End of an Era

A personal story of my last year at Unknown Worlds

In January 2025, after over 15 years as a Technical Artist at Unknown Worlds, I was terminated. I had worked in the Spark Engine (Natural Selection 2) and Unity (Subnautica, BZ, and Moonbreaker) for so long, I figured the change to Unreal Engine (Subnautica 2) would be a breeze for me. I COULD have stayed on the post-Moonbreaker Unity team to work on new game ideas… But the call to work on the next Subnautica game and to feed my hunger for new tech was too great to pass up.

With the new engine came new senior devs that I couldn’t wait to learn from. Especially since prior to this I was the only self-proclaimed “Tech Artist” on the team. We also had new leadership and an extensive structure that we didn’t really have before, but part of me had always wanted to experience. When I joined (Feb ‘24), the game was in the midst of transition from the initial prototype to the pre-production project so a lot of things were a mix of old conceptual features and new more structured code. It wasn’t exactly the best environment to start learning a new engine… In hindsight I really wish I just took a bit of a sabbatical to get the basics of Unreal before diving into the deep end.

I did make some strides forward in my comfort zone of working with the player character and animation graphs… Which did eventually go through two major rig refactors during that time. However with this new team structure came new engineering Tech Art requirements and new expectations that, on top of the other issues I was having, I was unfortunately not doing well with. I certainly tried my best to justify my existence on a team that had once been big enough to fit around our weird glass table at the office in San Francisco, as we brainstormed what our next game was going to be after completing NS2… It was heartbreaking to hear from this now almost 100 person team owned by one of the biggest game studios in the world that they had no place for me anymore. And that I should consider changing my title, my career, and essentially “get good” with Unreal and maybe I could apply for a new position in the future.

Truthfully, I still wanted that. And I didn’t want to have to get back on the market (especially since it seemed to be in a rough spot) after being at the same employer for so long. And of course, UW employees have been like my family since before I even met my wife! Now with a 4 year old and a second kid on the way, it all feels… for lack of a better word… Unreal.