Snowdrop

Red Storm Entertainment

Role(s)

UX Researcher

Engine Developer

Engine

Snowdrop (Ubisoft Proprietary)

Video from Massive Entertainment about the Snowdrop Engine

UX Research

Snowdrop is a proprietary node-based engine owned by Ubisoft and primarily coded in C++. Snowdrop has been used to launch various games. Before working on the research and development for the Snowdrop engine, I had worked with Snowdrop on XDefiant and an unreleased project.

Small snippet of benchmarking research

1/1

There was a push to improve and update Snowdrop's usability. My focus was on researching other industry-standard node-based engines and editors, including Unreal, CryEngine, Substance Designer, and others. I evaluated these programs across various aspects, including visuals and general readability, as well as usability features such as shortcuts and predictive bindings. I compiled this information to identify specific pain points and aspects users praised, to serve as guides for Snowdrop development.

Engine Implementation

During my research, it became clear that more developers were needed to implement these suggestions, given the growing task backlog. I summarized and wrapped up my research and suggestions, and began working on the engine in C++.

I had not used C++ before, so the first part of onboarding was learning the key differences between C++ and C#, which I was more familiar with. Once I had a good grasp of their differences, I dove into the engine codebase to familiarize myself with it. Shortly after, I took on my first task: adding a unique state to the favorite button when it is selected and hovered. As my code awaited review from the engine developers, I began investigating my next tasks.

Implemented new 'hovered while selected' state

1/1

I met with our UX Designer, who was focused on the animation tooling and interface, to help take some of the workload. In each meeting, we broke down tasks by priority and expected complexity. We used this breakdown to easily identify the best tasks to help me onboard while giving the animation team the best quality-of-life improvements.

Unfortunately, I was only on the development side for a few weeks before leaving Red Storm due to layoffs.