Cradle of The Rift
General Engineer · Gameplay Programmer
Unity · C# · Team of 16 | 2025-2026
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. 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 programming, procedural systems, enemy and boss behaviors, combat feedback, and gameplay balancing.
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/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.
- Tuned player/enemy health and damage, enemy aggression, and item/upgrade effectiveness through iterative playtesting and balancing.
Technical Highlights
A. Procedural Chest Spawning:
I developed a procedural spawning system that randomly populates the environment with a configurable number of chests. The system checks the distance between potential placements to prevent chests from overlapping or spawning too close together, 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 enemy. The Stone Golem dynamically switches between melee and ranged attacks based on its distance from the player. For its boss variant, I expanded the behavior with a wandering state and additional melee and ranged attacks to create more varied combat encounters.
Challenges and Solutions
A. Balancing Procedural Placement:
Challenge: Random chest placement could create overlapping rewards or clusters of chests that were too close together.
Solution: I implemented distance checks and configurable spawn counts so the environment could retain procedural variation while maintaining more controlled chest distribution.
B. Creating Flexible Enemy Combat Behavior:
Challenge: The Stone Golem needed to remain effective at different player distances while avoiding repetitive combat behavior.
Solution: I implemented distance-based logic that allows the enemy to switch between melee and ranged attacks. For the boss variant, I expanded the system with a wandering state and additional melee and ranged attacks to create more varied encounter behavior.
Development Team
Team Capybara · University of Utah
16-person interdisciplinary team