Deer Hunter World
As a full-stack engineer working on Deer Hunter World, I did a lot of front-end Unity client work. This project was the beginning of my adventures into the server code and writing my own tasks on both the front and back ends. Majority of the work was UI hookup in Unity. I did do some gameplay logic but mostly focused on everything that fell in the meta of the game, the in-between game sessions.
I also was tasked with completely overhauling the audio system. This task required hooking up our code base to some of the main Glu SDKs. I also worked with a group of audio engineers and producers to create a system that would make it easiest to fully revamp the audio of the game.
Lastly I helped connect the game to any and all SDKs, both third party and in house ones. I controlled how these SDKs interacted with our code and I also had to then profile our app and come up with solutions for any problems found.
Challenges
My biggest challenge on this team was getting up to speed with the server code. I have worked in server code on other projects outside of this studio, but this was a new beast. When they began the work for Deer Hunter World the goal was to make the game completely server authoritative to help prevent cheating. I had to learn and understand exactly how we were attempting to do this and to make sure I followed the correct engineering principles to achieve this while coding new features. For example, how do we get the data to the server, when do we do it, and how much information do we pass. Then making sure that data wasn't manipulated by the user before the server received it. This was a fun challenge and I learned a lot from the team on ways we were resolving this that I will take into my future roles.
Another challenge I had was the audio system revamp. The main adversity that came up was making it exactly how the audio team wanted, down to the exact UI and feeling they were looking for without an actual designer helping out on the project. My best way of resolving this was talking to some of our UI team quickly to get a sense what should work well and then building that as quick as I could to get it in front of the audio engineers so they could give feedback. Iterating fast was important to the success of this project. This also was in a brand new space for me and I had to learn more about audio in Unity and how any settings or modules I exposed to the audio team were used properly.
