Kaneva
About
The World of Kaneva is a social virtual world and game platform. In it, players can do everything from creating an avatar and socializing, to using and creating their user-generated content, to building massive worlds with integrated scripting.
I began Kaneva as a Technical Support Engineer, and helped players with their scripting, as well as creating game templates for players to utilize. However, I quickly found a niche in UI programming and was moved to work full time with the game's user interface system.
Over my four years at Kaneva, I became the Lead UI Programmer, working on almost every menu in the game - from collaboration on design, to construction of the menu based on the artist's comps, to programming their functionality. I worked with the company's in-house menu development system that's scripted in Lua. Frequently, I collaborated with the game engine and web development teams to complete projects.
Contributions
During my time at Kaneva, I created menus including:
- HUD: Player HUD and Build/Creator HUD menus
- Inventory: Player inventory and storage/bank menus
- Travel: Browsing various user-created worlds
- Events: Displays user-created events and allows players to travel to them
- Smart Object Menus: Visual property editor for the scripted objects
- Media Select Menus: Allows users to change videos and flash widgets on various special in-game objects
- Player and Object Context Menus: Displays information and action options on right clicking people and objects
- Welcome and Builder Tutorials
- Bug fixes, optimizations, and tweaks for many more
One of my favorite projects at Kaneva was a animation system I created after being frustrated at having to hand-code any animation. It ended up being used by both the UI and game teams!
Additionally, I have worked in the past to create game templates such as Treasure Hunt and Adventure, where players can easily create a small treasure hunt or adventure game by dropping items and creating various "levels" to explore.