About
War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius is a tactical role-playing game co-developed by Square Enix and Gumi Inc. and published by Square Enix for iOS and Android devices. It is a spin-off of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius that draws inspiration from the Final Fantasy Tactics series of games. The game was released exclusively for Japan in November 2019, and a global version was released in March 2020.
Thoughts
This is my first project that was both huge in scope and huge in terms of organization size. Overall it was a very different experience in terms of work flow pipeline which I will get into in the experience section
It also gave me experience on how working on a big scale live service game is like and gave me a clearer picture of what is going on and the amount of work happening behind the scenes for live service games.
Experience
First thing first, one thing I would like to say about this experience is that it gave me a lot of experience that are outside of game coding. What I meant by that is the other technical aspects of game development. Such as working with a new Git workflow, Jenkins, EC2 instances, documentation, etc. I have to be honest, it wasn't as enjoyable as when I was doing game programming, but I still grateful for this experience as it was not something I had the opportunity to learn previously especially since they were smaller companies with smaller project scope.
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Midway through my time here, I've also had the opportunity to be the Client Lead for the project, and while I had Leadership roles in the past, being a Client Lead for this project was much much more challenging than what I experience previously. Especially with the size of the project, it was impossible for me to know every single aspect of the project. Which was a challenge since previously, I was able to have a good understanding of how every single aspect of the project works, and with that knowledge I was able to give proper guidance on which specific area to look at and what to try/do. But with a project on this size, I had to learn how to rely on other colleague's strength as well and accept that it is ok to do so even as a Client Lead.
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One last experience I like to point out is the experience from managing software and SDK versions. It is my first time having this many moving parts within a project, and with it, came with what I would like to call dependency hell. While yes, having the automation tools do help to decrease the overall workload for the team, it also mean there is more things to familiarize with and also more things that can fail. There are many SDKs that were required for the project (e.g ads, facebook integration etc) but because of that upgrading a single SDK would often means affecting other SDKs as well. And while I wouldn't say I have mastered managing all the cases, (as there can be so many things that can go wrong) I can certainly say I now have more experience and confidence in managing issues relating to this
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There are many other things I learned from this experience as well but I kind of want to keep this section as condensed as possible. So I'm just going to dump some words to briefly describe what I learn here. Ticket tracking, documentation, git management, branching, forward merging, version management, ec2 instances, project tools, data management, python, serialization, localization systems, Asset bundles. If any of these words sounds interesting to you and you REALLY REALLY are interested in what I learn about it. Feel free to contact me.
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In conclusion while I wouldn't say my time here in Gumi Asia was long, it opened a lot of new experience for me that I feel would help me to be a better game developer!