Robot Raiders is a cooperative ARPG shooter on the Meta Horizon Worlds platform. I worked on Robot Raiders from its conception in February 2023, all the way to its launch date in December 2024, while I was employed at Mercenary Technology.

Most of the code I wrote was in TypeScript, using Horizon Worlds' custom TypeScript API and tools. This project was my first introduction to the Entity-Component-System (ECS) pattern, which I came to love as a pattern for writing maintainable and extensible gameplay code. I wrote and owned the code for various core systems, such as collision systems for the game's combat and player class abilities. I really had to shore up my 3D math skills—vector spaces, quaternions—to understand how to implement collision between rays, spheres, capsules, and oriented bounding boxes.

I dipped into Unity as well, when I used Unity's Mecanim animation system to make weapon and NPC animations work in Horizon Worlds. Lastly, I maintained a Unity plugin, written in C#, that exported the Mecanim to be ingested by the game—a roundabout way to get data from Unity into Horizon Worlds that couldn't be done using the Horizon Worlds TypeScript API.

Meta Horizon Worlds was a nascent platform that challenged us to overcome its limitations, or even bypass their systems and roll our own alternatives. This turned out to be a great learning experience for me and the other junior developers at Mercenary Technology.

You can watch the Robot Raiders trailer by clicking on this link.

Geometry Gunner is a cooperative rail shooter, also on Meta Horizon Worlds. This was the first game I worked on at Mercenary Technology, and we started small. The project spanned seven months from June 2022 to Jan 2023, when it shipped.

Horizon Worlds didn't even have a TypeScript API yet, so all the code was written using their "code blocks" visual scripting language that resembles MIT's Scratch.

All that said, I'm proud of the gameplay features I worked on, which included combat, a lobby system, player progression, and a dynamic 3D background.

My friends and I have been working on a couple of Godot projects: a typing and dungeon-crawling game, and a UI-driven game about detecting art forgery. I'm excited to be writing code and co-designing for both projects!