AI-Built Production Tools for a AAA VR Game

Context

A AAA VR game is built by many hands. On Metro Awakening I ran eight concurrent outsourcing workstreams — 3D assets, performance capture, concept art, VFX, audio, localisation, UX/UI — and more than 13,000 technical and creative assets had to be integrated. The slow parts were manual: checking every delivery, producing weekly reports, and knowing which workstream was blocked.

My role

I managed the vendors, wrote the SOWs and negotiated the commercial terms. I also saw that three recurring problems were really product problems for the production team, and built the tools for them myself with AI coding assistants, without dedicated engineering resources.

What I did

• Automated asset validation. Checks run automatically on about 13,000 assets per delivery.
• Confluence-to-PDF pipeline. Page-by-page export and PDF stitching for reports needed at least weekly.
• Integration tracking dashboard. A custom backend with a dashboard showing integration progress across all eight workstreams.
• Vendor orchestration. Negotiated MSAs and SOWs with international agencies under strict confidentiality and IP frameworks, and optimised the production pipelines.

Result

• Manual review time for asset deliveries cut by 95%.
• About five hours of manual report work per week replaced by an automated export.
• External budget reduced by roughly 10% without compromising technical quality.
• The tools were used daily by the production team.