BioWare / Electronic Arts : Star Wars The Old Republic
Turning a personal pet project into a compelling product.
Prototype driving final implementation
In 2010, I was working at BioWare doing the UX/UI for their game. I discovered that I had a interest in working deeper than just the UI. I was intrigued by game engines and working within the 3D space. However, the game engine we were using was too intimidating to work with.
So, at home in the evenings I decided to explore other game engines. I was a Macintosh based and a Google search for 'Mac game engine' lead me to Unity. In 2010, Unity was a very small and unknown product, but I decided to give it a try. Looking back now, a very wise choice.
I started to learn and tinker, I created a rudimentary space game. It had levels, enemies, goals and even an intro sequence. I was proud and showed it to upper management at work, they took a look and gave me some great feedback.
Around this time, I was also given the task of owning the Galaxy Map for The Old republic. This was quite exciting for me, and I started mocking-up the design. However, I was having trouble getting the engineers to make anything that matched mock-ups or had any polish. I was getting the bare minimum to meet the functional requirements.
So, I decided to use my Unity experience and create a working prototype. I took some time and what I learned from my space game and created a prototype. The prototype was the magic that I needed, it was basically an animatic that described the experience. It was much easier to get engineering to match my vision. The prototype drove what we shipped with and have today.
The prototype spawned another idea - I thought, how about an interactive Galaxy map that runs outside of the game? I got busy and created a proof of concept, I presented this to my boss and the marketing team. They loved it, in particular that it ran on a iPad first gen.
I continued to polish and perfect the experience. Adding things like a detailed-sector-view, crawl text, ships and even videos. Finishing it off by localizing the content for French and German.
We launched the Galaxy Map while I was at the Unity developers conference in SF. The teaser email went out to our mailing list of over 2 million people. I even presented the Galaxy Map to the CEO of unity and he was quite impressed. I asked him to check his download stats for his Unity plug-in and we both noticed a large spike when the email went out.
Kotaku and other press picked-up the Galaxy Map story and it was all quite exciting. In the end, our customers and fans had a cool immersive experience to enjoy!