Game development considerations

My CD Projekt RED story, part 3 We are now 2 years into my CD Projekt RED adventure and so far, it’s been mostly smooth sailing. I got promoted to a QA Analyst position, an equivalent of a specialist position for developers. I was earning around 2600zł or $650 per month, which would sometimes go as high as 3500zł with additional crunch pay. At this point I felt fairly rewarded for my efforts and could even start planning my wedding. I also received the first bonus for my participation in the creation of both Witcher 3 expansions. This amounted to roughly 13.000zł or $4250, which was an amount of money I had a hard time wrapping my head around. I still lived in a single room in an apartment I shared with other people, but at this point it was mostly my own choice. I’ve had my own wedding on the horizon so I needed every coin I could save for the occasion. Getting out of QA It was during that time that I decided I want to transition away from doing QA work. I approached the audio te

My CD Projekt RED story, part 2 Once the Blood and Wine expansion was wrapped up, the crunch period has ended for the majority of the teams at CDPR. Since there was quite a bit of downtime, the QA team started a series of internal trainings. These would cover many aspects of game development and were presented by embedded QA testers and designers alike. Downtime learning I signed up for as many of these trainings as I could and presented a lecture about audio myself. It was a blast, you could feel the dedication each of the lecturers had to help their peers grow as developers. Around the same time one of the gameplay designers started an internal C++ course, which I immediately signed up for. The concept of programming have always intrigued me. I made multiple attempts to learn how to code before, but would always give up sooner or later. In spite of me getting the syntax quite easily, I just couldn’t see how these skills I was learning could actually be used. When I enrolled on t

My CD Projekt RED story, part 1 When I joined CD Projekt RED in October of 2015, I was positively thrilled. I did not expect to be given this opportunity with only 9 months of previous game development, or rather games testing experience. But there I was, joining one of the most acclaimed gamedev teams in the world. I was hired as a QA tester in the heat of the Hearts of Stone expansions certification process. My first contract would be a 3 months of probation. I was offered around 1600zł, or roughly $400 a month, which was less than I previously made at one of the Warsaw’s test labs. I figured the limited savings I gathered would see me through those financially rough 3 months, so I accepted the offer. Getting to work I was immediately thrown into deep waters, but with the training help I received from my leads I was slowly learning the tropes of the trade of in-house testing. I had no previous experience with any game engine, let alone one of such complexity as the RED engine.

It’s been a while since the last article I published. I was busy wrapping up a project I’m working on currently, which, as most game development projects do, turned out to require a little more attention than was planned. The project I was working on was my first porting gig. As can be expected, this exposed me to a bunch of problems I never considered before. One of the tasks I was assigned was writing up a radial menu control, and that’s what I would like to write about today. Radial menu At its core, a radial menu is nothing more than a UI control that consists of a circular items layout and an optional direction indicator. Seems simple enough, right? Well, as it often is with simple concepts, there is a ton of things that go into writing a radial control that is responsive, easy to use and flexible enough. Initial guidelines Let’s start by quickly going over some of the initial discussions I had with people who had done this sort of work before. It’s very important to go thr