Football Manager was the third video game title i worked on, and perhaps had the most odd development cycle out of the previous two ive worked on due to the pandemic.

For me FM21 was about improving upon existing systems and refactoring my areas of the game.
The tutorials system which I had ownership of had various features that I had logged approved for implementation The features that are user facing is the “Tell Me More” button which gives the user a more indepth explanation about an area or mechanic of the game during a tutorial. Aswell as the back button allowing users to go back to the previous step of the tutorial.

These both sound like trivial things, but they both required big rewrites of the tutrorial code. The tutorial system wasnt originally designed to go back and forward, so a large refactor was needed to implement this. Whilst the “Tell Me More” button required a tutorial to be embedded inside another tutorial which was an interesting challenge.

Other work of note was parts of the newly revamped Match UI. I was given ownership of the penalty shootout UI and replays UI. These required me to learn new parts of the code which I had never dealt with before.

Throughout FM2021 I was providing mentoring and assistance to some of the newer Juniors on the team, helping them grasp the fundamentals of C++ such as class inheritance, pointers & const correctness. This was an experience that helped solidifiy my own understanding of C++ which was rewarding. I have also helped a junior settle in and feel comfortable whilst he joined the company in a remote role.