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First update where I got full engineering ownership of a particular item, that being the Hoverboard. It was incredibly fun to work on; a weird mish-mash of player controller revamps, anim blueprint work, and then dealing with the fallout of trying to do stuff while in an odd movement state.

I can remember the first time I got it working smoothly, and posted my progress in the striketeam channel, only to immediately get PM’d by a lead asking me to come hop in the hangout channel and show it off for everybody. Good times. Had to put in some extra work to get the “iceman” tech in.

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Snails! Another update I had a big hand in; I was the engineering owner for snails, and also helped out a bit with some of the snail mission interactions. Ended up putting in some extra work for the “snail hide and seek” missions that was versatile enough to keep getting re-used later. Always good to make a generic tool someone actually uses more than once.

Turns out, snails can be complicated. There was a lot of multiplayer state, interactions and unique effects that everybody wanted to get in, to make sure that having a “pet snail” was actually cool. I remember there being a lot of conflicting functionality that had to be massaged quite a bit to get everything cooperating nicely. Stilgar’s my favorite.

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I wasn’t the engineering owner for Rails; the engineer who was did a fantastic job, and she was great fun to work with. I came off the back of the previous Controls update, and the Rails team needed a bit more engineering support to hit a deadline, so I hopped in and got up to speed with the systems and spec, fleshed out the rail cars / rail station, and then took point post-launch to help out with bugs.

Hoo boy, was this update a labor of love. I think this was probably the most complicated post-launch update to date? Again, the engineering owner for Rails did the majority of the core system layout and interaction, and I hopped in later to help flesh things out. Man, some of the bugs were gnarly. My notebook was full of train arrival / departure diagrams; the type of stuff that you’d see in your nightmares as a middle school math student.

I have another fun anecdote where, due to unfortunate happenstance, I was pretty much the only engineer on the striketeam that was available for the first two weeks after launch. As expected, we needed a hotfix to knock out a bunch of ugly bugs, and I remember staring down a very stubborn-looking jira task inbox, only to somehow find an inner well of power and knock nearly all of them out in the first week. Coming into work the next monday and seeing QA mark all of my bugfixes as “resolved” with no issue was an incredible feeling.

Man, I’m boring.

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SES was a really fun place to work, and my longest gig to date (although it still kinda feels like I was only there for a year). First game I’ve worked on that has had big media coverage and player reactions for every update; while I’ve gotten a little jaded with industry hype, I’m definitely still really proud of all that I contributed to Astroneer.