Roles

Gameplay and Network Programmer

Studio

Frontwire Studios LLC

Date

May 2020 - Present

Technologies

Unreal Engine 4, C++, Blueprints, git, SVN

Platforms

PC - Steam

Overview

Galaxy in Turmoil’s conceptual Early Access game is a FREE multiplayer combined-arms game set in a brand-new universe, created by a team of volunteers with a single vision: Create a franchise that is community-focused. It’s all about endless arms races, corporate espionage, and, most of all, blasting up on the enemy faction and taking their stuff.

Comm capital ship

Galaxy in Turmoil features flexible scenarios where you, the player, decide how best to complete your mission. Need to take down a shield generator to advance your team’s objective? Sneak in on foot and plant some remote explosives or hop in a starfighter and carry out bombing runs. If you’re so inclined, you can even grab a tank and storm right into the enemy base. Want to disable that pesky capital ship that’s scraping the upper atmosphere? Strap into a pilot seat and soar up through the clouds. The choice is yours!

Vori scape pod

A sour release

While the idea behind Galaxy in Turmoil was pretty cool, it turned out to be a bit too ambitious for our small, budget-strapped team. We put in a lot of hard work trying to deliver something that came close to what the community was hoping for, but, in the end, it didn’t quite pan out as expected. Still, we’re proud of what we managed to achieve with the limited resources we had.

One thing we can pat ourselves on the back for is that, for a while, we did manage to serve up an exciting 24 vs. 24 player-versus-player experience in large maps with all sorts of vehicles and capital ships. We had a basic variety of weapons, gadgets, classes, and heroes, and all of this was created by a team of fewer than 20 developers working in their spare time. Unfortunately, we had to pull the plug on the 24 vs. 24 PvP mode because it simply wasn’t fun to play, and we lacked a dedicated game designer. As time went on, it became clear that our limited development time was a significant hindrance.

Additionally, we had to stop paying for the dedicated servers provided by Nitrado, so we decided to focus on the Close Quarters experience, which, at the very least, had better design and managed to capture part of the gameplay experience we had in mind.

CQ experience

My responsibilities in Galaxy in Turmoil were mainly gameplay programming and networking.