Philipp Geyer

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Vikings

Photo by Erik Mclean from Pexels

This was a project that interested me greatly. It was a tie-in with the Netflix series of the same name. Unfortunately I inherited a project that had come from a previous design iteration, so while we had some work to begin with, a large amount of it had to be restarted.

The best way that I could describe the game is, a multiplayer, turnbased battle system, similar to, for example, Final Fantasy VII, with team building and character collecting.

The team we started off with was just me, a designer, and the artists that had been on the project since the beginning. My first task was to identify what we needed to get the project completed. I hired programmers for the main game development, but then also found a contract company to provide backend and network development support. With the guidance of the backend expert, I designed an architecture that would allow us to develop the game in a staged way, so that it should not require major rewrites to add features or change technologies when we scaled up.

As we were already playing catchup on this project, which had been running for some time before we got a hold of it, my primary goal was to get an actual multiplayer game running as soon as possible, so, while the art assets that had already been created were used, little additional final UI was created or implemented.

The next most important thing that was done on this project was for me to work with the artists to attempt to formalise an art pipeline, especially for animation, so that we had a reliable way to get high quality animations importing correctly.

The final thing that I did was migrate the project from an aging Subversion system running in-house to a cloud based git repository. This was primarily because we were working across multiple studios and I felt this was the most reliable way to be able to run the project smoothly. I provided training and support for those unfamiliar with distributed version control, and git.

Unfortunately this project did not get much further than just getting the re-envisioned proof of concept done, as the TV series got cancelled, causing the company to close the satellite studio that I was a part of.

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