Portfolio Presentation

MAIN	OTHER WORK \| ABOUT \| CONTACT

Mount and Blade: Bannerlord

Mount and Blade: Bannerlord is the highly anticipated next installment of the Mount and Blade (M&B) games.
Mount and Blade combines the Total-War-like grand strategy of a campaign map with intense, massive battles where you control your own character directly and order your troops.
M&B is renowned for its versatile and intense gameplay, as well as the online battles and the vibrant modding community.

Towards the end of my final year at Digital Arts and Entertainment we had to pick internships. This was to be the final "project" before we graduate.
As a long-time Mount and Blade fan, I wanted to work for Taleworlds Entertainment, developers of the M&B franchise, located in Ankara, Turkey.
I was accepted, moved to Ankara and lived there for nearly 5 years (after my internship ended, I was hired and stayed a while longer).

I worked on a variety of things, including:

Multiplayer game modes, spawning and equipment handling
ingleplayer "game modes" (ambushes)
I did all of the boardgames, together with a designer and artist. The boardgames started out as a side-project to see if we could add some more non-combat elements to the game
Performance and bandwidth optimizations for multiplayer
A visual tool to analyze network bandwidth while playing
The atmosphere system for the campaign map
And many more smaller things that are not worth mentioning

On top of that, TaleWorlds trusted a couple of other colleagues and me to represent Bannerlord at Gamescom and E3, several years in a row. There, we showcased the game to game journalists, peers and fans who managed to sneak into the area.

Top (extrovert) moments at E3/Gamescom:

I ended up doing an improvised presentation for Warren Spector who casually strolled into our booth. It was on the very first day, before we had had a chance to practice. I was nervous and I am sure it was not that great.
Warhorse Studios were also around to showcase Kingdom Come Deliverance. It turned out that they're a bunch of M&B fans (shouldn't be too surprising) and we all spent a lot of time at each others' booths. They also made their own beer to hand out!


["Epic sieges" was definitely one of the selling points of Mount&Blade]


[This was from one of the internal playtests, before we went into Early Access. There was a lot of experimenting with game modes, different flag-capturing methods, etc. Good times.]


[One of the boardgames that I worked on. All of these boardgames can be found in the taverns, with each culture having their own respective boardgame. Occasionally, you can also challenge a lord to a game, as a way of settling a barter. I was fresh out of school, had never done AI before, and the biggest challenge here was making sure your opponents played decently, but not overwhelming, and have it all be performant. Most of the boardgames use a simple pruned min-max tree with heuristics, but some of them had way too much branching and those use a Monte Carlo tree search instead. I found this to be a super cool algorithm...]

[One of the boardgames that I worked on. All of these boardgames can be found in the taverns, with each culture having their own respective boardgame. Occasionally, you can also challenge a lord to a game, as a way of settling a barter.
I was fresh out of school, had never done AI before, and the biggest challenge here was making sure your opponents played decently, but not overwhelming, and have it all be performant. Most of the boardgames use a simple pruned min-max tree with heuristics, but some of them had way too much branching and those use a Monte Carlo tree search instead. I found this to be a super cool algorithm...]


[Yes, I made this, believe it or not! It was a test-project in my spare time and I had a bunch more in this level. It was all pretty scenery - no gameplay. I'm pretty sad that I forgot to do anything with it when I left TaleWorlds..]