Released: Cancelled
Theme: MMO TPS Survival
Studio: Darewise Entertainment (70 collaborators)
Platforms: PC
Skill focus: Combat, 3C, Progression
Time spent on project: ~3 years
Engine and tools: Unreal Engine 4 & 5, C++
Blueprints | GAS | ABP | UMG | Shaders
Players reacting to the game
I was the designer responsible for 3Cs and player abilities, including movement and combat skills. My role involved extensive prototyping and iterative testing within the team, designing behaviors and dedicated test environments, and authoring comprehensive documentation ranging from high-level briefs to detailed FSOs.
My responsibilities expanded to include AI system iteration and tuning as well as UI, AI world spreading and progression, to be finally principal game designer on all Combat topics.
/ ! \ There was a change in the Art Direction during the last year and a half of the project, going from Stylized to Realistic, you will see visuals of both / ! \
Character Controls & Skill Systems
Guided by our creative brief for a “skill-based PvE shooter,” I designed intuitive input mapping and dynamic camera systems, ensuring a wide situational awareness that encouraged constant strategic movement.
Despite being early in development, I strategically anticipated all necessary MMO survival interactions and developed a user-friendly input system prioritizing frequent actions, supplemented by multi-step interactions using radial menus and input combinations.
Custom adjustments to evasion and jumping mechanics enhanced responsiveness, compensating for server latency through features such as coyote-time jumps and increased invulnerability frames during dashes.
(Reactions to Player movement playtest to confirm/improve the character’s movement skills)
Combat Design & Weapon Modularity
(Modular weapons that were made for the game, each one has 2 unique abilities and custom stats based on the modules they are built with)
(Control schemes example I shared with the team for playtests)
I developed a role framework resembling healer/damage dealer/tank dynamics, adapted specifically for a skill-intensive PvE environment:
Damage Dealer: High DPS, area-of-effect damage, handling secondary threats.
Front Liner: Precision-based crowd control, emphasizing skillful risk management through timing and reflexes.
Anchor: Support role offering healing, buffs, strategic setups, and escape route creation for allies.
This trinity system enabled specialized level designs optimized for cooperative gameplay.
In close collaboration with Whitney Burner (Lead Gameplay Programmer), Kosma Lobov-Rabiega (Lead Character Artist), and Ines Djezzar (VFX Artist), I designed, iterated, and integrated over 40 weapons, culminating in 25 final designs implemented into the game.
I developed a modular weapon system with interchangeable barrels, grips, and magazines attached to standardized weapon bases (e.g., sniper, shotgun, assault rifle) to efficiently diversify visuals and reduce development time. I also collaborated with Pavel Ksenofontov (Technical Artist) to create procedural materials enabling consistent, dynamic textures across weapon modules and bases.
Throughout this process, we utilized Unreal’s Gameplay Ability System (GAS), for which I received specialized training, significantly improving our gameplay implementation capabilities.
I tackled the classic camera vs. barrel alignment issue by implementing a layered system: a raycast and spherecast from the camera to determine intent, line traces from the weapon to validate hitability, and feedback routed to the reticle. This ensured clean communication and avoided the typical near-miss frustrations due to misaligned perspectives.
For non-instantaneous projectiles, I distinguished between low-speed and high-speed behaviors. A slow grenade might use colliders and gravity, but a fast-moving grenade cartridge requires predictive spherecasts between frames to feel responsive, particularly in MMO environments. A mistuned setup made our launcher feel laggy, once fixed, it felt snappy and fun.
Area-of-effect abilities brought their own challenge. I built a unified AOE system from scratch: every effect had a logical center, shape, distance curve, and obstacle rules. AOE visibility relied on three key elements, clear VFX, impact decals, and 3D residuals, ensuring readability, responsiveness, and tactical clarity.
Responsive combat isn’t just math. It’s about bridging intention and reaction with invisible logic and visible clarity.
When I arrived in the project, multiple problems happened with the camera.
Enemies behind the player were hit, but enemies in melee range litteraly in front of the player’s weapon weren’t.
This is of course a well-known camera core issue: camera-based traces misaligned with the weapon. It wasn’t a bug — it was a consequence of tracing from the wrong point of view.
To resolve this, I designed a simple system, the camera performs a spherecast and a linetrace toward the reticle to determine the player’s intent. If a shootable element is hit, we validate the target and follow with a weapon-to-target trace. If there are no obstacles, we finally fire the projectile and update the crosshair accordingly. A safety trace from the hand to the muzzle ensures players can’t shoot through nearby geometry. Since these calculations happen on client-side, I didn’t have to worry about to many calculations.
This alignment ensures shots feel precise, especially in close-quarters or cover-based encounters. It also prevents frustrating near-misses and invisible hits. The key is to treat the camera and weapon as two separate agents that must constantly stay in sync.
This allowed us to safely explore different camera framings without suffering from loss of precision in our shooting gameplay.
Enemy AI Design & Boss Encounters
I conceptualized and designed 25 distinct enemy AIs: 5 neutral wildlife, 15 aggressive wildlife, and 5 unique bosses. These enemies leveraged various gameplay mechanics (precision, reflexes, strategy) through diverse combat roles—melee, mid-range, long-range, healers, snipers, mortars, and tanks.
Collaborating closely with Kosma Lobov-Rabiega (Lead Character Artist), I ensured visual coherence and logical consistency among AI entities. Additionally, I led the “Alien Metamorph” initiative, creating immersive, reactive open-world bosses that reused wildlife animations and behaviors with enhanced complexity and interaction logic.
I spearheaded technical and design efforts for boss encounters, supported by Whitney Burner (Lead Gameplay Programmer), thoroughly documenting behaviors from concept (MDD) to detailed FSOs.
(Render of wildlife variation [young, mature, elder] that each had added behaviors but reused most assets)
Progression & Encounter Design
(extract of AI Difficulty Progression Mid level Design Document)
(Every element of progression was tied to variables that would modify in cascade the whole balancing file)
I was fully in charge of the progression and statistics systems for the game, covering player weapons, character growth, enemy scaling, and meta-progression, all designed to support a satisfying difficulty curve over a targeted 20-hour gameplay experience.
To establish meaningful progression across regions, I designed a stat growth model with a 250% increase in both player damage and enemy health, and a 170% increase in both enemy damage and player health. This framework provided a consistent and measurable difficulty ramp between areas.
To reinforce this progression, I implemented a tiered enemy system:
– Normal enemies had baseline stats for their level.
– Hard enemies had 170% more health and dealt 140% more damage than normal ones.
As a result, a level X normal enemy < level X hard enemy < level X+1 normal enemy, clearly communicating progression and encouraging the player to feel the difference between encounters.
To further differentiate enemies, I gave each of them unique weak and strong points mapped to armored or exposed parts of their bodies. Their attack patterns were designed to create intentional recovery windows, forcing players to reposition and actively engage with the combat space to strike back effectively.
I developed a master balancing spreadsheet exportable directly to Unreal Engine, enabling rapid iteration. In collaboration with Benjamin Lutz (Lead Level Designer), I created over 50 encounter scenarios that scaled dynamically based on region, biome, and player progression, efficiently managed through an exportable spreadsheet.
UI Leadership & Visuals
Beyond my technical game design responsibilities, I led significant UI refactoring and enhancements. As acting UI Lead for nearly a year, I supervised up to seven team members, establishing comprehensive UI documentation, resolving technical debt, and redefining the visual direction.
I actively programmed and collaborated closely with engineers (led on the technical side at the end by Luis Lairet) developing in UMG, gaining deep expertise in Unreal Engine’s UI systems. Additionally, I managed the rendering process for maps, minimaps, and UI illustrations, developing specialized tools for rendering and applying post-processing effects directly to in-game assets.
(extract of UI elements rendered and processed to be used in game)