Jedi: Fallen Order - Respawn Entertainment, MAY 2019 - NOV 2019

I joined the Star Wars team about six months before Fallen Order shipped, and was primarily responsible for implementing cinematics, particularly intro/outro transitions for smooth blending between cinematic and gameplay. I also assisted level design with a lot of last-minute toys and interactables, things like doors and platforms that have unique interactions with the player’s force powers, destructables, and puzzles, and general bug fixing across the entire project.

There’s not too much else to say, design-wise, since I came in so late in development and was largely finaling elements of the game that already existed, but I did learn a lot about weaving cinematics into gameplay (in a sort of high-pressure boot-camp fashion working with our cinematics team), and the contributions I did make were mostly fun little in-level toys the player could use force powers on, which I love. When development was over I wrote up a doc on my findings from setting up cinematic transitions as a guide for our cinematics team going into the sequel, which ended up informing a lot of those same decisions on Survivor.

Jedi was built in Unreal Engine 4, and most of my tasks were accomplished in Blueprint or Unreal’s various built-in tools. This was my first professional use of Unreal (prior to Jedi my experience was limited to tutorials and small side projects) and this six-month sprint was a crash course in full-scale AAA development in Unreal, which forced me to learn a lot very quickly. I’ve since used Unreal for the entirety of Jedi Survivor’s development and several other projects, and Unreal has become a second home for me as far as game development goes.