What's been your favorite feature to work on and develop so far?
TL;DRThe speakers name different favorites: the friends and social system, the Character Customizer for its small-team iteration, and, for Reininger, isolated projects like quantum travel, missions, economy work and the friends system.
Certainly the friends system, the social system. Man, I'm excited about the work that we're going to be doing on that in the future as well. Like I said, my anecdote before wasn't a lie. I've got friends that I want to get in here and playing with me, but I've been a little hesitant because the onboarding experience hasn't been particularly good. And now I think it's particularly good. So I'm looking forward to getting some of those people in and looking at the amazing work that everybody else has been doing in the game. And that's really what our job is, to make all that stuff much more accessible and visible to the users. So that's my favorite one so far.
My answer is a little less about the feature and more about the process. I would say the Character Customizer is probably my favorite one to work on, specifically the Character Customizer experience, because I was not the one who implemented the actual face morphing, but rather the whole front-end experience of it.
It's definitely the funniest to work on, too.
Making that random button is pretty fun, especially before we had symmetrical faces. So that was a ton of fun just for playing with, but the process of making that was the most enjoyable too, because the core of that work was done between myself, John, and one of our other designers, Calix, with lots of ancillary parts and helpers and such. And this was actually before we were under the purview of US PU for most of that development, like Q2, Q3 last year. But that was most enjoyable for me because we were actually able to iterate on it multiple quarters. I'm sure you guys remember, technically there's been three live versions of the customizer, and I did work on all three of them, but ignoring the first one for now, when we redid it with DNA initially in Q1 of last year, we had those radial sliders and stuff. We did that, but we weren't super happy with it, so we spent more time to reiterate on it, and we had a really close-knit team of only a couple developers, and personally, I could iterate with John and Calix, and even though I'm a programmer, I like to pretend I'm a designer sometimes and be like, "Well, guys, what if we did it like this?" And that was when the job was the most fun for me: a small team doing lots of iterations to make the best experience. And obviously, we have the benefit of this being a very isolated feature that's separate from the sheer cluster of PU features, but the process itself is what made that one so enjoyable to work on.
The Character Customizer almost got to cheat in a way, because it was completely separated from everything else, where everybody else has to develop their feature and then integrate it with everything else, which is where bugs often come from.
You'd think that, but now we're relying on so many microservices that break all the time, and I get bugs. It was the loadout service. It was the variable service.
Oh, man. I've been here for too long and worked on too many things. It's been six years. It's crazy. There's something to be said about it: I've had the most fun working on projects that have, again, kind of been an isolated thing that the team doesn't have to go to a bunch of external teams to get support from. It's just the iteration time, the turnaround speed that we can do things is much better. I had fun working on the quantum travel stuff. I had fun trying to figure out the mission givers. Talking with Tony on the economy stuff has been a blast. My role has kind of changed and morphed over time, much more trying to work with Tony on future schedules and plans and trying to keep these guys moving on a day-to-day basis, more so than making things as much nowadays. Which in and of itself has been kind of fun. I've always enjoyed the games industry because it's always something new and different every project. So I'd say those things. I'm really happy with the Friends stuff. I've wanted to work on the social system for a while. I look forward to what we're going to do with that, and I look forward to seeing how that's going to affect the game and just the numbers that we're seeing. So yeah, I think anything that I've worked on where I've gotten to actually see a tangible result or comments and thanks from the fans has been just a joy. Because that's why I do it, right? I make games because I want other people to experience things and have fun. And so to see the fans on Reddit or Spectrum or wherever react well to something that we did was cool.