Fire & Rescue

Fire & Rescue is a live service cooperative multiplayer game where players work together to put out a building fire and extinguish fire monsters throughout. The game is played in a series of runs, like a roguelike, where each player upgrades different aspects of their water pistol and picks a different ability. They play through cooperative levels and if they make it that far, fight a boss together at the end of the run.

We picked up this game project from a pitch for 2nd party development With Meta to fill out their new Horizon platform with polished games. This game went through 3+ Different structural rewrites and changes to account for shifting platform demands, as well as multiple rewrites of its tooling pipeline. I participated in nearly every aspect of that process, but in particular I owned the game architecture, tooling and the fire system. Originally levels were built in Unity and then a custom export process built assets that could be reconstructed in Horizon dynamically, though we eventually settled on in-engine tooling. I also wrote a custom grid-based fire system that simulated fire propagation across its three-dimensional cells and rendered fire by using a custom particle system to cut down on draw calls. This system was the basis of three other projects that we ended up working on in Horizon.