After what I would call a successful first half of the year (2015), something great happened. I meet the awesome guys of Any Arts Productions and joined them!
Meeting them kinda felt like "fate". The guys at Any Arts have the heart in the right place, they wanted to make games for the love of it and we shared many views of the industry. This gave me a great feeling of connection with them right from the start!
Here is where I directly met Unreal Engine 4. I had known of the engine, but never really gotten into it.
I needed to learn how to use it and quick so I could pass my "trial period" the team had put me into at the begging, it made sense. I knew close to nothing about the engine and they were work only on it at the time.
It felt very similar to when I started with Unity, picking every little stone and turning it over, and see if I could understand what it did there. Slowly and steadily learning more of how it worked and how this new engine "thinks".
After about a week, UE4 and me became sort of friends. Friends that get along but with different tastes. We wished we both did things in a different ways, but still made progress. Slowly with time we polished those edges and learn to work with each other.
In my head I needed to truly understand how the engine work, how it "think-ed" inside. It's a thing I do... which is why I was always so bad at history and biology back in high-school (too many names and dates). Math and physics came so much easier for me. They "made sense".
One of the things that I liked the most were UE4 Blueprints. Oh boy, how did these guys help me learn and understand the engine faster. Luckily for me, the studio worked mostly with Blueprints only then. All this things combined sort of create an nice environment for me to learn. The combination of a great motivation, a clear goal and it's reward, a great learning environment and the people, all that allowed me to "make sense" of it and get to a basic working level with UE4 in about 2 weeks.
And so, I passed my trial period and was asked to work directly on one of the titles. Here I was given a lot of freedom to experiment and test gameplay options. We wanted to find solutions to gameplay options that didn't quite exist yet at the time. Here was were I had my first dip on Gameplay Programming. And in a simple task like that, I felt in love with Gameplay Programming.
Today I think that Gameplay Programmer is the most artistic way of programming that I know. It takes a very logical process and turns it into a feeling. From something so structured, rational and objective, to something so very abstract as perception and "the feeling" you transmit to the player when they play.
Later on I was tasked on working on the main project, Season of Heaven. They asked to work on one of the mechanics of the main character. This felt huge, they truly cherish this title like a child of them. Everyone involved had this warm feeling when talking and working on this project.
There, by my hands, the "kite" was created. Made from scratch as a test of sorts, with the goal of putting it in the prototype (keep in mind this was 2015).
I might dedicate one day a post to talk about this one if I'm allowed one day, but for now I won't go into details.
I got great feedback from this task, from some really important people in the industry. Creating this features felt reeeeeally good!
By the end of the year I had to stop working with AAP because the work permit I had in the US from being a student in the field expired and I had to sadly return to Chile. The company wanted to sponsor me, but for a new company this things sometimes ain't so easy to do.
It was a great experience in general and even today, the guys of AAP still have a special spot in my heart.
[j]
