Disclaimer: These thoughts are my own, My involvement with this project is purely professional and I will not be discussing NDA information.
The WWE 2K games represent a consistently dependable product that caters to one of the most dedicated fanbases around, and I'm very happy to be involved. From 2022 to 2024 I worked on supporting and implementing new features, under the company Lost Boys Interactive. Due to their excellent support work on WWE 2k22, Lost Boys were able to take on more ownership over systems. When I joined the company, Lost Boys had begun ownership of entire game-modes. My work on the project primarily focused on the always online, content driven game-mode "MyFaction". This game centers around a card game theme where the player wins matches to gain and upgrade wrestler cards. There are also many mechanics centered around augmenting the wrestler cards abilities, sometimes for a limited time. This game-mode features a virtual currency store as well as daily events.
Client
Over the dev-cycles I primarily focused on creating technical design documents informed by GDDs. Most of the front end work was done in C++ in a proprietary engine, with its own quirks and hidden complexities. The documentation was very extensive though, so common practices were usually very agreed upon. I started out extending UI functionality and fixing bugs, but then transitioned into owning entire screens and systems. As my knowledge of the engine grew I was transitioned into a senior role and became a subject matter expert for several systems. I was also transitioned to a full-stack engineer.
Backend
The backend was mostly Python, custom content tools, and a SQL database. I primarily worked with extending the content tooling for new features. Much of the server architecture worked off of RPCs, so most server work was retrieving and packing necessary data to be sent to the client. Often, It was my role to write the client-side parsing of this data, and connecting it to the UI systems.
Conclusion
This project helped expand my C++ and Python knowledge to a very comfortable level. I got opportunities to own large systems and work closely with different disciplines. Its awesome to be able to help out with such a cool project.