My personal experience differed with the one I had with Red Dead Redemption 2 for numerous reasons. The team was much smaller, the genre was a first person shooter rather than an open world game, and rather than being on the project from the very start I joined relatively late into the development cycle of the project. This meant I had to carry existing features across the finish line more often than architect them from the ground up and I had to become acquainted with these systems very quickly. The project was originally scheduled to ship in November of the same year so this "whatever needs fixing fix it" attitude was more or less my experience working on the game.
Rather than linking to other videos I captured and edited some footage myself this time. The compilation below does a good job of quickly demonstrating features I contributed to on the project.
You will likely want to watch on YouTube and manually set the quality to 720p to get an acceptable resolution compared to the embedded video. I captured the footage on an old 1680x1050 display and apologize for the inconvenience.
Weapons
I spent a lot of time working on the player’s Ballista
weapon. This included work on all 3 fire
modes, the AI gore wounds used when hit by it, damage related issues, and the impact
VFX. This resulted in adding a few
collision filtering features to our physics system, special shapetests for the
primary fire, adding support for ‘sliced’ full body gore wounds, and splitting
up the VFX into multiple instances for different positions and normal.
I did a lot of work on various weapons in the game aside
from the Ballista. This ranged from
various damage issues, queueing up the equipment launcher, hit scan logic, smoke
bombs for the playable mancubus, and many issues related to the upgrades for
each weapon.
Gore
I fixed numerous features for gore systems and added a
pattern for the destroyer blade gore cut behavior that could be re-used to
replace demons with custom rigs, split ragdoll constraints, and shoot the
pieces off with a random range of speed and direction. I also worked on other gore behaviors like
the blood punch, syncing wounds for multiplayer, and the deferred blood pools
left behind by a corpse.
Multiplayer
My previous industry experience at Rockstar Games always
used a peer to peer networking system which would migrate ownership of entities
to different player machines during active gameplay. Doom: Eternal was a fun learning and growth
experience for me because it instead used a server authoritative method. This meant I needed to learn new methods to deal
with things that needed to be client authoritative such as hitscan weapon hits
and how to validate it on the server.
Animation issues also could be much more difficult. Previously during something like a ledge grab
with a peer to peer setup we could simply disable all network blending but with
a server authoritative setup this got much murkier and complicated than that.
I supported many gameplay features specific to our PVP
gametype known as Battlemode. This
included demon character work (e.g. the revenant jetpack or the marauder
shotgun), summon wheel abilities, 3rd person ledge grab animations,
1st person spectating, and a considerable amount of work adding
features to our visual scripting system for the Battlemode tutorials.
Misc
- Soft body repulsors that prevented characters from visually clipping into each other
- Contributions to a heat map performance tool to find bottlenecks in a level
- Contributions to player customization from getting skins to appear in cutscenes, animated deaths, and on remotely controlled clones in multiplayer
- Gore nest secret encounter systems support
- Boss voice over audio for the doom hunter boss fight
- Numerous bug fixes for VFX, damage, stats and milestones not working as intended
- Rune prototyping
- Various UI and menu support
