Underlord

Hats Worn: Technical Designer, Network Engineer, Gameplay Programmer

Tools: Unreal Engine 5, Git, Figma, Epic Online Subsystem

Team Size: 3

Time Frame: Early 2024

Underlord was an Unreal Engine prototype pitting four top down diablo-style fighters against a deckbuilding dungeon-designing DM player. The DM would use cards in order to populate various gauntlets with enemies and traps, and then play an active role in antagonizing the players as they attempt to conquer the underrealm.

I was the principal designer for this idea, and had the difficult task of marrying such asymmetric playstyles. I did paper prototyping for the dungeon creation and deckbuilding to sell the concept and later implemented the logic for dungeon generation, construction, card placement, and overarching game logic. This includes the “Dungeon Frame” system, an internal tool I implemented which allowed our team to quickly design and produce dungeon gauntlets to feed into the system, allowing level designers to make these sublevels with minimal friction and repetition.

This was my first professional project that involved advanced multiplayer networking, and in the process of working on it I had to become quite familiar with networked objects, gamestates, and maps. The end result had some time consuming bugs, but ultimately we got the project running both locally and through Steam’s SDK.

Ultimately the project was shelved after several iterations of prototyping, and perhaps its asymmetric ideas were a little too bold for the capacity of our team. I do still believe that the niche of “one player buys, everyone can join” that Underlord was aiming for has some great virality potential. Maybe its ghost will show up in a future game by Bolder.