The first professional game I took part in creating was ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2. Not a bad project to be associated with considering the talent at the studio and the eventual metacritic score the game received.
I started working at ArenaNet as an intern on the tools team in October of 2008. My internship contract meant that I was only allowed to work a maximum of 30 hours a week which was fine by me as I was still had two semesters left at DigiPen. After spending 9 months working in C#, xaml, and wpf on the content editor for the game, I transitioned over to the gameplay team after graduating from school.
As a member of the gameplay team I worked alongside artists and designers in order to implement gameplay features. Being responsible for the development of a feature meant that I would expose data driven hooks to designers in our content editor, parse that data in to my game module to be used at runtime, network required state to our players, and serialize any data that would need to be saved between play sessions. After the back end was functional, I would also find myself working on the user interface in order to expose additional information about my feature that could not be understood through gameplay alone. I loved being able to have such a wide range of responsibilities and fully owning a feature from top to bottom, it was a great first gig.
Some of the features I ended up working on included the world map (my very first task), the story system, the “task hearts” area objectives, city navigation, character traits, and many others that I’ve forgotten after 6+ years.