Fortune Online

Fortune Online was a browser-based fantasy dungeon crawler MMO from NetDevil and Gazillion Entertainment, played in real time in a web browser with no client download. It ran on a custom Flash-based engine, entered closed beta in February 2011 and open beta a few months later in June. The game shut down in February 2012.

After a couple of years as NetDevil’s web developer, I moved to the studio’s newly created web games division to work on Fortune Online, primarily as a tools programmer.

What I worked on

• Built the in-house asset pipeline, where artists imported character armor and weapon meshes and animations into a database, a render farm rendered every equipment permutation at 8 isometric angles, and the results were packaged for immediate in-game use
• Built an animation authoring tool that let animators compose final animations from the rendered frames without any additional renders
• Optimized the packing of rendered animation frames, raising how many characters the game could have on screen at once
• Wrote the gameplay audio system in ActionScript, including 3D positional sound
• Built the audio authoring tooling, so sound engineers authored the game’s audio themselves without going through a programmer
• Did general gameplay programming alongside the tools work