CASE STUDY / 01 · PERFORMANCE
Driving Empire
The architecture work that made development easier for everyone else, and the customisation rewrite the brand deals depended on.
Voldex's flagship driving game, where I was a senior engineer on the core team. The big thing I brought was code review and solid architecture on an acquired codebase — refactoring where it mattered so our development speed increased as well as quality. I improved performance, both memory and compute, and I was tech lead on the car-customisation system rewrite that brand integrations were built on.
- Tracked down the slow loads and cut them from 15s+ to ~3s, which resulted in the onboarding funnel completion doubling.
- Tech lead on the car-customisation rewrite, done with a junior I mentored as we went. The old backend was a mess; the redesign carried the filtering the Porsche and Lamborghini deals needed, and designers got an interface to tweak all values themselves; no engineer required and no restarts required.
- Automated 90%+ of the car-implementation pipeline: a 3D artist's Blender model became a driveable, rigged in-game car in under 30 minutes instead of a manual 3+ hour job. Fewer errors, less QA, and the brand cars shipped clean.
15 months on Driving Empire — 3B lifetime visits.