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Virtual Training Simulations

Training software for fire incidents and active shooting incidents, used by fire departments across Texas.

SmokeStack Studios Website currently down

About the Project

Studio

SmokeStack Studios

Engine

Unity

Genre

Professional Training Simulation

Aries is a virtual training platform built for first responders, specifically fire departments in Texas. Developed in collaboration with the Allen Fire Department, it simulates real-world emergency scenarios including fire incidents and active shooting incidents, with every feature shaped by input from their experts to teach critical communication skills that keep firefighters safe in life-or-death situations.

Virtual training lets departments run scenarios that are difficult or dangerous to replicate in person, and allows training to continue when summer heat in Texas makes outdoor events unfeasible. The simulation is developed by SmokeStack Studios and supports networked multiplayer, allowing teams to train together remotely.

My Role

Game Developer

June 2024 – March 2026 · Project completed

I worked as a generalist developer on Aries for 1 year, 9 months. My work spanned networking, physics, audio, AI, general gameplay, and more. I implemented many new features from scratch as well as maintaining, improving and extending existing ones.

Hover cards to preview my work

Gameplay Features

Implemented many, many new gameplay features for both local and networked play.

AI Radio Analysis

Implemented an AI-assisted system for analyzing radio communications during training exercises, adding an intelligent feedback layer to scenarios.

Physically-Simulated Firehose

Built a robust, fully physically-simulated firehose system.

Dynamic Audio Occlusion

Implemented dynamic audio occlusion so that sound realistically propagates and is dampened through walls and environments during scenarios.

NPC AI

Improved existing NPC AI systems as well as implementing new ones, making bystanders and incident participants behave more believably during training exercises.

Maintenance & Fixes

Maintained, debugged, and improved existing systems throughout the project's development.

Remote Collaboration

Collaborated asynchronously with a small international team across different time zones (Slack, GitHub, Jira).

Screenshots

Note: obviously visuals were very secondary to functionality with this project; we never had anyone that really took care of the visuals so the game is a mix of bought assets and programmer art :)