XDefiant

Juan Santiago Lucaras

Performer of many roles in my +3 years stint as a member of Ubisoft for the online multiplayer FPS XDefiant.

Development Tester

Full manual testing and documenting of key game features such as the BattlePass, covering the whole set of available platforms (Xbox1, XboxSX, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Luna, PC) with a hands-on approach that went beyond a plain verification of the acceptance criteria upon delivery. Involvement started at the design meetings in which the foundations of the feature were presented, went through the whole development phase working back to back with the assigned developer, and did not end until my last day in the project. During that time my contributions were:

• Provider of constant input about planned or potential new features, based on both my own experience as a gamer and preexistent examples found in other games, as well as my daily interactions with the content.
• Scribe of all things related to how the feature shall work, test status, useful tools and commands in order to emulate scenarios, points of contact, related articles and info.
• Surveyor of the feature status on a daily basis through smoke and exploratory testing, with the subsequent creation of bugs in Jira, always using the proper tagging, naming, description, reproduction steps, evidence, visual reference, linkage to related tasks and/or issues, epics, priority (severity + probability), reproducibility, expected behavior vs. actual behavior, always aiming to keep communication simple and clear, but without being dull or lacking in style.
• Instigator of the involvement of producers, designers, developers and testers in the approval of test plans, preferably in advance to the feature development, using Gherkin as an universal language, leaving a clear path for regressions, automation, and also simplifying the eventual passing of the torch to future team members.
• Enforcer of a compromise to duty that went beyond finding what isn’t working or can be improved, always giving my best to provide either potential alternative solutions, or plain straight official answers from a trusted source.

Test Automation Engineer

Design, creation and maintenance of a suite of automated tests by using Ubisoft internal tool, DTest, employing C++ as the main language, with special focus in the obtainment of performance metrics with adaptable threshold values, but also adapted to provide a smoke of the main functionalities involved for each scenario, divided in two main categories:

• Coverage created for the full front-end menu navigation of the UI in every single user facing screen.
• Realistic gameplay scenarios covering multiple combinations of maps, game modes, factions, equipment and cosmetics.

Environmental Artist

In charge of setting up the locations in which the MVP and High Five sequences take place at the end of the match on +20 different maps and prototypes, as well as the Pre-match Vistas.

Technical Artist

Integration of assets into the game, including weapon and character skins, and also MVP and Killscreen animations. This process was done through Ubisoft own editor, Snowdrop, which is quite similar to Unreal, and included the creation of the specific objects from a static template, in which the different elements such as geometries, textures and shaders were integrated and configured according to specifications.