Description

Outer Wilds is an award winning, action-adventure, space exploration game where the sun explodes every 21 minutes and it’s up to the player to unravel the mysteries of the solar system as to stop this from happening. I worked on this project as a contractor with Unity Technologies, Mobius Digital, and Annapurna Interactive while at Tricky Fast Studios, and thereafter through my own venture Moon Shark Software.

I was brought on to assist with porting the game to the Nintendo Switch, but ended up touching many other aspects of the project while doing so including the DLC Echoes of the Eye and foundational work to the core game that was released as a free update to every platform.

As of February 2023 the Switch port for Outer Wilds is still in development, however you can Play Outer Wilds on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S PlayStation 4, or PlayStation 5 today!

Contributions

My main contributions on this project included:

Programming (C#):

  • Refactoring large parts of the game’s source code to support an additional platform (Nintendo Switch)
  • Implementing the Nintendo SDK to support Nintendo Switch features such as Joy Con and Pro Controller input
  • Refactoring the save system for every supported platform to move from binary saves to JSON based saves without breaking backwards compatibility
  • Improved performance and helped reduce the game’s memory footprint to get it in memory on Nintendo Switch by implementing systems such as Addressables and refactoring various core systems to utilize asynchronous loading patterns
  • Assisted with moving the game over from the old Unity input library to the new InputSystem