Thomas Jones

Game Developer

Artificial Studios

When I was hired by Artificial in June of 2006, the company was known for the Reality Engine, which was purchased by Epic Games in 2005, and the CellFactor physics demo designed to showcase the Ageia PhysX hardware device. Artificial was a small company consisting then of about half a dozen programmers and a team of about a dozen artists located in Columbia known as Immersion Games. I spent 14 months as a game programmer for Artificial, the entire time working solely with the Unreal Engine 3. Most of my time was spent on one project, but towards the end of my time there I worked on another.

Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia

I spent the first 10 months designing and implementing game-play objects as well as scripting levels and for the title Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia. This title was released in June 2007 for the PC and XBox 360 systems and was published by SouthPeak Games. My responsibilities there first consisted of implementing various enemy attacks and AI behaviors. Then I began to learn and use the Kismet scripting system. Eventually I was creating my own Kismet objects for performing intricate interactions between boss enemies and the levels in which they were fought. I went on to implement both the AI and level scripting of several more bosses as well as implementing many level-specific objects and fully scripting a few of the levels. Eventually I had contributed code to just about every component of the game, whether it was weapon, vehicle, player-ability, networking, or related to some other system.

Tasks:

  • Implemented various enemy behaviors based on a design spec and assets, ranging from small mobs to entire bosses with scripted level interaction.
  • Created custom Kismet objects for allowing unique level scripting actions as well as scripted several of the final levels.
  • Implemented various weapons, items, and vehicle objects within the game.
  • Networked various gameplay objects for use in multiplayer games.
  • Became very familiar with using UnrealEditor and its Cascade, Kismet, Matinee, material, animation tree, prefab and Archetype systems.

Unannounced FPS

I spent the remaining 4 months designing and implementing game systems for a new FPS project, also powered by UE3. I was tasked with creating the weapon system, player abilities, and control scheme. This, among other things, involved creating a robust two-handed system in which the player could have arbitrary control over two different weapons in either hand. This tied in heavily with the player abilities, as they were contextually dependent on the particular layout of weapons (or lack of weapons) in the hands. Furthermore, these systems were designed around being usable for multiplayer games, so their ability to be used across a network was built-in rather than being added in later. This project was started from scratch and adhered to strong object-oriented design principles. The prototype I helped build, along with a team of significantly fewer people than the previous project had, was eventually approved by a publisher. It is now the basis for a new, still unannounced project from Artificial Studios and their new parent company Ignition Entertainment. The project is scheduled for release in late 2009.

During my time at Artificial I became very knowledgeable of UnrealScript, the Unreal Editor, and the Unreal Engine 3 as a whole from a high-level. I also became familiar with other aspects of UnrealEditor such as creating animation trees for skeletal meshes, authoring particle effects, creating materials, and using prefabs. I learned how to set animation blending and material parameters through code and create objects that could easily interface with the Kismet scripting system.