Time Flies
Where has the time gone?! It’s almost been 2 years since my last update and there is so much to cover and update you all on. Last post left off revealing that I internally switched teams at Hi-Rez to begin work on a new IP. Here is the backstory of that.
Paladins was doing well and with the battle royale hype train in full swing across multiple developers, Hi-Rez wanted in on the action. So a small team within the Paladins team spun up to take the Paladins IP and make a battle royale. The first prototype was done within the Paladins engine and codebase and was called Paladins Battlegrounds. I was one of the few who worked on this prototype while still supporting Paladins proper. After much deliberation it was decided that this new game would be spun up but as it’s own game. Enter Realm Royale. This is when I stepped down from Paladins and joined the new team, Heroic Leap, charged with getting Realm Royale out the door. This occurred roughly around the same time Hi-Rez was doing some internal re-organization and making all the game projects their own teams.
Now Paladin’s Battlegrounds prototype was kicked off in 2 months and teased in January 2018 and then Realm Royale was released 5 months later in June 2018. Talk about staying busy! After we officially launched Realm Royale, things shifted into long term content support (making content for new battlepasses, weapons, and equipment) to keep players engaged. This continued for roughly a year and I was the only Tech Artist supporting that game. A ton of cool stuff was created from scratch for Realm Royale such as the weapon system, handling multiple devices, hit reactions, lean tech and ground alignment for mounts, and much much more. Like I have said in previous posts, that’s the kind of game creation I’m addicted to. Taking a problem and figuring out the system to handle it.
Then came the next transition in early 2019 as I was asked to join a small strike team that was spinning up. The goal of this strike team was to take our extensive knowledge of making games and to objectively look at any of the games in Hi-Rez's library to provide feedback and help. Our first client was the team working on Rogue Company! Some things I tackled were hit reactions, weapon exploration for the sword, overall knowledge dumping on the best way to handle weapon swapping (since I helped create the system of weapon swapping on Realm Royale), as well as a ton of game feedback.
That lasted for about 2 months until I was once again asked for my expertise on a new IP. The new IP already had a small team working on it but they needed more manpower, so I joined the team and began putting my skills to use. Roughly 1 year after I joined and many many iterations later, welcome Prophecy. Prophecy is our take on the auto battler genre using licensed Smite assets. Being the sole Tech Artist on this IP has once again kept me really busy. Especially since the team behind Prophecy is now its own studio independent of Hi-Rez.