A VALORANT Portfolio

September 20, 2020 Arkem

I'm changing jobs (after almost 7 years at Riot, that's a long run!) and I wanted to post a bunch of links to public facing stuff from my time at Riot, mostly VALORANT stuff from the past year, this is very self indulgent but think of it as a portfolio of sorts.

Writing

Riot Tech Blog - Fog of War

Game Update 01: ON RAZE AND ANTI-CHEAT

Game Update 02: ON VANGUARD ERRORS/SOLUTIONS, GUN SKINS, AND AGENT PROGRESSION

Game Update 04: ON PEEKER’S ADVANTAGE & RANKED

Ask Valorant #5

Dev Blog: Anti-cheat What, Why, and How

Dev Blog: VALORANT ANTI-CHEAT: CHEATER, REPORTED!

Reddit comment about the first cheaters banned

Reddit comment about running a driver at boot

Reddit comment about a performance regression

My Riot Reddit Account history

Tweet about how many cheaters exist in games and how that feels for players:

There wasn't a right or wrong answer to this poll but I do have some background to give.

It's hard to measure cheating rates because we often have imperfect detection. Devs normally estimate cheating populations by extrapolating from detections, player reports and research. https://t.co/UOzBTkVkNy
— Paul Chamberlain (@arkem) June 26, 2020

Interviews / News clips

I did a lot of interviews and got asked for quotes many times, I didn't do a good job keeping track of how those quotes and interviews were used but here are some of them that I could find after the fact.

Polygon: Valorant: How Riot finally made something new

Nerd Street Gamers Interview Video

InvenGlobal: Valorant has prepared to deal with hacks from the very beginning

Polygon: Valorant team bans over 8,000 cheaters in closed beta

IGN: Valorant Cheaters Remain Banned After Beta

ChinaJoy Keynote official page

ChinaJoy Keynote Video

VICE: The Vigilante Hunting Down Cheaters in Video Games

Riot: A Message About Vanguard From Our Security & Privacy Teams

Engadget: Valorant’s always-on anti-cheat system, Vanguard, is invasive AF

Valorant Game Features

Most of what I build for Valorant was behind the scenes technical systems there are some more visible features that I want to highlight below.

Fog of War

Here's the "with Fog of War enabled" clip from the article https://t.co/FdTY2tWICz pic.twitter.com/TK6bdBsm1F
— Paul Chamberlain (@arkem) April 14, 2020

Player facing no-hud/cinematic mode

Early grenade physics (~2015 version)

Character select (the first version ~2015)

Security error messages / ban messages (UI and plumbing)

https://twitter.com/arkem/status/1193343334636326912

Here's me being banned from Project A. I am better at security than at art but my "HACKER DETECTED" screen is a thing of beauty. pic.twitter.com/3N0953yqq0
— Paul Chamberlain (@arkem) November 10, 2019

https://twitter.com/Ninja/status/1278388868534894599

Feelsgoodman pic.twitter.com/xxhuYomrVF
— Ninja (@Ninja) July 1, 2020

Lots of behind the scenes stuff

Anti-cheat and security systems, network encryption, performance optimization, UI tweaks, gameplay telemetry system, engine upgrades, middleware integrations, code analysis tools and lots more that I've already forgotten.