This is the story of one of the most infamous video game projects ever made, Aliens: Colonial Marines.

It was my first project in the AAA space as a professional level designer. I debated whether I would put this on my portfolio, but looking back, I am proud of what I was able to accomplish given a difficult situation. I spent my first few weeks at the company providing design feedback for Borderlands 2 before being thrown into the deep in on A:CM.

I joined this project three months before shipping to do a lot of scripting and collision work. The plan was to let me go after the project shipped, but my peers were surprised by my talent, work ethic, and my ability to stay positive in a difficult situation.

The project was what it was, and the goal we were given was to ship it. It was brought back in-house from an external company that was experiencing development hell.

We ended up getting a few extensions, but it wasn't enough to make good decisions to remake the game.

The game looked great on PC, but we also had to ship on consoles. As is often the case, the PC version suffers from low-end consoles. This is why some of the visuals didn't line up with some early gameplay trailers since there wasn't time to optimize the deferred rendering engine to play nice with consoles.

After various surprise extensions, I ended up being on the main project for about nine months before ship, not including DLC. It's a shame we didn't get all that time at once because I believe we could've saved the project.

This project ruined many developers, who are either jaded to this day or left the industry entirely. I'm proud that I was able to not only get through the project, but I was able to make things I was proud of as well. Regardless of the outcome, this project taught me multiple lessons that I reflect on to this day.

I did all the combat scripting, NPC scripting, mission scripting, and most of the map's in-game cinematics.