help design that system from scratch.

• Prototype reusable blueprint actors that could contain a cinematic, and be moved anywhere or reused.

• Design the first prototypes for dialogue cinematics, including our first “high quality standard” sequence to present to SONY.

• Document the process with several tutorials and guides for outsourcing studios to get them comfortable using the system.

Scripted Events

• Prototyped a crowd event system for NPCs based around the concept of “Action Stations” using blueprints.

• Design those first few prototype “Action Stations” along with its data structure as proof of concept.

Overall, we got a lot done in a short time. Our dialogue/cinematic systems were in a good place ! We then got to present the concept to SONY, and they liked what they saw. All in all, we created some pretty awesome stuff, and I hope Knights of the old Republic finds its way onto the market !

The NBA2K Franchise

2K sports holds one of the best sports IP in the business in NBA 2K. The online component of the title grew in scope ever since “The Park” was first released in NBA2K15.

It now has an open-world type city where players can challenge each other, explore, and complete achievements and quests to spice up their play time !

Outside the online component, they also offer an extremely robust career mode.

Being a basketball fan and playing the game religiously with friends, I took the easy descision to join the team in California.

I was hired as a Senior Gameplay Scripter. It was also a very fulfilling assignment; I touched on several online and career features while leveraging my perspective of playing well over 1000 hours on the franchise.

My role

“The Neighborhood” online ENVIRONMENT

The online multiplayer aspect of the game called “The Neighborhood” was one of my main focus.

• Design the open-world system for navigation, 3rd person cameras, collisions, shops and interactions.

• Create dynamic and interesting presentation cinematics during game intros / outros, or during in-game building transitions (Doors, walking in stores, browsing items, etc).

• Create gameplay cameras and camera cuts for online game modes.

• Participate in designing the UI and various GFX elements for multiplayer games, as well as special or seasonal events.

• Fill the role of both designer and producer for any owned features.

“Mycareer” feature

• Author over 50 trailers and in-game cinematics for impactful career moments (The playoffs, interviews, marketing trailers, etc).

• Attend MOCAP sessions to insure the animations would fit our environments and needs.

• Participate in implementing the various career features in coordination with programmers, animators and sound designers.

• Create, document and present designs to the team for new career features, and what those would look like.

• Help modernize the designer tool sets used for camera and cinematic content creation.

(NBA 2K19 : The Neighborhood)

The neighborhood; One of the key pillars of the franchise. I spent most of my time working on this feature during my stay at 2K. In the neighborhood, the player is free to roam about in 3rd person navigation. They can play, shop, participate in mini-games, interact with each other through emotes, send party invites, and leverage various other social systems including matching against each other for online games.

Timestamps - Expand for more information :

(NBA 2K18 : Get shook trailer)

During gameplay, we had a lot of in-game cut-scenes and cinematics. During the career potion of the game especially, we had in-game trailers that were made to underline a special event in the character’s career progression. Things like getting to the playoffs, winning key games, important match ups, etc. We also had a ton of cinematic content documenting your character’s day-to-day life as he progresses through his journey.

Expand for more information :

I have very fond memories of my time at 2K sports. We delivered 3 new and ambitious titles during my stay there and grew the online feature to be one of the best ones throughout online sports. I got to meet Shaq (he made fun of my socks) and work alongside some great people.

Shadow of the tomb raider

A new title in a completely revitalized franchise, Shadow of the Tomb Raider had pretty big ambitions of upgrading the franchise with a more interactive narrative and questing elements while keeping true to its 3rd person adventure roots.

Dialogue systems, side-quests & objectives, a lot of new areas I had the chance to cover.

I joined the team as a Technical Game Designer inside the performance team. The performance team was a small cell of designers responsible for creating the heavier narrative story beats of the game.

We were heavily tied to the “golden path” of the game, or any shiny new features related to narrative content, such as dialogue systems, side-quests and “town hubs”.

My role

The main focus on my end was to come up with better ways to interact with the environment. Be it through dialogues, scripted events or object interactions.

The new cinematic toolkit

• Helped design the new in-game cinematics timeline tool (was a proprietary engine at the time, similar to Unreal Engine’s sequencer).

• Created several scenes throughout the game using this timeline tool, from conversations to small in-game events.

• Integrated the first prototypes for dialogues between Lara and NPCs. This included setting up the scene, cameras, animations and audio tracks played by both parties, seamless transitions, etc.

• Troubleshooted and worked with engineering to come up with the right set of features the design team would need out of the tool, as well as making sure the workflow was comfortable for other designers to use.

• Designed reusable scripting solutions to seamlessly transition between cinematic and gameplay.

Questing and town hubs

Tomb Raider had quite sizable maps with countless side objectives. One of my tasks was to make sure objectives were clear, and quests were easy to follow.

• Implemented the breadcrumbs system for sidequests and main objectives to guide the player through his adventures.

• Designed and implemented the first prototypes for side-quests and optional tasks.

• Took ownership of my share of main story performance beats in the main city hub of “Paititi”.

Combat Sequences

• Designed the narrative side of combat encounters by adding VO’s, animations or otherwise interesting actions NPCs could be taking during their patrols.

• Helped write dialogue during combat for both enemies and Lara.

• Created visual hints and narrative level design elements to help pace / guide combat encounters.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Full playthrough)

During my stay at Eidos Montreal, I’ve had the chance to work on several parts of the game, here are some areas of note.

For honor

For Honor was Ubisoft’s take on Chivalry and it’s stance-based combat system. The team behind the project had some real talent. The game had a solid single-player campaign, which is where i spent most of my time. It also had a stellar online 4v4 mode, which really gave this game it’s solid reputation.

The game had great gameplay, solid thematic and narrative direction and have a unique play style. The end product really spoke for itself.

My role

My mandate on For Honor was to lay the ground works and integrate cinematics for all our studio’s assigned levels. An added challenge was that I was a solo act in the Event Scripting team, which had me cover a lot of ground !

• Work with level designers to integrate the correct actors, triggers, and level design elements to have working cinematics.

• Create seamless in-and-out gameplay transitions.

• Integrate all cinematic elements throughout 8 full solo campaign maps.

• Integrate all scripted elements throughout those maps.

• Sit down with each level design teams to correctly target what their scripting requirements would be, give estimates, and map out tasks in Hansoft.

• Work with technical artists to import complex rigs (trebuchets, catapults, elephants, etc) into the game and have our scripted events make use of them as intended.

For Honor (Full Playthrough)

Here are some areas of note where I had direct involvement.

Assassin’s Creed : Syndicate

The assassin’s creed franchise has been the pride and joy of Ubisoft for a long time. I had the chance to participate in the development of the franchise for several years.

From my early days in games as a dev. tester, to my first professional position as a developer, Assassin’s creed holds a special place in my heart !

On Assassin’s Creed, I came in as an Event Scripter. My implication was fairly heavy with anything scripted. Cinematics, custom scripted events, NPC behavior, the list goes on !

I had very heavy involvement in Assassin’s Creed : Unity as well, however it was mixed between dev. testing and event scripting.

My role

• Worked on several cinematics and in-game scripted moments throughout the game. This includes integration of actors, creating cameras, sounds and visual effects.

• Was part of the team assigned to E3 performance demos, as well as any other slices of gameplay showcasing our game.

• Helped integrate the “Gang boss” system where the Player would have encounters in a street brawl format that would mimic a “mini-boss” fight against gang leaders.

• Created several scripted events involving essential NPCs alongside massive crowds of hundreds of NPCs

• Scripted mass hysteria, or massive groupings. The crowd system allowed us to script very intricate sequences for the Player.

• Scripted elements of the game from scratch, such as the push-cart and other one-use systems not covered by programming.

• Helped the mission team come up with interesting scripted events or custom assassinations for the Player.

Project “Demilich”, a Turn-based Indie game

The overworld

The world is explored through a horse carriage holding most of the Player’s possessions. I leverage several Unreal Engine systems to get there :

• PCG to fill out the world with various elements

• Nanite meshes used wherever possible (keeping in mind nanite’s limitations with transparency, overdraw, etc.)

• Virtual Textures and custom d-buffer decals for roads

• Custom horse cart movement logic (avoided physics for reliability and predictability).

• Optimized assets coming from cinema-quality 1mil polygon meshes, brought down to run in Unreal Engine 5 at acceptable frame rates.

• Everything is optimized to currently run at around 100 FPS on a 3080 graphics card.

My challenges

On my end, I am taking care of everything. One man band.

A few key, fun technical tidbits !

• Grid-based combat, so fairly math-heavy with movement points, weapon ranges, areas of effect, abilities, etc.

• To keep performance to a maximum, skeletal animations are converted to vertex animations, which allows us to have 100’s of units in combat on-screen at once without an oversized performance hit.

• Turn based combat can be pretty slow, so it is “modernized” by allowing multiple units to move or attack at once, giving it a bit more of a natural and quick paced feel. A basic level of prediction is used to avoid overlapping moves and attack actions.

• Navigation is cached and calculated on another thread to avoid hitting bottlenecks when requesting navigation solutions for 50+ units at once.

MQL-Based automated trading algorythm

A way to automate trading the markets

One of my personal hobbies is to do day trading; More specifically, trading FOREX currencies.

As a continuation of that hobby, I eventually started programming an automated trading system that could :

• Trade the market automatically, independently of my inputs.

• Follow a pre-programmed trading strategy. Open trades, close trades, evaluate a position every tick, and react accordingly.

• Be able to run the algorithm on previous offline historical data to verify the profitability of a given strategy over previous months/years.

A Pixel-reading BOT, running on RGB channel packing.

A way to automate a character.

This one is a bit more unusual, but it allows me to “geek out” about AI. I used to play World of Warcraft a fair amount back in the day. For my own curiosity, I looked into creating an AI to automate playing a character.

I love automation and wanted a challenge, so I went ahead and gave it a go, and it worked !

The software used a pretty clever way to receive information from the game. It would 100% automate a character’s play during mostly all PvE or PvP content in the game. It reliably ranked in the 99th percentile in terms of Damage-Per-Second performance as well !

About the program

I needed a way to convey a lot of information over to the AI. Things like :

• Where I am, who is around me, are they friends or foes, how many are there, and at what range are they standing.

• What abilities are available now or in the near future & keeping track of what is on cool down as well as character status effects.

• Knowing what is the most optimal ability to use depending on how many enemies are around me and what abilities are available.

The way to convey that much information was a challenge. This is where I geek out a little bit !

My solution was to compress all that information into a pixel’s RGB channels.

A quick how-to

This gets into the weeds a little bit, so I apologize.

The system is an advanced version of channel packing (texture compression workflow in games).

Since a pixel is made of 3 channels, RGB, and each channel has a value between 0 and 255, this gives us 3 digits to work with to store information :

• The hundreds - 0 to 2

• The tenths - 0 to 9

• The ones - 0 to 9

What I did was compress the game information into those color channels and display the resulting pixels on-screen. The bot program would then read those pixels and find their RGB values. From there, we evaluate that information and send the right key press back to the game after running through a decision tree of what is the best ability for the situation.

An example :

Here is an example of storing Abilities 1, 2 & 3 in the 10s digit of the Red channel :

• 000 = 1, 2, 3 cooldown

• 010 = 1 available / 2,3 cooldown

• 020 = 2 available / 1,3 cooldown

• 030 = 1,2 available / 3 cooldown

• 040 = 3 available/ 1,2 cooldown

• 050 = 1,3 available / 2 cooldown

• 060 = 2,3 available / 1 cooldown

• 070 = 1, 2, 3 available

From there, let’s say you also store the number of enemies around you within 20 yards in the 1s digit, and if you’re in combat or not in the 100s…

The red channel of the pixel would read as “165” :

• 165 = In combat, Abilities 2 & 3 available, 5 enemies around me.

• 010 = Not in combat, Ability 1 available, no enemies around me.

• 171 = In combat, all abilities available, 1 enemy around me.

• Etc.

That’s the information 1 channel of 1 pixel can give, so with several pixels on-screen you could get a fairly high amount of information through. Ultimately, I only needed to compress the information into about half a dozen pixels to get the job done.