Lost Boys Interactive

After Zynga, I went to Lost Boys Interactive to continue my career in a Lead Engineer capacity. Moving away from mobile games, this opportunity allowed me to start developing and leading teams on AAA titles that had a wealth of existing knowledge and talent capable of delivering games. My first couple months involved overseeing the conclusion of Tiny Tina Wonderlands DLC before taking that knowledge onto similar projects.

Unannounced Titles

I started at Lost Boys as essentially a Lead UI Engineer (called “Associate Tech Director”) being responsible for the UI engineers responsible for two of our internally developed titles. Both games shared a UI tech stack built in Coherent Prysm, across two different versions of the Unreal Engine (4.20ish and 5.1)

Both games presented different challenges: For the older version of Unreal, the team took an existing shipped title and leveraged the existing tech stack to create additional content and features within the constraints of the engine. For the newer version, we worked alongside a larger UI team that had originally built the tech stack to rewrite it from the ground up.

Key IC contributions I was able to make while leading both projects include writing a custom gamepad cursor solution, developing HUD widgets like nameplates and health bars, and debugging a variety of Coherent-related issues with the custom code written on top of it.

After demonstrating capabilities as an Associate Tech Director, I was promoted in May to lead a wider range of technical responsibilities on one of the two projects I was overseeing UI on internally. This expanded my domain to everything from overseeing performance data being submitted to our back end metrics to feature conversations across the game as well as a lot of my original duties with respect to UI development/management.

One large initiative I was able to oversee to completion was taking our old version of Coherent from 1.19 to 1.35 with help from the Coherent development team. This involved a lot of technical hurdles as our existing tech was incompatible with a variety of features in the plugin and needed custom solutions for landing it safely.