Meet Bojan Vasiljević, Unreal Engine Developer for the MILC Metaverse. His job is to keep the nuts and bolts that hold our Metaverse platform together running smoothly.
Tell us about yourself!
Hello everyone, I’m Bojan and I’m a gameplay/Unreal Engine developer based in Belgrade, Serbia, working on the MILC platform. I have been into programming for more than 10 years now, 5 of which are professional work experience.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with great teams on amazing blockbuster games like “Steep”, “Riders Republic” and “Starfield” using various game engines. However, I’ve always felt the urge to come back to Unreal Engine, play around and have fun with it in my spare time. This eventually led me to my position here at MILC.
How would you explain your job to a layperson?
In creating our 3D experience, every feature and user interaction must be translated into a list of instructions to the computer. Every action – whether it is clicking a button, typing on the keyboard, or entering a portal to explore new levels – must be translated into a step-by-step language that the computer can understand.
My role involves this translation. I create the instructions for the computer on how to execute each functionality we designed. Whether it’s defining how the user interface looks/functions or how the 3D engine responds to user commands, my work is to make sure that every interaction works according our plans and designs.
How did you come to work with Unreal Engine? What was your training?
I got into game development by playing around with the C# programming language in high school. I had so much fun making simple games that I knew that’s what I wanted to do for a career. At the time, the Unreal Engine 3 Development Kit (UDK) was one of the few 3D game engines available for free. I took advantage of this low barrier to entry to get into 3D game development. When it came to choosing a faculty, my passion for games influenced my decision to study Computer Science at the Belgrade Faculty of Mathematics, where I received most of my formal education.
What was the most complex task you ever had while working on the MILC Metaverse?
The biggest challenge for our project is making recent versions of Unreal Engine run on the HTML5 platform in a web browser. This is because these versions of Unreal Engine do not officially support this. Adapting our code for the browser while upgrading to the 4.27 version of Unreal Engine was probably the most complex task I’ve done. But it was also the most interesting in terms of research and the one that provided me with the greatest learning experience so far.
What was the first program you ever wrote and what did it do?
The first program I ever made was probably one that just displayed “Hello World” on the screen, because that is how most programming classes/courses start 😁. But the first game I ever made was for a high school project where I remade the classic video game “Pong” in the C# programming language. I had planned to just make a simple game with 2 paddles and a ball going left or right, but I had so much fun programming the game that I kept working on it for months. I added abilities, powerups and a simple AI for the player’s opponent to the game with several difficulty levels. Looking back on my program code, I am disgusted by how messy it was. Still, this was definitely the project that made me fall in love with game development!
Can you share some fun facts about yourself?
While I tried to be professional in this interview, I really love lowbrow jokes/puns! That being said, it’s really been an Unreal experience working on this project 😁
Weitere Empfehlungen der Redaktion