A large portion of my work focused on level systems, particularly the Event System, which served as the backbone of interactivity throughout the game. This system allowed any participating system to communicate with any other, creating a flexible and designer friendly framework for building simple and complex gameplay logic.

Over the course of development, I continuously expanded the system’s capabilities, integrating new features and connecting it with other core systems. Level Design relied on it heavily to control gameplay elements and create complex interactions without constant engineering support. Ultimately, the goal was to empower designers, reducing their dependency on engineering while maximizing their creative flexibility.

For example, in the image above: when the player shoots the blue crystal with a blue spell, it triggers the crystal’s event, which communicates with the nearby locked door, causing it to open. Both objects are communicating through this system. 

To bring the game’s enemies to life, I helped design, create and implement a Chatter System that managed Enemies' ambient voice lines and reactions. The goal was to make the world feel more alive and reactive without overwhelming the player.

Enemies would make reservations to a central manager before speaking, ensuring that dialogue lines didn’t overlap or interrupt one another. This system also handled voice actor pooling, preventing multiple enemies voiced by the same actor from speaking simultaneously.

Once an enemy’s turn came up, it would deliver a context-aware line appropriate to its current state, some of which included whether it was attacking, retreating, or alerting allies. These lines were spoken in the game’s custom in-world language, with translated and localized subtitles displayed on-screen for the player.

The background characters were driven by a system I developed to streamline how ambient NPCs were placed, animated, and integrated into gameplay events. This system empowered designers and animators to easily set up groups of animated characters and connect them to the broader Event System I had built earlier.

It included tools that automatically positioned characters performing shared or tandem animations around a specified origin point, decided by the animator and encoded into animation itself. This eliminated the need for manual alignment as designers could simply drop in the tool, select the desired animations, and the system would handle precise placement automatically.

Additionally, the system supported dynamic AI transitions. Background characters could be seamlessly “possessed” by AI and leave their animation scenes to become autonomous if the player interrupted them or if triggered by in-game events.