Composer

The Vesper Composer is the Vesper world authoring and creation tool.

It is a React frontend; Node.js backend; Python worker for AI interactions and intensive, threadable tasks; on an AWS Serverless infrastructure, authored using Terraform.

The Composer came about after working closely with the leadership team, where requirements for a stable source of truth, editing tool that allowed creators to avoid distractions of semantics and syntax and a game data processing platform were discussed. From these requirements I architected and developed The Composer tool from scratch which was quickly being used by the internal Narrative team and creators to make games.

The user facing parts of The Composer consists of a block based text editor with collaborative features like editing and commenting. It also has features aimed at simplifying the writing process for writers such as error checking, adaptive autocomplete and versioning.

Once ready a writer can use The Composer frontend to trigger the process of generating game data on the server. This Node.js backend parsed the script data, passing the result to the Python worker for processing - A combination of LLM integration, data transformation and procedural generation.

Once complete this data is ready for the game to consume, driving game functionality from camera angles, world generation, character interaction and dialogue.

I am the Senior Backend Developer at Vesper - and was fortunate to be involved from the very start of the project.

While working directly on The Composer - I have been responsible for -

• Translate requirements and general discussion with leadership team into a concrete plan and actionable tasks

• Fully architecting and developing the Composer stack, including terraform based AWS infrastructure and Node.js, React and Python based software

• Designing Interaction between several integral parts of the Vesper ecosystem and software

• Working closely with UI/UX design to ensure their designs were brought to life

• REST API design for quickly expanding Composer requirements

• Implementing unfamiliar technologies and frameworks, ensuring that these were integrated cleanly and correctly

• Working with Narrative, Audio and Game Development to add urgently needed functionality in an efficient but well prioritised way

• Developing a shared assets library that would be used across multiple front end projects

• Implementing GitHub Action CI for this, and other projects as the projects grew