Unreal Engine 2D/3D Combat Sim
A 2-and-3D military tactics simulation for testing new dense urban environment navigation. Built to contain complex scenario creation tools and configurations, but be easy for beginner military academy students to jump into and enjoy.
“Salem is an amazing part of every team they have ever worked on. Intellectually insightful and incisive while being supportive, organized, and keeping a strong hand on chaotic situations.”
My Role
I inherited this project after a long period of crunch had left project management and the backlog in a state of disarray, with additional important deadlines coming quickly. It was a government-funded research program, with little in the way of written requirements and much in the way of high scrutiny expectations.
Alongside a program manager who had similarly inherited chaos, we drafted a backlog of requirements with help from the technical leads and several customer-facing demos that allowed us to do user research. I coordinated the deliverables for these demos, including deciding MVP builds, triaging defects, and managing the messaging around what would be shown to customers, then supported the demos remotely. I also prepared government progress reports monthly and quarterly as well as how-to documentation and tutorials with subject matter experts, and kickstarted an initiative to massively increase usability testing.
The Project
The goal of this product was to create a 3D tactics simulation to examine the effectiveness of specific miltiary tactics in dense urban environments using video game technology. This involved:
Creating assets for and rendering urban environments in Unreal engine
Enabling backend analytics to capture game feedback for classroom scenarios
Creating complex UI and UX that communicates many levels of tactical input while being easy for beginning users to quickly grasp
Quick Facts
4 teams, ~ 35 people
4 customer/stakeholder demos
2-week-long end of phase exercise game tournament, supporting 50+ participants remotely
2 usability testing initiatives: 1 weekly game session and 1 intensive 3-week experiment involving 16 users
Problem Solving Sample:
The Problem: Unplanned customer requests caused many features to not have time for adequate testing for defects & usability, with a high scrutiny demo nearing quickly.
Additional Problem: Due to losing some resources earlier in the project, there is a surplus of budget that needs to be spent quickly or be lost, costing revenue.
The Action: Drafted a plan to hire as many short-term QA as possible to do weeks of intensive usability testing. Hired 16 QA, many with no experience, with a week’s notice and trained them in QA practices and the product in order to generate useful data.
The Result: Generated over 100 defects and 30 usability improvements, enabling development to have a clear path forward for a better product going into the review. Additionally, recruited 6 permanent QA to the company from the effort.