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Men of Valor is a first-person cinematic shooter set in the Vietnam conflict. In addition to a story line, it also includes several multiplayer maps and a cooperative mode of play. It was developed by 2015, Inc., published by Vivendi Universal Games, and shipped October 2004 for both Xbox and PC platforms.

I was with 2015, Inc. from December 2002 until July 2004, initially working on an unannounced PS2/Xbox project. I switched to the Men of Valor project in Spring 2003 as the primary network programmer responsible for Xbox Live play, System Link play, and cooperative and multiplayer modes of game play. I also created the initial framework for our menu system, have done work on the animation system, and of course supported the team in other areas whenever possible. The Summer of 2003, my wife joined me as a programmer for Men of Valor.

Apart from working crazy hours on Men of Valor, we also found some time to play Vetrex.

I have participated in all stages of the game development process, from early design, prototyping, to development, and alpha, beta, and gold stages.

I co-designed the following systems for the unannounced PS2 project: matinee system, physics system, save game mechanism, deferred processing, in-game profiling, file system, and memory management.

I took a game that had seen 12 months of single player development to a state of complete multiplayer functionality with no prior experience with Unreal or game networking. My approach for dealing with this task consisted of studying the system, enabling basic functionality, teaching the team the necessary skills, and communicating with leads on scheduling programmers and level designers to assist me in completing the remaining work in a timely fashion.

I was responsible for realizing all Xbox Live functionality and providing a menu system framework. Due to availability of licensed code, I was able to demonstrate basic Xbox Live game play within two weeks and 75% of the Xbox Live functionality in a first-pass quality after an additional four weeks, allowing us to meet extremely tight publisher deadlines.

Beyond Xbox Live and networking, my other areas of exposure includes some limited work with the animation system, DVD functionality, limited exposure to the Unreal script interpreter (I had to deal with the Unreal struct inheritance problem), performance improvements, and of course many aspects of the Unreal engine.

Official Men of Valor web site

Vivendi Universal Games Men of Valor web site

2015 Men of Valor web site

Xbox Reviews:
    GameSpot

Xbox Previews:
    Team Xbox
    Beyond Unreal
    HomeLAN Federation & Alliance
    Actiontrip
    Jolt Online Gaming
    1up preview by Kevin Gifford
    1up preview by Ivan Sulic
    Worth Playing
    Xbox Pro
    IGN preview by Aaron Boulding
    IGN preview by Aaron Boulding
    IGN preview by Douglass C. Perry
    Game Informer
    Games Domain
    Video Game Maniacs
    GameSpot preview by Andrew Park
    GameSpot preview by Greg Kasavin
    GameSpot preview by Jason Ocampo
    GameSpy
    Gamer's Europe

Featured Sites:
    IGN
    GameSpot
    GameSpy
    Team Xbox

Interviews:
    Action Vault Team Q&A Vietnam War Knowledge Part 1 (includes a response from me)
    Action Vault Team Q&A Vietnam War Knowledge Part 2
    Action Vault Team Q&A Challenges and Interesting Aspects Part 1 (includes a response from me)
    Action Vault Team Q&A Challenges and Interesting Aspects Part 2
    Action Vault Team Q&A Notable Locations
    Action Vault Protagonist Interview of John Whitmore
    Action Vault Vietnam Interview of John Whitmore and Kris Jackson
    Games Fusion interview with John Whitmore
    File Front interview with John Whitmore

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Last Updated: August 06, 2007