I am Development Director at Mechanical Moonworks, leading a team of ~15 and coordinating across programming, art, design, and marketing. The studio’s project, DreadReign: The Shadow Fortress, is a first-person, squad based dungeon crawler being developed for PC.
The game puts the player into the shoes of a party of four heroes cycled through in real time, similar to changing weapons in an FPS, giving players access to multiple sets of abilities and gameplay styles.
As Development Director, I interface with leads to make high level technical and design decisions, prioritize work, and match responsibilities with appropriate team members. Since assuming the role in 2021, I have overseen several major improvements to a project that first started in 2015:
As Development Director, I interface with leads to make high level technical and design decisions, prioritize work, and match responsibilities with appropriate team members. Since assuming the role in 2021, I have overseen several major improvements to a project that first started in 2015:
• Upgrading the project from Unity 5.6 to Unity 6, a 7 year leap in engine technology
• Conversion of hundreds of custom shaders and thousands of materials to the High Definition Render Pipeline
• Replacement of bloated, out-of-date character controller and audio middleware with custom in-house solutions tailored to the game
• Migration of character stats from a cumbersome spreadsheet import pipeline to scriptable objects, offering better data flexibility visualized by custom design tools implemented via editor scripting
I am present in all major design discussions, helping to create fast-paced, challenging combat in a detailed fantasy world. My major design responsibilities have included:
• Redesigning the movement systems for player, NPCs, and projectiles to incorporate convincing, simulation-quality physics into all interactions, giving combat and movement weight and consequence
• Designing and implementing a damage type-based combo system to improve combat synergies between character classes
• Rebalancing character stats to ensure combat remained challenging but fair across all player and enemy levels
• Designing and implementing several new character abilities, as well as redesigning the Cleric class
I also lead the engineering team, designing and implementing major gameplay systems, as well as tools that help automate and streamline development of an ambitious project with a small team. Some of my key technical innovations include:
• Implementation and optimization of an HDRP-compatible minimap with fog of war, and asset maintenance automated via custom editor tools
• Development of an enemy character controller that reconciles root-motion character movement with physics-based interactions
• Creation of a lightweight, soft-body character collision system utilizing virtual ellipsoid collision geometry
• Maintenance, refactoring, and expansion of several preexisting editor tools, including a quest system and an elaborate node-based spawn configuration level design tool
• Design and implementation of an automated string localization system compatible with wildcard text replacement
Cycle through a party of four heroes in a unique first-person take on squad based adventuring
Each hero class boasts a unique weapon and combat style, as well as a collection of slottable abilities to diversify the combat experience
Each hero class also specializes in dealing a signature damage type, promoting tactical character selection via selective enemy resistances
The custom combat balance tool helps designers visualize and compare character stats across classes and levels in-engine, presenting base stats, derived offensive and defensive stats, and a range of additional metrics aiding in balance, including effective health, total survivability, damage per second, ability uptimes, and combat efficiency.
This minimap system, featuring fog-of-war and several map and icon orientation options, replaced a third party solution that had been implemented via additional cameras. It improved frame rates by as much as 40%.
The Audio Asset Editor provided a centralized tool for managing audio assets and their associated sound hooks, replacing Wwise middleware that was no longer supported by the budget with an in-house system built around Unity's built-in audio solution.