Age of Empires IV on Xbox

With the release of the Xbox version of Age of Empires IV I am now free to talk about the work I did bringing the RTS game to Xbox and on developing a whole new UI for the game.

I’ve been a fan of the PC game since release so it was exciting getting to work on the Xbox version and play a small part in a long running, iconic video game series.

It’s certainly been a fun yet challenging project to work on, lots of complexity, and lots of edge cases. As a senior programmer on the UI team I got to build the foundations for some very key parts of the UI, including the radial menu. A lot of time and effort was spent making sure the core UI features were fast, responsive, and intuitive to use. Being a competitive RTS meant there was no room for delays/hangs or for the design to be confusing. I think in the end we managed to achieve this.

I’ll go into a lot more detail in a future post (which you can now find here) but while I’m writing that up I just wanted to make a quick post to celebrate the release of Age of Empires IV on Xbox.

gl and hf.