Cradle of the Rift
General Engineer · Gameplay Programmer
Unity · C# · Team of 16 | 2025-2026 | Released on Steam
A cooperative third-person roguelike shooter featuring escalating enemy encounters, procedural gameplay elements, upgrades, and a final extraction sequence
Game Overview
Cradle of the Rift is a cooperative third-person roguelike shooter developed by a 16-person interdisciplinary team and released on Steam. Players fight escalating waves of enemies, collect upgrades and resources, and progress through procedurally populated environments before facing a final extraction encounter.
I worked primarily on gameplay systems, procedural spawning, enemy and boss AI, combat feedback, and gameplay balancing, while integrating and testing features within the team’s collaborative development workflow.
My Role and Contributions
Systems Worked On:
Player Interactions · Procedural Spawning · Enemy & Boss AI · Combat Systems · Items & Projectiles · VFX · Gameplay Balancing
- Developed core gameplay systems in Unity using C#, including player interactions for chests and shrines and procedural chest spawning with configurable counts and distance constraints.
- Created and expanded enemy and boss behaviors, including the Stone Golem’s distance-based melee/ranged combat logic and additional boss attacks and states.
- Implemented gameplay features including a homing-projectile item and integrated combat interactions with enemy systems.
- Created VFX for enemy attacks, projectiles, spawning, damage, and death states, along with several gameplay sound effects.
- Unit tested, debugged, and integrated gameplay features using Agile/Scrum, Jira, Perforce, and Git, iterating through playtesting and gameplay balancing.
Technical Highlights
A. Procedural Chest Spawning:
I developed a procedural spawning system that populates the environment with a configurable number of chests. The system uses distance checks between potential placements to prevent overlap and excessive clustering, allowing designers to control reward density while preserving variation between runs.
B. Enemy & Boss Behaviors:
I developed and expanded several enemy behaviors, including boss variants and the Stone Golem. The Stone Golem switches between melee and ranged attacks based on its distance from the player. For its boss variant, I added a wandering state and additional melee and ranged attacks, creating more varied combat encounters.
Challenges and Solutions
A. Balancing Procedural Placement:
Challenge: Random chest placement could create overlapping rewards or excessive clustering, reducing control over reward distribution.
Solution: Implemented distance constraints and configurable spawn counts to preserve procedural variation while maintaining more consistent reward distribution.
B. Creating Flexible Enemy Combat Behavior:
Challenge: The Stone Golem needed to remain effective at different player distances without making encounters repetitive.
Solution: Implemented distance-based decision logic for switching between melee and ranged attacks. For the boss variant, I added a wandering state and additional attacks to increase behavioral and encounter variety.
Development Team
Capy Co Studio · University of Utah
16-person interdisciplinary team