I started working in AAA games in 2021, and I’ve worked on a number of projects since then. At time of writing they all remain unreleased and under NDA, so that’s all I can say about that.
In general terms I’ve been learning a lot about the AAA industry’s approach to generating and implementing metadata – by which I mean the tunable, exposed values you feed into blueprints and the like. It’s an area that dovetails tightly with the kind of modelling and data management work I’ve been doing throughout my career. I’ve been collaborating with engineers to improve our data pipeline, and engaging with designers to bring more of their work into spreadsheets.
It’s also been an educational experience to see how the dynamics of the publisher/developer relationship model affects the production process – it’s only now that I can look back and understand what a difference it made to be working on self-published projects in the past.