Need For Speed : No Limits
Race for dominance in the first white-knuckle edition of Need for Speed made just for mobile – from the developer that brought you Real Racing 3. Build your dream ride with an unbelievable range of cars and customizations. Launch yourself between chaos and control as you hit the loud pedal and roll into underground car culture. Win races, up your rep, then kick into more races, more customizations, and more cars. Make your choices and never look back. Tonight we ride!
Need for Speed was the sole project while I worked at Firemonkeys in Melbourne, Australia. Although I worked on a handful of features on the front end (VIP? Some car customisation) and their tool support, the bulk of my time was spent eliminating a lot of the major crashes and performing optimisation. The former was intriguing since the bulk of my time was a small number of very obscure crashes, notably a threading issue where I had to walk a TD through it before he understood the wrong due to its ‘multiple gears running’.
Unreleased Game
I spent a substantial amount of time on two projects at TinyCo that never went public unfortunately. The later one was variation on FTP town builders. It never reached a state where there was a lot of elaborate technical problem solving, although there were a few things I did that were a bit interesting. We didn’t (yet) have 3D support so for an interim work around we did one part in Unity and another in our own engine. I ended up being tasked with setting up a bridge so that you could go back/forth between the two modes in game. Definitely not something you would seriously do in a launched title, but useful for coherency testing. It was also my first foray in Unity in a professional way. A second problem I spent a bit of time was hooking our asset pipeline into a 3D engine we were evaluating.
Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff
Build, collect and quest with your favorite Family Guy heroes and villains in a freakin’ hilarious new sandbox game!
Family Guy is one of the four projects I worked substantially on at TinyCo. I started on it fairly early and was on well after launch. I then moved onto another project before coming back shortly before my departure to prepare a possible ‘on par’ Windows Phone build. Since I was on it for such a long time, I ended up working on a fair number of the system.
My baby, though, was facespace. I always feel a bit sad that I didn’t get much design love after launch (in beta people loved it, but I guess it wasn’t marketable enough). It ended up taking some interesting tricks to get it working smoothly (w/ all the assets) and looking right. One of the tricky bits with the later was the feature image. It has an unusual size so to avoid a massive memory hit, it is sliced in 3 and packed in a much smaller image. On its own, that is a standard thing. What makes it a more complex problem is coping with the various screen densities, compressions and odd asset sizes (e.g. 1.5x). Avoiding a 1/2 pixel drawing errors causing fine lines takes a little work and has subtle bugs.
Some of the other interesting problems I solved were the various kinds of fences and a new sorting algorithm to fix some issues with long buildings. That never made it in before I left, though since while it worked it didn’t pass my own bar for performance (1000’s of entities on screen started chugging).
Unreleased Game
After SuperSlots was sunsetted, I was moved onto a new game that in the end never went public. Some of the features I did work on for it were fancy yet flexible animation system, a system for recording and playing back gameplay (useful for my purposes, AND taught someone about floating point maths when they tried to stretch it to something it wasn’t designed for), and path finding. I also fixed some interesting bugs demonstrating my capacity for rooting out the nasty stuff such as memory stomps (I hate memory stomps… especially since there are lots of things that LOOK like memory stomps, but aren’t. Because they aren’t tricky enough as is).
SuperSlots
Super Slots™ lets you spin on your very own set of virtual Las Vegas slot machines. Help Lady Luck recover all the lost treasures in this rich and exciting slot machine game.
My first proper project at TinyCo. My biggest contributions were bug fixes, getting the Android builds working, updating our FaceBook interface, and the crowning achievement: working with the artist we created a whack-a-mole mini game with awesome particle effects. That was really one of the last things to go in the game, sadly.
TinyMonsters
Can you find the Legendary monster?
Hatch, raise, and breed mysterious elemental creatures in Tiny Monsters by TinyCo!
TinyMonsters was my first project when starting at TinyCo. I was added to the team, as most new engineers at the time were, to get used to the code base before finding a more permanent team to work on. The bulk of my time (about 2 weeks?) was spent doing just that and investigating bugs. I don’t recall any more if there was anything in game that I can point to as me.
Darksiders II
Become the terrifying force which everything fears but nothing can escape. Awakened by the End of Days, Death, the most feared of the legendary Four Horsemen embarks on a quest to redeem his brother’s name. Along the way, the Horseman discovers that an ancient grudge may threaten all of Creation. Death lives!
Darksiders II was both the final game I worked directly on while at THQ, and the one with my most substantial involvement. After it I spent most of my time improving tools, notably trying to get my Excel library into a usable state. On Darksiders II I used the experience I built up on previous games to fully integrate our localisation tools into the game. This meant for the first time localisation testers could actually test and update strings on the fly (a substantial time/cost saving). I also learned to appreciate the wide variation in engines while working on it; I had done an earlier test run of the tools in a different engine and the difference in time (and bugs) for integration was substantial.
August Junkala 