Age of wonders 4
Age of Wonders is a 4X strategy and turn-based game. In this fantasy setting freedom of playstyle is crucial.
I worked on Age of wonders DLC's for my period at Triumph Studios. I have been there for the release of 2 DLC's, with the 3 one being released soon.
The interesting challenge for this project was that it was a project that has systems that have been around since 2012. So creating additions to those systems, maintaining them and creating new systems that should work with those older systems took a lot of understanding from the current systems
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Size: 40 people
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Roles: Gameplay Programmer intern
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Date: September 2023 - June 2024
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Engine: In-House (C++ and XAML)
Pantheon Expansion
I worked on the Pantheon Expansion for the Primal Fury DLC. The pantheon is the overarching meta system in our game.
The idea of the update was to add new functionality for the players progression to be kept and partially be converted to the new play sessions.
I sat down with the design team and what we wanted was for all transformations gained from spells to be fully given to the player. However certain transformations gained trough skills would only be visibly there and not for give any benefits until the skills are unlocked again.
This turned out to be a bit more challenging then expected as we currently could not separate the Visuals from game play. This required me to create a new layer into the system.
UI / UX improvements
I worked closely with the UI designer a lot to update current UI screens to make them cleaner.
The interesting part about our UI is that there are a lot of layers of information that are linked trough hyperlinks. One of the improvements was cleaning up our Empire Relations tool tips. To do this I worked on collapsing the individual modifiers to merge together instead of directly showing all individual modifiers directly.
I kicked of multiple initiatives to either overhaul current features / adding new features which would make things easier for players to use or understand.
Content Code Support
I spend a big part of my time implementing code support for designers and artist to be able to create new content for DLC's.
One example of that being would be a new manager which would allow designers to create new effects that will show VFX on every sector of a city.
Design implementation
For the upcoming DLC we ran into an issue where we had a shortage of designers so I ended up helping out the Design team by creating one of the three new Tomes. This tome included 6 spells and a new hero attribute.
It made sense as I was the programmer who was implementing the most code support for them. This was a great opportunity which then in turn helped me get better at creating code support for design as I got more experience in how they use the systems we setup
Other Contributions
- Setup the achievements of the latest DLC
- Performance improvements
- Multiplayer fixes
- General bug fixing