Reave
As a Gameplay Engineering Intern at Alta VR, I contributed directly to the development of Reave, a dark fantasy VR medieval-extraction game for PCVR and Meta Quest. My role centered on building and refining gameplay systems that defined the player experience, while ensuring performance and scalability in demanding VR environments.
One of my core contributions was developing a modular HUD notification system that designers and engineers could easily extend. This system delivered networked real-time updates across quests, inventory, exploration, and combat events, connecting communication between systems on both server and client and improving the clarity of player feedback. I also engineered a multi-choice NPC dialog framework that supported branching conversation trees, enabling more dynamic player agency and narrative depth.
I worked on a complex weapons system refactor, re-architecting a complex and difficult-to-maintain codebase into a scalable structure that simplified the addition of new weapon types and interactions. This reduced technical debt, improved maintainability, and accelerated future iteration for the combat team.
I was responsible for multiple features including a networked in-game notification system, which notified players of important events such as quest updates, inventory changes, and combat alerts. I developed a multi-choice NPC dialog system that allowed for branching conversations, enhancing player interaction with the game world. I also handled SFX and UI hookups to game events, ensuring a cohesive audiovisual experience and alignment with engineering and design. Part of this was creating a dynamci item rarity-based chest VFX system that visually communicated item rarity through changing the chest effects color based on the loot inside. This required communication between the server and client to communicate the rarity data upon opening a chest.
Part of my regular duties included debugging gameplay systems that were assigned to me on Jira. I investigated and resolved issues related to player movement, combat mechanics, SFX and UI desyncs, physics misbehaviors, and network synchronization, improving overall game stability and player experience.
Beyond these systems, I collaborated with senior engineers and designers in an Agile workflow, contributing to debugging, code reviews, and playtesting feedback loops. This experience gave me hands-on exposure to professional VR game development, interaction mechanics, PvP gameplay systems, and cross-disciplinary collaboration with art, design, and QA teams.