My first professional project outside of University! I remember the fear and excitement I felt at the time. I had been aware of the ARK series but wasn’t quite sure what was in store for me.

Having only briefly used Unreal Engine in University it was a little overwhelming to dive into gameplay for an actual high-profile game. My company was tasked with rescuing a failed co-development project from another company. We were given their assets and tried to implement the gameplay features of the expansion in a short time-frame.

My own tasks were quite varied but mostly were gameplay-related. I had to implement an energy system. Basically many creatures in the world could be harvested for energy in the form of batteries. These batteries could also charged in structures placed throughout the world. The main difficulties in implementing this was working around the stasis system in the game where structures and creatures get deactivated when they’re far away from the player.

A major concern in Aberration was having to implement and test everything with the intention of it working in a multiplayer environment, sometimes with a dedicated server and sometimes over peer-to-peer connections.

To a lesser extent I would occasionally have to debug and modify engine code, depending on which bugs had the highest priority. I was also responsible for making sure art and sound assets function correctly across the single/multiplayer configurations.