The Legend of Khimorii is a systems-driven open-world horse game where you play a young courier rider in the wild lands of 13th century Mongolia.
For a quick impression, see this announcement trailer.
My work: Programmer.
Duration: April 2023 – today, 32-40h/week
Studio project, done by a team comprising multiple devs from NightinGames and Aesir Interactive. Unreal Engine 5.
The Legend of Khimorii is developed by Aesir Interactive, a ~100-person studio from Munich, Germany, in collaboration with indie studio NightinGames, which I am a part of.
As a junior and later regular Unreal C++ Programmer being on the project from its very start, my responsibilities where
- migrating, setting up systems and iterating on them
- writing technical designs for new systems, implementing them
- investigating and fixing bugs
- performing peer code reviews
- creating content implementation guides
- build maintenance
- acting as the dedicated techie for two major game experience pushes
Fueled by my commitment, I moreover took ownership over smaller and larger systems, pushed for better systems, project health and user experience.
My peers and leads praised my proactive communication, competence, investment into the project’s success and high empathy.
Key Learnings
During this time I learned a lot about system architecture and gained a lot of insights into the Unreal Engine codebase, using various systems like
- Custom asset editors, Slate and type detail view customization
- UMG, MVVM, CommonUI
- World Partition, Game Features, Data Layers
- GAS
- Data Registries
Moreover I got to collaborate with a wonderful team of designers, tech artists, UI artists and of course techies, who helped me grow rapidly and get an in-depth feeling for what game development on a grander scale is like.
Over time I gained confidence to advance the project with efforts beyond my junior seniority: by having a strong project overview, proactively communicating issues & ideas and taking ownership.
Gregor Sönnichsen 