Daniel Marques

Welcome to Yara, a tropical paradise frozen in time. As the dictator of Yara, Antón Castillo is intent on restoring his nation back to its former glory by any means, with his son, Diego, following in his bloody footsteps. Their oppressive rule has ignited a revolution. Play as Dani Rojas, a local Yaran, as you fight alongside a modern-day guerrilla revolution to liberate Yara! Fight against Castillo's regime in the most expansive Far Cry to date, through jungles, beaches, and Esperanza, the capital city of Yara. Employ an arsenal of resolver weapons, backpacks, and vehicles to take down Castillo's ruthless regime.

I joined the Far Cry 6 gameplay programming team during its final stages of production and continued to work on it after its launch.

Initially, I worked on features for the heat mechanic in Special Operations, namely heat sources and the colourblind mode. Later, as the game was preparing for launch, my responsibilities shifted to polishing features, fixing bugs and crashes across multiple gameplay systems, including character state machines, weapons and gadgets, vehicles, physics, network replication, mission scripting, game mode logic, camera, and more.

I leveraged this opportunity to learn about many gameplay systems, collaborating with system owners and domain experts to understand their implementations and resolve issues.

Experience an epic action-adventure story set in feudal Japan! Become a lethal shinobi assassin and powerful, legendary samurai as you explore a beautiful open world in a time of chaos. Switch between these two unlikely allies as you discover their common destiny. Master complementary playstyles, create your shinobi league, customize your hideout, and usher in a new era for Japan.

I worked on Assassin's Creed Shadows on the world gameplay systems team for the entire production phase and during post-launch.

I was responsible for the technical implementation of various new gameplay systems. Namely, the Opportunity, Scouting and Ally systems. The Opportunity system was a novel way of exploring the world, purposely built for this game to help realise the Shinobi fantasy. It does so by building a passive network of scouts who provide the player with information each season about locations, activities, valuables, and rumours across Japan. The system also evolved to allow the player to find quest objectives by deploying their scouts to the specified area of Japan. Since this scouting system was a departure from the previous exploration paradigm, I was also responsible for creating the Guided Mode: an alternative mode where players automatically see their quest markers, bypassing scouting and locating the objective.

The Ally system aimed to contribute towards the same vision but in a more active way: the player can call upon recruited allies to assist in battle. They each have their own set of skills and, when summoned, they spawn nearby with a fight or stealth goal, useful in each situation the player encounters.

For each system and its multiple ever-evolving features, I conceptualised the code architecture, accounting for performance, code modularity, ease of data setup, testability, and expandability through content updates. While implementing the systems, I collaborated closely with game designers, technical designers, quest designers, testers, production managers, and other programmers.

Besides code ownership of the new systems, I was responsible for the exploration system and contributed to the hideout, notoriety, achievements, online collectables, and more.

During post-launch, I implemented the Castle Respawn system and contributed significantly to the Open-World Alarm system and New Game+. In parallel, I debugged and fixed several player-reported bugs and crashes across gameplay systems, including repairing corrupted save data.

Throughout the project, I applied my leadership skills to elevate the team by providing meaningful insights when discussing code architecture, by fostering their knowledge of C++, memory and performance, and by promoting high standards in our codebase through code reviews.

I enjoy learning about graphics programming, so I decided to create Roar: a small amateur Vulkan Rendering Engine. The project is written in C++, leveraging the more recent language features. The engine is loosely built with an Entity-Component-System (ECS) architecture using the EnTT library. Components represent meshes, lights, transforms, cameras, and graphics resources, while model loading, render passes, uniform buffer updates, and camera movement are implemented as systems. The project features a very rudimentary Render Graph, which owns the render passes, uses dynamic rendering, automatically creates and destroys attachments and texture resources, and deals with layout transitions. In terms of shading, it features a Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) pipeline with Image-Based Lighting (IBL).