Who Am I?
I’m Peter Wester and I have been an Engine Programmer here at Frictional Games since late 2011.
I work from my apartment in Stockholm, Sweden. I used to have a nice big desk, but after getting a PS4 Devkit it has become cramped.
Background
My gaming interest started as a kid when my parents bought a Sega Megadrive and I became obsessed with Sonic the Hedgehog.
On my 12th birthday I got a program called Multimedia Fusion. It was a 2D game maker that didn’t need any coding knowledge. Instead you placed objects on a canvas and gave them existing behaviors to get them to move or collide. I used this to try and recreate my favorite 2D games. The most memorable one was a GTA clone with the goal of killing as many civilians as possible before the timer was up.
This got me interested in how games were made and I started to look for tools to modify other games. Me and my friend would replace all the voice acting in Worms with our own recordings or make custom maps for Counter-Strike.
It wasn’t until high school that I got into programming. After taking a programming course and learning basic C++ I downloaded the Doom 3 SDK and tried to understand the code; eventually I started helping out on a few overly ambitious mods that never got close to being released.
After high school I applied to a game development education at Stockholm’s University. It didn’t turn out to be the best education, but I met a lot of people and started making games from scratch. Three years later me and three of my friends dropped out and started a game company.
We made games for Android and iOS and I was in charge of game design and programming. After releasing two games we got the chance to go to China and meet up with a contact and start a subsidiary there. We made some money and got a few awards but after two years we decided to shut down the company to focus on other things.
I started looking for a job and saw a blog post about Frictional hiring an engine programmer. Knowing that Frictional had their own engine and that I wanted to focus on programming I decided to apply.
What do I do?
As an Engine Programmer I take care of the code that makes up the foundation of the game. The game is built on top of this. We’ve separated the engine and game code; this means that the engine can be used for multiple different games. In fact, most of the engine code used for Amnesia: The Dark Descent is still in HPL3 (our latest engine version) and could run the game with a few tweaks.
What an engine needs to provide is different for each title. For instance, SOMA requires a way to simulate physics, to render a believable 3D world, to play sound effects and to support fast iteration of level creation. My job is to make sure all those exist and work as they should.
An Engine Programmer’s job can be broken down to two basic parts: adding features, and supporting existing features. Adding a new feature takes about 1-2 months and goes something like this:
When I added Depth of Field to the engine I started out by researching the subject. I read up on tech blogs and research papers to find the best implementations of Depth of Field. I decided to try out two versions, an expensive bokeh version and a more standard blur based one. After implementing both and getting feedback I decided to go with the blur based version since it was cheaper and fit with our underwater aesthetic. Once completed I added script functions and made a helper class so that the gameplay programmers could add it where it was needed.
Some tech features also need to work in the editor. When I’m done with such a feature I hand it over to Luis who later adds it to the editor in a user-friendly way.
The closer a project gets to the end, more of my time gets spent on supporting and improving the code. This could mean fixing bugs that have been reported or optimizing code to make the game run faster.
I’ll test the game on different hardware and make sure it runs as fast as it should. If it doesn’t I’ll try and figure out what’s causing the game to be slow and then find a solution to that problem.
