Up to this point I had only ever worked on console games. After EA Chicago closed, I thought it would be good to branch out and do something for the PC. I joined Chewy Software shortly after and started work on a bowling game for EA's casual web portal, Pogo.com. I was accustomed to large budget, 50+ developers on my latest projects. My team was now three engineers and three artists with a few other producer types thrown in there. I was allowed a great deal of freedom on this project to start with a clean slate and setup the game code from scratch. I did some investigation into using the Torque engine for our game, but instead it was decided that the game was simple enough to roll our own engine. I coded everything using DirectX with occactional help from the DirectX extenstion library (D3DX). The Popcap sexy framework was used for all of the 2d screens and hud elements. Also, Pogo had thier own library that handled much of the network communication with Pogo.com. Getting all of these libraries working together and, in sync, with integration engineers at EA was a constant challenge.
Responsibilities:
- Gameplay
- Animation
- Cameras
- Rendering
- Game objects
- Particles
- Replay
- Input
- Audio
- 3ds Max export tool
- Automated game build process
Movies:
