I worked on the 2010 Pop for most of its development. I really got into working with Ubisoft's primary Engine and made a lot of improvements and fixes. Overall I was really happy with the game. If nothing else it had very solid gameplay. It didn't fare so well on Game Rankings (76) but most of the complaints seemed to be about the story and setting.

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At first I wasn't terribly impressed with Ubisoft's Anvil engine. It seems bloaty and convoluted. It did, however, use c# for the editor which was impressive.

My first impression quickly changed however. Sometimes it just takes time to understand the workings of some so enormous. Anvil is a pretty big engine with a lot of very interesting features. Obviously I can't go into a lot of detail but it is by far the best engine I've ever worked with. It manages to maintain a good balance between power and flexibility and build times.

Like usual my work was spread around the engine. I made fixes and improvements to the file system, build pipeline and editor. I implemented a new feature, based off of work done on Assassins Creed, to help artists and level designers manage work and to be able to categorize and interact with objects at run time (think Photoshop Layers).

Because of my previous work on Shaun White I also worked a lot on audio. I created a system to simulate the sounds of the large groups of creatures we had in the game without playing separate sounds for each. With this system we could reduce the number of sounds playing by 70-80% and not hear a difference.

Towards the end of the project I worked on the Save Game system and related platform TCRs and the usual array of random bug fixing.

So far I think this was my favorite project to work on. I got to work with a lot of talented guys that I worked with before on lost and I was able to learn and improve upon and already impressive engine. I can only hope that I will be able to work with it again but this project has definitely helped to improve me as well in many ways.