An Omega Strikers Portfolio

Now that Omega Strikers has been in maintenance mode for a little while I thought it'd be a good time to write down my contributions before my memory starts to get hazy.

I did some freelance work on Omega Strikers in the few months leading up to the beta, so the game was well established but needed a few technical bits and pieces done before launch.

 

In particular I did some security audit work and found the game in good shape with the exception of two speed hack bugs that we managed to fix before launch (embarrasingly we accidentally briefly un-fixed one of them later though). I also built an AFK/abuse detection system (primarily looking at idleness and own goal scoring) as well as doing a lot of server performance and infrastructure work (decreased server costs by roughly 33% and came up with the launch server provisioning strategy), I contributed in a small way to client performance optimizations as well with CPU side optimization and assisting the team with PSO caching (primarily for mobile platforms).

 

By far my biggest impact on the project though was the creating of a "micropatch" system that allowed designers to update the balance of the live game without a code deploy. This was especially important for a crossplatform game where code deploys were expensive and often needed more than a week's notice. The system used Unreal Engine's reflection system to runtime patch the default values of attributes in the game allowing the design team to adjust values like cooldowns and damage as well as turn on and off content as necessary. The system isn't 100% robust but since I built it in about 2 weeks and it became the backbone of our live-ops I think we got great value out of it. Later after the game shipped I'd learn that I'd indepedently come up with a technique that was commonly being used by modders of Unreal Engine games (specifically Satisfactory), it's nice to know that I was in good company with my tech!

 

I had so much fun freelancing on Omega Strikers that when New Avalon had to go on hiatus I was happy to accept a full time role at Odyssey Interactive and for the last while I've been there running tech for one of their future games! I hope I get to write a "Portfolio" blog post about that game someday as well, it'll probably end up being much longer than this!

 

Omega Strikers is available on PC (Steam), PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One / Xbox Series, Switch, Android, and IOS and is free to play! Get your friends together and have a blast with some anime airhockey action!