Apologies for the lack of update, it's been a busy time for me.
To follow up on Beta, our final delivery for our game at Champlain went well. We had a couple people sit down with us for over an hour attempting to beat it, and attracted everyone within our target market to our booth. I had several people come up to me remarking on the design decisions that I made and asking questions about the development. I was lucky enough to give our presentation in front of the gaming cohort and recruiters from all over North America. It was one of the proudest moments of my life to have been up there with my team and I am extremely happy to have done that.
Not long after I left school, I went to start my internship at Epic Games. This was a very quick turn around, but I am glad it was quick. An idle mind has never done me any favors so I was good to be back to work.
While the first week of work was used to get me up to speed on my project, the 3rd person MOBA Paragon, soon after I began taking on more and more work. Early struggles included learning the way that UE4 had been set up specifically for Paragon, particularly on the design side. Things that generally would have existed in one space on previous projects for myself, were now several folders away, which led to me having more tabs of Unreal open then I am used to. Blueprinting wasn't too bad, but there definitely were some early struggles in adjusting to the way blueprints handle things. As someone who is a bigger fan of actual code then visual scripting, some of the choices that would make a lot of sense to people without coding experience, made very little to myself. Still, I stuck on and was successful enough.
At first, I worked with the hero designers on the project. That design team was easily the biggest and was the easiest way to acclimate a new member of the team and make sure that I had plenty of bugs to fix. After a couple weeks, however, I moved to the card team. At this point, they were busy prepping for the launch of V42, our biggest update to date where we completely scrapped our old item system and built an entirely new one that better promoted the goals we wanted to achieve in-game.
Prior to me joining the design team on it, there was 3 members of this team, the lead (who also had roles in competitive, balance, and QA), a senior designer, and mid-level designer. So during the day, while the other 2 designers were building content, I would be rapidly trying to fix all the bugs that a massive system switch would cause and with the items themselves. Sometimes these were simple fixes, other times it would require a complete rewrite of the card in order to make it work. The latter type of bugs seemed to make their way on to my plate 2 weeks before lockdown, so I spent the next two weeks crunching as best I could to get everything done. I felt great. I felt like I was part of the team and that finally my work was benefiting the team in impacting ways.
Following the release of V42, my work became much more development focused instead of bug fixing. While I still fixed numerous bugs for the team, as the player base always finds way to break things, I began to build some real concrete stuff. I rebuilt our ward system from scratch, which previously had been using some antiquated code and blueprints from a time when Paragon was vastly different. I designed and prototyped 5 new cards for our system, all with intent to ship in the near future. I rebuilt cards to make them feel better rather then to simply fix issues with them. I loved every minute of it.
Unfortunately, as with everything in life, all good things must come to end. I was unable to be hired on or extended because of lack of space. A nice reason to be let go, as you leave knowing they wish they could have kept you, but disheartening all the same. All in all though, it was a wonderful experience, that I can't wait to carry with me to my next.