Creator Spotlight : Edgar Parente - Technical Director

Tell us about your journey as a game developer and you came about to be working with Rogue Factor and as technical director on Hell is Us?

Like many in this industry, I got involved with computers and video games at a young age. My first experience programming was a type-in game in Compute! Magazine. My interest in video games and computers was always present; I tinkered a lot with old PCs to upgrade memory or soundcards, etc.

I started making video games on the Nintendo DS in a small company (now defunct) called Wicked Studios. I spent a few years working on web games, then joined Cyanide Montreal as a gameplay programmer.

I have always been part of the core team at Rogue Factor. I held leadership positions on all our projects moving to Technical Direction as the studio grew larger. Interestingly, I still work with a majority of the team I was with at Wicked Studios. We merged back together at Cyanide Montreal before creating Rogue Factor. I’ve been working with the same people for over 20 years now!

I program less, but I still like keeping some systems to myself. When I don't program for a few weeks, I miss it in my bones and start working on personal projects to scratch that itch.

Hell is Us was released simultaneously on Steam, Epic Games Store, PS5 and Xbox Series. What were the main technical challenges while developing a multiplatform game?

One thing we did well was establish our performance targets on each platform early on. These targets changed somewhat as the project moved along, but always having that goal ensured we never lost focus.

The Xbox Series S is quite different than a top of the line PC. We made sure the technology used in our game was scalable, and tailored the experience for that specific console. Each of the consoles require specific optimizations and tweaking to be at their best. This was many hours of playing the game finding choke points and analyzing how we could optimize that area of the game.

Working with platform services also requires custom code, but they are generally pretty similar. We were able to merge our achievements code, for example, and have it connect to Steam, or PSN, or Epic Games Store.

All this work gets planned years ahead of the final release. We iterated and tested continuously on all platforms throughout production. It gives us time to have a semi optimized game during its creation, and reduces the QA overload at the end of the project when everyone is too busy to think about platform specific work.

One of Hell is Us’ core design philosophy is « player-plattering » (no guidance, no quest markers, etc.). Were there technical challenges inherent to that approach to the game design?

Making an immersive experience is always difficult. One area where we iterated a lot was how obvious interactions (doors, loot, etc) should be when you are running around in the world. We initially had a system which would not show interactable areas unless you stopped moving. In the end we opted to have a subdued sheen which was always present because we didn't want someone to miss important elements.

We always said we didn't want the player to have a radar pointing him to all the things he could do, but having a compass to help guide the player was important. We localized the game in multiple languages, and had to make custom compass textures