From mid 2022 until it released in 2023 and a bit afterwards, I had the privilege of working on The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria.

I joined the project as part of a moderately sized team after the project had been already underway for some time, about 3 years. We were working in Unreal Engine 4, which I had a ton of experience from my previous job working at vrCAVE. I started working a lot in Blueprints but had a lot of encouragement to try to learn how to work with things in C++ as a lot of the project had a C++ backing. Finally, all my C++ studying was paying off. It wasn’t without a lot of difficulty though, as the Unreal Engine codebase is its own version of C++ with how many macros it has setup with all the UPROPERTY() and UCLASS() macros to learn about and how to use. In time, I would go on to make all of the cozy systems in the game, such as the meal tables, the drinking, the visual storage, waypoints and more.

Given the large size of the team, we worked in smaller pods of a few developers to develop various features. This also meant that I didn’t touch shaders almost at all, or particle systems, two things I missed a little bit from my previous job. However, we had a lot of really talented artists who did a much better job than I ever would have, so it was for the best. Instead, I got to focus on what I was good at, which was logic. Finding and fixing bugs, creating new systems and so forth. When we did the post-mortem of things to do differently for future projects, I got a shout-out from another engineer, saying something roughly like “Thank goodness for Boris” which still lives on with me to this day as a really really wonderful compliment.

It’s hard to understate that this is the coolest project I’ve ever got to be a part of. I’ve always been a fairly large fan of The Lord of the Rings, so getting to work on this project was basically the dream coming true. There’s a Japanese term, Ikigai, which basically means “one’s reason for being” that comes to mind here. In life, you want to do something that gives you these four things: you love to do it, you get paid for it, society needs it, and that you’re good at. If you pursue something that fits all four of these criteria, you will be satisfied. And that’s how I felt on this project. I’m so lucky and happy that I got to be a part of this and I hope my adventures in this domain continue for a long time. Making games is the best.