CodeCraft – Under the Hood with Blizzard Engineering, Part 1
Mythic Plus Systems
Overwatch Patch Days
Technology Challenges
Learning from Warcraft Patch Days
Getting into Design Industry
Mythic Plus Affixes
Lag in Blizzard Matchmaking
Dealing with Bugs
Working with the World of Warcraft Code over the Years
Continue reading...
Mythic Plus Systems
- Record a watermark of mythic + level when determining keystone level
- Design team determines what combinations of keystone affixes are possible
- Dungeon reads keystone when it's placed and allows design team to modify dungeon based on what the key turns on.
- Design team also is responsible for implementing the chest and rewards at end of keystone dungeon
Overwatch Patch Days
- Patch cycle starts days to weeks before patch.
- Red and blue deployment cycle for patches. Testing happens on one cycle to prepare for launch day
Technology Challenges
- Team had to deal with the growing pains of being a multiple platform system
- Integrating all games through one platform helps immensely
Learning from Warcraft Patch Days
- Try to avoid surprises and downtime
- Went from over 8 hour deployments to much faster with red/blue deployment
Getting into Design Industry
- Look at team culture and your fit within it
- Try to do side projects and consider the scope
- Finished projects are much better than larger scope projects
- Don't forget a cover letter!
Mythic Plus Affixes
- Wasn't necessarily an engineering challenge
- Content creators design the affixes, designers just see code and implement it
- Designers run scripts to add additional functionality based on affixes (such as conditional upon enemy death)
Lag in Blizzard Matchmaking
- New technology also involves infrastructure
- Data centers all over the world
- Evaluate where players are coming from
- Understanding where to put servers
- Always trying to reduce ping
- Data collection helps the speed at which network team can respond to concerns
Dealing with Bugs
- Look at what caused it and how to immediately solve it
- Go back and look at everything that led up to bug
- Incident management
- Bugs are inevitable with the amount of data in games
Working with the World of Warcraft Code over the Years
- Adding code on top of the existing systems sometimes causes problems for the older systems
- Matter of experience and looking at what the feature does to the existing systems
- Most important thing is that the game keeps running
Continue reading...