One of my last projects at EA Sports was PGA Tour- much of it was still a work in progress at the time of these screenshots. While I helped on the project in various ways, including some terrain sculpting, foliage placement, and asset creation and updates, my largest, and main responsibility was ensuring the authenticity and flexibility of tournament structures over every course shipping in the game. While we had structures from the previous installment, they were limited in size and variability – leaving many areas of the game without authentic-feeling tournaments. I was tasked with and given ownership of finding a way to take what we had and update it to be able to create anywhere from massive to tiny structures to better match the individual tournaments.

 

The test case we started with was TPC Scottsdale hole 16. It has one of the largest structures built for any golf tournament and takes an estimated 4 months to build in real life. On top of that complexity, there was the challenge of creating a system that still worked next to our updated legacy assets and could have their colors and logos added and customized per tournament. In the end, I broke down everything we had and resized and rebuilt what I needed, resulting in the ability to create all the varied structures we could need to fit wherever they were called for. I kept everything using all the legacy texture sets so it blended seamlessly. I worked closely with the Technical Designer to ensure we stayed within performance budgets, and that crowd and logo placement could happen for more easilly than in previous iterations of the game. Scottsdale was a huge success with leadership both in the art department and on the game team side, allowing me to push for more customized structures across every tournament new and old.