AAA VR title under NDA - Technical Lead Manager at Sanzaru Games / Meta Reality Labs
For this project I was the technical lead manager for the gameplay systems group. I managed 5 people, working on systems, missions, architecture and infrastructure. The game was being developed in Unreal 5 and C++.
Leadership
- Managed 5 engineers and colaborated with cross functional partners to align on schedule, direction and quality.
- Interviewed engineers and provided mentorship.
- Provided performance reviews, and biweekly 1:1s directed to grow skills and improve career.
Technical Contributions
Progression and Level Building
- Created a new visual flow based progression system, with save interdependencies.
- Created a Story Graph in Unreal, allowing for shortcuts to any asset, script, and progression point in the game. This is the source of a shortcut system to allow users of the system to access any progression point in the game, including location, state machine state and save point.
- Architected in collaboration with a Senior Engineer a Level manager to replace Level Blueprints that was level independent, message based and compatible with World Partition.
Gameplay
- Created a visual camera system for cinematic visualization of the character.
- Created a Holdable spawner, using a system to place grabbables in the world with multiple configurations for respawning, despawning, baked lighting, and asynchronous asset loading.
Tools and acceleration
- Created Scriptable tools in UE5 to accelerate the narrative team and level designers, allowing them to create interdependent assets in 1 click via an unreal tool.
- Created interactible unreal tools to draw special splines for traversal purposes in the editor.
- Created a visual “state” of the game HUD system to visualize state, narrative, progression, location and others in order to debug problems fast.
Optimization
- Worked on support World Partition and Level streaming, supporting fixes of level instancing compatibility for cinematic assets.
- Optimized CPU cost by looking at Unreal Insights and fixing or provided suggestions to remove unnecesary costs.