Age of Wonders 4 is a high-fantasy 4X strategy game with deep customization, featuring turn-based tactical combat and empire-building. Players design and grow their own faction on a generated fantasy world map, managing resources, researching magic, and conquering territories. The game features two interconnected layers of gameplay: a strategic overworld for managing cities and researching magic, and tactical, grid-based turn-based combat for engaging enemies. The game was released on PC, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and Steam Deck in May 2023 by Triumph Studios, with multiple expansions shipped after launch.

My work on this project started early, in the pre-production phase. One of my first tasks for this project was to investigate new UI middleware, as we did not want to continue with Iggy. My UI colleague and I started creating prototypes with various middleware. We ended up choosing NoesisGUI, which is a C++ port of WPF for games. While working on the entirety of this project, I gained extensive experience in WPF and XAML. In addition to finding a new UI middleware, there were some other systems that needed an upgrade. For example, the old window management system was not holding up very well. I designed and implemented a more dynamic and fluid window system for it, and it still powers the entire UI of the game today. We made significant improvements to the UI, including a completely new workflow with new middleware. Because of my large role in this, I onboarded the rest of the gameplay team onto the new system and gave support to anything they needed from the UI.

Another achievement of mine on this project is leading and creating a large part of the tooltip-in-tooltip system. This is a system where some content in a tooltip is marked as a hyperlink, hovering over these hyperlinks will spawn a new tooltip based on the content it represents. This way you can create tooltip chains that progressively layer information for the player. This game needed controller support as well. I had a big part in creating a new controller API for this UI system, applying everything we learned from the previous game.

This was my first project where I contributed from pre-production all the way to release, including multiple DLCs.