Ashes of Oahu

Ashes of Oahu is an open world, post-apocalyptic RPG shooter set in Hawaii, where you tap into the power of the spirit world to liberate the island of Oahu from the army that occupies it. Developed and published by Wyrmbyte in Unreal Engine 4, it released on Steam for PC in August 2019.

As a senior programmer at Wyrmbyte I worked with a small team across gameplay, systems, the open world, UI, and CI/CD.

What I worked on

• Built the open world encounter and spawning systems that populate the island based on region, terrain, and faction control, resulting in emergent behavior between warring factions and fauna
• Helped set up world composition level streaming and optimized it for a large open world
• Wrote optimization tooling that baked world composition level geometry into instanced meshes, cutting draw calls enough to bring the open world back to a shippable frame rate
• Built the outpost clearing system, a Far Cry style loop of taking enemy-held outposts one at a time to push the occupying army off the island region by region
• Built the hatch network, a set of safe rooms across the island where players could reach their weapon locker, sleep, save, and fast travel to any other hatch they had already found
• Built the map, compass, and guidance systems that point players to objectives across the open world
• Contributed extensively to the game’s menus and HUD, providing full gamepad support and input icons that updated when hot swapping input methods
• Built most of the enemy and friendly NPC AI, driven by Unreal’s Behavior Trees and AI Perception
• Worked on the weapon system and numerous other gameplay systems
• Maintained a custom Unreal Engine 4 engine and editor build for the project
• Built an in-house patcher and launcher that distributed the custom editor build to the team, so artists and designers auto-updated to new engine builds without engineering help
• Managed many Unreal Engine version upgrades over the life of the project
• Built and maintained the Jenkins CI/CD pipeline end to end, so anyone on the team could pick up a current playable build without asking an engineer