Pudge Wars
Pudge Wars was a long term project where I co-led a team in the development of an add-on for the popular PC game Dota 2. Pudge Wars is an adaption of a highly popular Warcraft 3 add-on with the same name (I was not involved with the original Warcraft 3 mod). The official Steam Workshop page for my Pudge Wars project can be seen here. The project gained quick success, boasting over 1,700,000 ratings on Steam and over 5,200,000 unique subscribers. Additional stats on the project can be seen here. Pudge Wars has been featured on several websites, magazines, and videos, including on Valve's official custom games announcement video. A gameplay video is embedded below, showing one of the most famous professional Dota 2 players livestreaming himself playing Pudge Wars.
Our team consisted of two programmers, one 3D map developer, and one digital artist. My role involved development and programming, as well as managing the project's outward image and marketing. We implemented the project using Dota 2's Scripting API,before Dota 2 offered official developmental tools. We did so by reverse engineering Dota's single pre-existing add-on at the time, Frostivus. Coding was done almost entirely in Lua, with the exception of user interface development. UI development used Dota's Panorama UI framework, which in turn uses HTML5, CSS and Javascript. The source code can be seen at our Bitbucket repository.
The most challenging part of this project was working concurrently with team members from across the world, in Brazil, Sweden, Poland, and New Zealand. This collaborative effort helped me significantly improve my teamwork and communication skills. I also gained significant experience with Git as it became a critical aspect of our project management. This project also pushed me to be creative and experiment more, given that we were working with an almost entirely unexplored and poorly-documented API. Accomplishing anything required trial and error and collaboration with other developers facing the same issues.