Colossal Cave - Lead Engineer
In 2022, I had the incredible privilege of working on Colossal Cave, a remake of the text adventure game from 1976. This was a project by Ken and Roberta Williams, the renowned founders of Sierra On-Line and pioneers of PC gaming and games with graphics.
As a lead engineer, I was tasked with the immense responsibility of programming and overseeing the majority of the core gameplay features. By the time the end of the project had come, I had had a hand in nearly every aspects of the game, including, but not limited to:
programming nearly all character animations and behaviors
programmed and designed nearly every puzzle in the game
'turn based' lamp system that increments moves based on traveling and actions
a larger than expected amount of design work, including sound, puzzle, characters looks and personalities, narrative design and writing
coding for enormous number of narrator and dialogue lines for nearly every location, object and interaction in the game
months of bug fixing, general QA and mountains of Jira tickets
Some systems were already partially implemented by the time I joined the team, but I had a hand in polishing/bug fixing them and bringing them to a release ready state. Some of those include: camera, UI systems, puzzle and score systems, dialogue, character controller, acquiring/detecting/dropping items, save system, inventory system, pathfinding.
In August 2022, I also had the absolute pleasure of traveling to Cologne, Germany to showcase the game at Gamescom. I sat for several interviews, answering in depth gameplay and technical questions, showing off the team's work and represented the company, Cygnus Entertainment. I also demoed and presented the game for attendees and got to meet with our partners at Unity.
The game launched on Steam in January 2023 to 'Very Positive' reviews, and in March, my contract was up!
In summary, Colossal Cave was a dream come true. It was truly an unbelievable journey and one of the most valuable and rewarding opportunities I've ever had and one that I'll always be grateful for.
