Studio Tools
While working at Amaze Entertainment, I have done a fair amount of work on in-house tools. The most significant of these is an application known internally as Quintessence - a studio-wide level scripting tool that is utilized on virtually all 3d games made by Amaze. Quintessence has many features but it is primarily used by designers to add enemies, world objects, triggers, spawn points, camera paths and countless other game-specific features to raw map geometry.
Quintessence was in its infancy when I joined Amaze, so two of my coworkers and I were responsible for quickly getting it up and running with the features needed by designers. This tool was the first large-scale C# application I'd worked on up to that point, and used an adaptation of a Managed DirectX wrapper I'd written earlier for graphics. As time went on, Quintessence evolved into a sophisticated tool for design, being adaptable both specific project needs and personal preferences.
Responsibilities
- Implementing large portions of the tool's UI with .NET Windows Forms.
- Adding Visual Source Safe integration to simplify user-end source control tasks.
- Developing various DirectX world drawing and camera features to make Quintessence easier to use.
- Working on command-line support for managing & exporting intermediate map formats to raw ROM data.
- Participating in requirement gathering and support roles with designers to improve the tool.
