I’ll keep this one brief for now as extra content is still being developed for it, but I was ecstatic to join the team for what was, by most accounts, the game of the year. A very intricate codebase to match a game I loved playing through.

I’ve always felt the story is very important in a game and can make it mean so much more to go above and beyond to become an amazing experience. There has never been a better case of that than here. Red Dead II is completely driven by the storytelling and interactions of the characters and is almost as much a movie as it is a game. This is usually typical of more enclosed game than the open world experience that RDR2 offers, so it’s nice to get some spice out of the best of both worlds where there’s something for multiple types of players.

I believe it’s the first project that I worked on after it had released, so it was interesting finding bugs at home in the retail version and going into the office to try and hunt down and fix some of them later on.

The sheer extent of the codebase required to make a game of this magnitude also made hunting down a lot of those bugs immensely difficult. But that is the price paid for what was accomplished with a huge international team (one of the largest in history on a single project) all collaborating to put it together.

A large part of what my team handled was the character system, managing the streaming of assets for all of the clothing and body parts and providing support for character artists to attain what they needed for story characters as well as for the ambient population. I took on assert management / autobugging and target management systems, among other things…such as working out many random crashes / memory stomps / deadlocks as part of generic engine work.