The Order: 1886

My entire employment at Ready At Dawn Studios focused on finishing development of The Order: 1886. I joined the team as a full-time Scripter towards the end of May 2014, right before the completion of their E3 Whitechapel demo and about halfway between Alpha and Beta. I stayed with the team through the approval of the Gold Master build in January 2015. I mostly worked on cinematics, the Personality System, and subtitles.

Cinematics

I worked primarily alongside Kyle Lauing (the main cinematic scripter) and the cinematic animation team (who produced character animations from motion capture for the cinematics; led by Daniel Sipes) to implement the game's cinematic sequences. One main facet of The Order's cinematics is that they play in the game's engine, which means the design of some of the levels (or cinematics) and memory management became important considerations. In some cases, we needed to reduce or manage character counts during some cinematics, add or remove particular constraints on cloth, et cetera. Another side to these cinematics is that they use the same in-game characters you play as and with; saving or changing the player/AI states during these sequences was an important factor (e.g. inventory loadouts, character moods, player models, etc.). I also worked with Dana Jan, Ru Weerasuriya, level designers, other scripters, technical artists, and the physics team to polish the cinematics and make them as seamless with gameplay and technically impressive as possible.

(YouTube playlist coming eventually)

This playlist shows all the cinematics I believe to have worked on — I say "believe" because I captured gameplay from my PS4 more than two years since I had worked on the game. You can go to the video's page for more detailed descriptions of what I did with each cinematic. If I don't explain it there, then the process likely followed this format: get character and camera animation data from animator, update pre-visualization cinematic from Alpha with new animations, do any additional relevant scripting for cinematic, and submit changes to version control.

Personality (Systemic Combat Voice-Overs)

I worked with Angelo Orlando Cafazzo (gameplay programmer) and Robert Duncan (game designer) to implement what the studio dubbed the Personality System. I wrote the LUA scripts that trigger certain VO lines to play based on the given design specifications and the lines we had recorded for the game. This scripting controls the global behavior for these combat lines; Robert and the contracted sound scripters focused on level-specific lines.

Subtitles

In the final month of development, I helped with putting subtitles into the game for all languages. I made several local modifications to the subtitle system, effectively adding event logging for easier debugging (e.g. seeing why some whole subtitles never played, why some lines were missing, why other lines appeared twice, etc.). In the final week of development, when the rest of the available scripting team and a few other volunteers began assisting with the subtitle implementation, these local changes significantly improved our workflow.

 

Besides these three main systems, I also assisted with a number of smaller tasks, including:

Checkpoints - assisted the scripting team when we needed to make full-game changes to the checkpoint system (e.g. switching to a different implementation of our checkpoint system mid-development, immediately starting cinematics or preserving post-cinematic camera angle when loading into a checkpoint, etc.)

Levels - assisted the scripting team when we needed to make full-game changes to the level files (e.g. what weapons to load with a level); repositioned force-load event volumes

Inventory/Loadouts - converted the main cast to use his or her specific blade/knife instead of a generic template; specified what weapons needed to load with each level

Tools - made a few local modifications to the overnight builder, some of which the team later incorporated into the live system