EA Sports PGA Tour is EA’s return to the golf game genre after nearly a decade. It has players playing through three different major golf leagues across dozens of tournaments on 30 iconic golf courses.
Format
Engine
Frostbite
Team Size
Small AAA
Development Time
Roughly a year and a half of the project’s development, starting in production and running up through launch.
Roles & Tasks
Technical Designer
Presentation
Collaborative ownership over the space with one other developer
Refactoring the bulk of the space for consistency and stability (formalizing the scene system, transitions, and other misc. logic)
Game Loop Refactor
Refactored and documented significant logic related to the core game loop to convert the game from a special-case-loaded web to a more hierarchical and cyclical structure making it easier to predict game state behavior, do bug fixes, and modularize segments
Dynamic Tee Markers
Created a system to swap tee marker assets depending on course and tournament so each course can have multiple possible markers based on context
STORIES
Presentation was chiefly owned by a single mid-level developer but was handed off to two junior developers, me being one of them. As the two of us settled into position we had to find a balance of understanding each other’s work styles, implementing new features, and cleaning up/refactoring old features from both this development cycle and legacy content from prior ones. Ultimately along the way I ended up evolving a framework developed by the original owner to refactor the control logic for handling scenes across most of presentation to improve consistency and stability.
While aiming to fix a specific bug related to presentation flow I discovered inconsistencies and lack of clarity around core game state flow. This ended up expanding into a full refactor of that core state flow to straighten things out. This was relatively late in production and if it was going to happen it needed to maintain stability for the entire rest of the game but I believed in its value so I went forward with it and managed to get it together. Ultimately that refactor delivered long term benefits by solving active bugs, reducing future bugs, and dramatically increasing my knowledge of the game which allowed me to help fix other developers’ issues across various teams.
Towards the end of development design made a request to have the tee markers across the game swap out based on which course and tournament was being played. Historically these tees weren’t built to be dynamic and were generally just course tees with a potential tournament tee loading in over it. I not only built out a system to address the issue but did the manual work of replacing every single tee marker on every single hole of every single course to ensure the content would be ready by launch. Ultimately the update containing this was deferred to a later patch but the process to build it out and keep it aligned with the more simplistic method used to swap less-complex art assets was notable.
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