Shane Whitfield

Overview
The Matrix Online was developed at Monolith Productions in Kirkland, WA by a team of 105 employees over a period of approximately 4 years. It was released in the US on March 22, 2005.

My Role
I began my tenure at Monolith as the Abilities Implementation Intern, moved on to Abilities System Engineer, and finally progressed to Abilities and Combat Systems Engineer.

As an intern, my responsibilities included implementing abilities in Python. Design communicated the requirements of each ability via emailed documents, and my task was to implement these as requested.

In my role as an Abilities System Engineer, I exposed ability functionality through a game object tool which allowed designers to implement skills effectively without reliance on engineers. Additionally I assisted in the creation of the ability system using Python and C++. This entailed writing client server code to validate system usage, connecting skills to attributes and status as well as implementing attributes to physics, world, and player properties. In order to provide a mechanism for more effective communication for the designers, I also assisted in the creation of a tool that allowed designers to input new items and skills and get feedback on whether these ideas were balanced or not.

As the Abilities and Combat Systems Engineer, I handled all new combat and ability requests and formed a combat strike team, which analyzed and rebalanced combat and abilities. In addition, the combat strike group added features for enhancing player enjoyment. I personally did the engineering for these features. The major tasks included reworking the combat and animation systems along with analyzing additional combat exposures and exposing them. This group created Combat Version 2.0, which helped to dramatically increase the number of active players.

Skills Built
● Improved understanding of client server architecture
● Experience with the game industry production pipeline
● Professional experience with Python, C/C++
● Experience meeting management expectations and deadlines
● Experience managing meetings and creating task lists from meeting discussions

Overview
Tornado Outbreak was created at Loose Cannon Studios in Kirkland, WA by a team of approximately 30 employees over a period of 2 years. It was released in the US on September 29th, 2009.

My Role
My primary responsibilities were prototyping gameplay along with design and implementation of system components. My secondary function was as a code reviewer ensuring coding standards were applied and simple logic was followed. These tasks were accomplished using C/C++, C#, LUA, and VBScript.

Our approach to designing game play followed an iterative process with a primary goal of finding and enhancing the most enjoyable features of the game. Initial game play implementations were done using LUA to expedite iterations. However, once completed, C/C++ was used to optimize performance.

My work on system components included design and implementation of camera, FX, localization, and animation. The goal for the camera design was to minimize non-user input while maintaining optimal visuals. This was accomplished by coding in C/C++ using linear algebra, trigonometry, and quaternions.

I created the FX system using FX Studio in collaboration with the artists. My role was as liaison between the artists and a third party, Aristen, who developed FX Studio. After setting up FX Studio properties to enable artists to generate content, I used C# and C/C++ to pull the relevant data through the asset pipeline to the game engine. Particle dynamics were implemented using C/C++ followed by particle data rendering using OpenGL and DirectX.

For the localization task I choose Excel as the authoring tool. This allowed me to utilize VBScript to support ease of author input and for efficient export of localization data to the game. Additionally, I used C/C++ to create a system enabling the mapping of multiple languages to an ID.

To support the animation system, I authored a portion of a Maya Plugin to allow animators to map keyframes to animation ID’s. On the game engine side, I created the animation system by using Granny internally and designing a simple interface that allowed game engineers to utilize animations with a readable ID.

Skills Built
● Improved understanding of FX and animation systems
● Improved rendering techniques
● Professional experience with LUA, VBScript and C#
● Improved software architecture skills
● Improved code optimizations