For software engineers, the process of building a high-quality product is not without its challenges.
However, the biggest challenges often present the biggest opportunities for growth, and that’s especially the case for Los Angeles-based Wonderstorm, a media studio that creates video games and TV series like the Emmy Award-winning “The Dragon Prince.”
Below, Built In LA connected with Wonderstorm’s senior software engineer to dig deeper into the types of technical challenges the team recently faced, how they overcame said challenge and how the process helped them grow as engineers.
What’s the biggest technical challenge you’ve faced recently in your work?
The characters in a video game interact by performing actions on other characters and objects like dealing damage to an enemy, giving armor to an ally or opening a door. One recent challenge was deciding which characters to target with those actions. Sometimes the player picks targets with a mouse or gamepad and other times AI needs to select targets for the player. We wanted one flexible system to empower our game designers to pick the right targets in all of those situations.
It’s challenging to turn those ideas into robust, flexible code, and every challenge you solve is great training for the next.”
How did you and your team overcome this challenge?
We started solving this by brainstorming a bunch of those targeting situations with our designers. From those examples, we broke the problem down into three main steps. First, we gathered a pool of potential targets from the world. Then, we rated each target against certain criteria, and lastly, we sorted the targets and ran the actions on the best ones.
Using our custom scripting language built on Racket, we exposed options to our designers for each step. By mixing and matching those options, they were able to find the right targets for whichever actions they wanted to perform.
How did this challenge help you grow as an engineer or help you strengthen a specific skill?
Like most technical challenges in game programming, this improved my skill at translating ideas into systems. It’s challenging to turn those ideas into robust, flexible code, and every challenge you solve is great training for the next. At Wonderstorm, I get to collaborate with great designers, artists and engineers to imagine all the things we could do in a game. Then, I break those ideas down into systems that empower our team to make them real!
