Wayfinder is my largest, most ambitious project by far, and it involved me taking on a lot more responsibility from an engineering perspective than I had on prior projects. I had to become the subject matter expert and point of contact for all aspects of gameplay, and in order to accommodate the large scope of the project, I focused my efforts on making reusable tech and tools for designers to implement content. We used Unreal Engine’s Gameplay Ability System plugin, which I had prior experience with, as the main driver of gameplay, as I felt strongly that it empowered designers to script content for networked gameplay while on the engineering side we could focus on maintaining tools or coding pipelines to support them. Given my role, I frequently spent a lot of time talking to other disciplines, spreading awareness of the tech we had developed, reviewing code and scripted content to make sure that it followed established patterns, and generally making sure that the lines of communication between gameplay engineering, design, and art were strong and built on mutual respect and understanding.

 

In the final year of development before full release, we decided to pivot the game away from the dedicated server and microtransaction based model that it was built as, and focus on a game that you could buy once, play in perpetuity either in single player or with player hosted lobbies, and unlock everything without spending additional money, as we felt that was what was fair to our fans. I was fairly important to that effort, and in the course of 3 months, I was responsible for completely reworking our stat scaling system to adapt to each player’s level, reworking the loot system to drop loot at each player’s level, (replacing the previous system where weapons were either bought with real money or painstakingly crafted), creating difficulty modes, and many other smaller adjustments to completely overhaul the game.

 

Overall, Wayfinder was the project where I came into my own as a gameplay engineer. I had some truly wonderful teammates and mentor figures both in the engineering team and among the design and art teams, and I feel like this is where I truly learned how to architect gameplay on a broader scale, having true ownership over the code. I learned so much about networked gameplay and the importance of prediction in making gameplay feel good in multiplayer. This project really instilled in me the nature of games as a collaborative art piece, and I strove to both learn from and teach everyone around me. Solid communication was absolutely the most important thing that led to success on any feature, and I am immensely proud of what we were able to accomplish.