As Lead Programmer, I worked closely with the game designer, lead level designer, and lead artist to ensure technical decisions supported the overall vision of the game. Because the melee combat systems were closely tied to engineering constraints, many design discussions required evaluating what was technically feasible. My role often involved understanding our tools and systems in depth so I could help guide scope, feasibility, and maintainability during active design planning.

Team Coordination

I assigned tasks based on individual programmer strengths and interests, which helped improve both quality and ownership of systems. I also worked closely with team members to remove blockers, review architectural decisions, and maintain steady progress across different technical areas.

Project Planning

I collaborated with producers to organize milestone delivery documentation and maintain structured task planning for the programming team. This included tracking progress, clarifying requirements, and ensuring deadlines were realistic for the team’s workload.

Communication and Collaboration

Within our cross cultural team environment, I focused on clear communication and open technical discussion. My goal was to balance collaboration with accountability, ensuring team members could provide input while still maintaining clear direction so development continued moving forward.

Stakeholder Reporting

In our simulated production environment, I delivered technical progress reports to stakeholders during bi monthly reviews. These updates covered development progress, system stability, and upcoming risks. My goal was to communicate the current state of the game clearly and honestly while outlining concrete plans to address potential concerns.

Risk Evaluation

Reports included milestone tracking, technical artifacts, and structured risk assessments. I evaluated system maturity, identified potential bottlenecks, and communicated mitigation strategies before issues could affect delivery.

Feedback Integration

Stakeholder feedback was translated into actionable tasks by evaluating technical feasibility, team bandwidth, and production timelines. This helped ensure requested changes improved the project without destabilizing ongoing development.

Technical Risk

Melee combat was the largest technical risk on the project. Creating responsive and believable combat required coordination between animation, gameplay code, VFX, and AI, all within limited production time. The team was also learning new tools and working in an unfamiliar technical space, which introduced additional uncertainty early in development.

Design Coordination

Because combat influenced core design decisions, development had to continue while technical constraints were still being discovered. I maintained close communication with the animation and combat teams to evaluate feasibility, helping determine what could realistically be achieved within schedule and where systems needed simplification or fallback solutions.

Iterative System Planning

A key focus was designing combat systems to support iteration. We structured them to degrade gracefully if certain animation features or workflows proved too costly. This ensured the game could still deliver strong player feedback through coordinated hit reactions, VFX, and hit stop timing without relying on high risk features.

While much of my time as Lead Programmer was spent coordinating teams and managing technical direction, the time I had available for direct implementation focused on building systems and tools that supported both programmers and designers. In this work, I translated gameplay goals into stable, data driven systems and exposed tuning controls that allowed designers to iterate safely without requiring constant engineering support.

Camera

Our game required a third person camera that supported both melee combat and 3D platforming, which created competing design needs. Combat required tight framing and responsiveness, while traversal needed clarity and spatial awareness. Because these goals were experiential as well as technical, the camera became a collaborative effort between programmers and designers.

I served as the primary communicator between both groups, translating subjective design feedback about camera "feel" into concrete, tunable parameters engineers could safely implement. I also developed supporting tools such as interpolation utilities, smoothing controls, and environmental avoidance helpers. These tools allowed designers to iterate on camera behavior while maintaining stable underlying systems.

Puzzles

Early puzzle prototypes were engaging but implemented through fragmented scripts and one off logic. I consolidated these systems into a unified puzzle framework. Core logic was centralized while exposing configurable parameters so level designers could place and tune puzzles directly within levels. This improved reuse, maintainability, and consistency across the game.

Audio

In collaboration with composers from SMU Meadows School of Music, I implemented a layered music system that dynamically mixed audio stems based on gameplay states such as exploration, combat, bosses, and puzzles. I also built a dialogue playback system that managed recorded voice lines with prioritization and state control.

UI

I created a dynamic UI system that embedded input glyphs directly into tutorial text and menus. The system detected the active input device at runtime and swapped glyphs between keyboard, mouse, and controller automatically. This avoided duplicated UI content and maintained consistency across platforms.

Graphics Scalability

I implemented a graphics scalability framework integrated into the settings menu. Players could adjust lighting, shadows, texture quality, and resolution scaling at runtime. These settings were connected directly to engine level performance controls, allowing the game to scale across a wide range of hardware.

Steam Deck

I took ownership of Steam Deck support, profiling CPU and GPU performance to identify frame time bottlenecks. Through optimization of rendering and gameplay systems, I achieved stable handheld performance while ensuring UI layout and input behavior adapted correctly to the device.