Tools created for Game of Thrones: Conquest and personal projects in Unity and Maya. Those made in Unity were written in C#, while the tool in Maya was written in Python. I love tool creation because it presents a microcosm of game development: identifying needs, communicating with stakeholders, and accounting for user expectations.

Prefab Lightmapping (Unity, GoT:C, C#): A tool created to enable lightmapping in a prefab based workflow. To avoid loading multiple scenes at runtime on a mobile device, we moved the pipeline to collapse different scenes into prefabs. Some of these scenes included lightmapped environments and objects (such as keep nodes on the map or an ornate map room). This tool bakes lightmap textures to the prefab so they can be added to any scene.

Animation in Edit Mode (Unity, GoT:C, C#): A tool created for the animation and VFX pipeline with the goals of reducing wait times to test, allowing for rapid iteration and testing, and creating a clean demo environment. The Game of Thrones: Conquest Unity project, with a glut of assets and scripts, takes a while to enter play mode, regardless of scene. This tool circumvents that wait time by playing an animation in Edit Mode. By creating an empty particle system, the editor tool can sync with real time, able to playback animations, VFX, or both in real time.

Sprite Atlas Manager (Unity, GoT:C, C#): A tool for artists from across the team to view, create, and manipulate Sprite Atlas assets. Implemented alongside a project wide update to the new Unity Sprite Atlas system, this tool consolidates the common interactions an artist may need to perform when modifying sprites. The tool uses a dictionary to keep track of atlases, store atlas contents, and track changes.

Procedural Maya Geo (Maya, Personal Work, Python): A tool created in Maya to allow artists to quickly create randomized cube structures following a controllable ruleset. Hanging Gardens allows for fine control of cube type, materials, names, structure size, and smaller conical structures within hollow cubes, to name a few.