Concord

Responsibilities :

Upon accepting this new position I was told I needed to relocate to the Bellevue/Seattle area and that all would be returning to office within a month or two. This return to office never happened and an optional hybrid work place was made permanent. When I joined the project, there were only 2 other members of the UI team. One UI Engineer and a Lead UI Artist. The project was in very early phases of pre-production and very little UI existed. What UI did exist was prototype and not developed with long term use and performance in mind, much created by the lead Technical Designer.

I worked alongside our UI Engineer to develop our file structure and naming conventions and then was tasked to create documentation on UMG for the team. Since I had been working in Snowdrop for the last 3 years, my Unreal skills felt under developed and brand new again. My fellow team mates’ Unreal experience was also pretty new. So I devoted myself to developing my expertise in Unreal so I could be a mentor and advocate for best practices, material creation, and performance for my colleagues.

Over the next years we hired, in-house, 2 more UI Artists and eventually ( a couple years later) another UI Engineer and UX Designer (who I was honored to work alongside) and acquired the help of 5 co-devs. With the welcome direction from our extremely talented UX/UI Lead, we began to create a valuable library of reusable widget components, UI materials, material functions, and other building blocks that made the implementation of new interfaces and features faster and much more enjoyable. We moved toward material driven animations, rather than heavy sequencer timeline animations to reduce slate tick time and avoid layout construct/draw/paint calls as much as we could. By launch, at some point, I had touched almost every piece of UI that shipped. The largest, most time consuming feature I worked on was definitely Character Select. It was a behemoth and underwent many visual design iterations.

Towards the project end, I was also tasked with working with the Tech Art team to assist with performance testing/bugging pvp maps/levels, using both unreal stat commands and Sony’s RazorGPU, analyzing traces and frame times to identify and solve GPU performance concerns.