Summary

• Very briefly worked on this when I started at Stellar Entertainment Software
• Worked to help automate the process of transforming data files from the sequel to be compatible with the codebase used for the remaster
  • Mostly based off of Python scripting

Personal Highlights

• Great to learn a new engine and asset pipeline
• Got to work with lots of amazing developers

Video

Project Description

I started working at Stellar Entertainment in January of 2022. Stellar was working with Nixxes on the Horizon Zero Dawn remaster at that point, along with Weaseltron and Nequinox. Initially, it was very overwhelming, similar to my experience at Ubisoft. Joining a new team with a complex development process is always challenging. Fortunately, the tools built for the game and my coworkers helped smooth the process, and by the end of my collaboration on the project, I felt very confident about the work I was doing and what the objective was. The project took advantage of the fact the sequel to Zero Dawn remade a lot of the same areas with a higher quality for the PS5. The challenge with reusing those assets was that the asset and graphics pipeline for the code bases is very different, so we had to find ways to make the assets compatible. This meant parsing asset specification files for both versions, and coding transformations for the data so that when artists moved them across projects, most of the work was done and they only needed to tweak details specific to the remaster. Some of this involved working with Python scripting which I had only very briefly touched in other contexts. Despite not having that much practical knowledge in the language, I was able to contribute to the team significantly. It was a very fun challenge, and I was very happy with the solution I came up with.