A vast world awaits in all-new, dark fantasy action-RPG, Lords of the Fallen. As one of the fabled Dark Crusaders, embark on an epic quest to overthrow Adyr, the demon God.
The game has seen several successful trailers so far:
- Announcement Trailer showcased at gamescom Opening Night Live 2022.
- Gameplay Teaser Trailer showcased at The Game Awards 2022.
- Technical Showcase Trailer showcased at State of Unreal during GDC 2023.
- Gameplay Reveal Trailer.
- Gameplay Showcase Trailer showcased at Future Games Show 2023.
- Extended Gameplay Presentation.
- Official Story Trailer showcased at gamescom Opening Night Live 2023.
- Official Overview Trailer.
- Official Launch Trailer.
- Official Accolades Trailer.
- Official Master of Fate Overview Trailer.
- Official Clash of Champions Boss Rush Mode Launch Trailer.
The game has successfully launched on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Steam Deck on Friday, 13th October 2023.
Within just 10 days of it release, the game had surpassed one million copies sold, and managed to pass the 120k viewers mark on Twitch.
Responsibilities
- Made the game work from the networking perspective, while dealing with numerous aspects of the game that include but are not limited to:
- Matchmaking:
- Revamped our Invasion Matchmaking System while utilizing Online Beacons.
- Provisioned a Custom Matchmaking by Key System.
- Fixed our Ping Calculation System, ensuring clients are matchmade with good ping to the server.
- Customization System: Synchronized character customizations by custom serialization and compression of data over the network to achieve atomic replication of data types unsupported by the Replication System.
- Save/Serialization System: Fixed vague game breaking issues that were caused by improper serialization of game state.
- Gameplay Ability System: Fixed several gameplay abilities not performing properly over the network, and made a few.
- Character Movement & Animation: Various Game & Engine level fixes to enhance the way characters move and animate.
- Level Streaming: Various Game & Engine level fixes to ensure game state is synchronized and resilient against level streaming under harsh network conditions.
- Audio: Fixed countless audio bugs, where audio wasn’t played properly across the network for all connections of interest:
- Made sure to force sending a network update when calling an unreliable multicast RPC within dormant Actors.
- Verified we don’t play audio directly inside GameplayAbilities, and instead use GameplayCues for that.
- UI:
- Fixed visually breaking issues with different in-game menus, and handled a bunch of memory leaks.
- Provisioned a dedicated, self-contained multiplayer settings menu.
- Provisioned user-facing text localization.
- Level Design: Implemented level design oriented tools to enhance the workflow of the level design team:
- Added an auto-fit outline around Invasion Areas so they are easily identifiable.
- Added Map Checks to invasion areas, to alert for malformed setup when placed in levels.
- Matchmaking:
- Profiling and optimizing game’s network bandwidth using Networking Insights:
- Effectively identified and disabled replication on many Objects and properties that didn’t need it.
- Effectively skipped data replication for connections that were able to conclude that data from elsewhere.
- Utilized Oodle Network plugin to manually compress serialized network data for improved player experience.
- Seamlessly moved bandwidth-unfriendly data to Objects that replicate less frequently, and persist longer.
- Profiling and optimizing game’s server CPU performance usage using Timing Insights:
- Effectively reduced the number of Actors reported by the NetBroadcastTickTime stat.
- Provisioned editor tools, that simplified and enhanced my workflow:
- Made a simple editor tool that scans all our project’s Blueprint assets, and inclusively finds potentially optimizable replicating Objects.
- Made a simple editor tool that triggers serialization on Blueprint assets, so that references to Gameplay Attributes can be seen in the reference viewer, to better understand how to optimize their owning Attribute Sets.
- Participated in the process of interviewing candidates for the Network Multiplayer Lead developer role:
- Reviewed a written test that was sent to them which helped pinpointing their strengths and weaknesses.
- Made sure they have an overview experience of networking in general, and the Tribes networking model in specific.
- Made sure they have an inclusive understanding of Unreal’s client-server model and guarantees.
- Took decisive decisions with a lot of caution.
- Participated in the post-mortem process of our game’s release to better pinpoint what was done right, and what could have been done better on all aspects:
- Went over what makes the multiplayer aspect of a game a potentially successful one.
- Addressed several flaws in the team’s communication and work pipeline aspects that hopefully will be done right for the next title.
- Took part in reviewing the code changes/contributions of other coders:
- Ensured code changes are resilient to data races, the bane of every multiplayer game.
- Ensured code changes stick to our coding standards and conventions, to maintain a unified standard within our codebase.