P11
Eidos Montréal
This is probably the hardest page of this portfolio to write. Not only does it mean looking back on a project that was cancelled, a project I cared about deeply and whose cancellation I still find unfair and hard to understand, but I also have to be careful about what I share, since I am legally bound not to disclose confidential information.
So please don't expect visuals or in-depth details about the game itself: I will deliberately stay on the surface and focus on my role and the work I did.
P11 was an AAA game developed by Eidos Montréal. It was meant to be a single-player, story-driven experience. Development started on Unreal Engine 4 before the project was migrated to Unreal Engine 5, a transition I lived through firsthand, with all the technical challenges that come with it.
I spent four and a half years on P11 as a Tools Developer. It was my introduction to the professional AAA industry, and the project on which I grew from intern, to junior, and finally to intermediate developer.
My role
My work on P11 was very versatile, but mostly centered on in-engine tools for Unreal. My goal was simple: make the lives of the content creators easier, whether they were level designers, environment artists, tech artists or FX artists, so they could spend less time fighting the editor and more time building the game.
Tools I owned
- Designer Tool: a tool to quickly populate the world with objects. Users picked the actors to place, the density, the brush size and a set of constraints (such as rotation), then simply "painted" them into the level, much like Unreal's foliage tool, but for any kind of actor. It turned a slow, one-by-one placement process into a matter of a few brush strokes.
- Teleportation Tool: a new way to move actors in the world. Instead of dragging them around with the gizmo or typing exact coordinates in the Details panel, users just selected the objects and pressed a keyboard shortcut to instantly move them to the cursor's location. A small feature, but one that saved countless clicks every day.
- Foliage Tools: with the move to Unreal Engine 5.0 and the introduction of World Partition, the foliage tools were completely broken. I was responsible for fixing and maintaining them, and for communicating directly with Epic Games to report issues and find solutions, a critical task, since the game made heavy use of foliage.
- Asset Tag Editor: an in-editor tool to add, edit and remove tags on assets, making it easier for the team to organize, search and filter content in a large production.
- Quality of Life features: many smaller improvements aimed at specific teams, including new Blueprint nodes for tech artists, changes to the Niagara editor for FX artists, and a character jump visualization tool for level designers, allowing them to see exactly where the player could reach while building their levels.
Beyond Unreal
I was also part of the team that developed a web-based tool, a kind of "Google Maps" for the game's world. It displayed a wide range of information on top of the map, such as activity heatmaps, points of interest (POI) and player movements, giving the team a clear, data-driven overview of the world and how it was being played. Building it with web technologies made it easily accessible to anyone: it could be used straight from a browser, without needing a development environment set up and running.
What I take away from it
Even though P11 never saw the light of day, it remains the project that shaped me as a game developer and tools developer. It taught me how to work within a large AAA team, how to build tools that real users depend on every day, and how to handle the complexity of a major engine upgrade in the middle of production. I am proud of the work we accomplished, even if the world will never get to see it.