As a close-knit team we had quite the large task of taking an incredibly buggy game that only ran well on powerful PCs and porting it to consoles. The UI system was basically only made for Chinese, running the game in English or any other language resulted in an unbelievable number of overflowing and clipping issues, we knew that the game would never pass console certification and thus we had to fix it. I worked extensively on fixing UI issues which was difficult because in Unreal most UI assets are binary files and despite how hard we tried it was impossible to get the client to merge our fixes. This required us to be creative in how we tackled issues as the game was updated frequently so we had to be ready to merge code and content at a moment’s notice to maintain platform release-parity.

PixARK was my first real opportunity to dive deeply into the Playstation 4 and Xbox One platforms. Having been introduced to them with ARK Extinction, I was able to explore the backend and tooling of both platforms in Unreal. The engine was a bit of a Frankenstein, with an extremely old base we had to selectively backport features to support the console infrastructure provided by newer versions of Unreal. My work often involved investigating platform-specific bugs caused by this set up, reworking the console build pipelines to better suit our needs, and performing bugfixes introduced by content updates.

Perhaps my most proud work is when I took the lead of managing and documenting our branching model. There was many a time when I had to create hotfixes and because of the strict master/dev/release branching/rebase policies we implemented it was a doddle. Need a code/content fix that was made a day ago in a month-old patch? No problem, you’ll have a full build to test in 30 minutes. We were always ready no matter the problem which was very necessary when you have three console platforms with entirely different certification requirements and timescales for patches you wish to deliver.

Finally some more miscellaneous work I did included upgrading the project from our Git for code and SVN for content approach to entirely using Git + LFS with Bitbucket. I also worked very closely with others to backport the splitscreen functionality from ARK to PixARK and fix many of the UI issues introduced by this. Although PixARK had many challenges I’m proud of the work we did to create a significantly better version of the game for consoles.