Crimson Knight

Crimson Knight is a Souls-style action-RPG built in Unreal Engine 5, featuring deep melee combat, emergent enemy behaviors, and a scalable AI pipeline.

As Programming Lead and Gameplay & AI Designer, I led programming and gameplay design for an 18-person capstone team, aligning engineering, design, art, and production from prototype to final showcase.

Programming Leadership

• Led a team of five engineers within an 18-person multidisciplinary team of producers, designers, artists, and programmers.
• Owned technical design from sprint scoping and task assignment through code reviews and teammate support.
• Served as a bridge between programmers, designers, and artists, translating combat and level-design goals into data-driven implementations.

Combat Design & Playtesting

• Designed player-versus-boss combat around movesets, telegraphs, counterplay windows, multi-stage pacing, difficulty tuning, and readable challenge.
• Ran target-audience playtests and turned feedback into concrete combat, balance, pacing, and readability changes.
• Tuned timing, damage, stamina, and challenge through repeated playtests.

AI Systems

• Built a hierarchical State Tree framework to manage enemy behaviors including patrol, engagement, stun recovery, and evasion.
• Integrated an n-gram predictive model with the Gameplay Ability System to recognize player action patterns and bias enemy decision-making toward appropriate counters.

Gameplay Ability System

• Designed a modular Abilities + Effects pipeline in GAS for rapid iteration on character attributes, upgrades, and status effects.
• Implemented boss AI and player abilities with State Trees, GAS, and motion warping.