My role: I was the sole programmer on Dungeons and Doors, a turn-based single-player card game built in Unreal Engine 5 using Blueprints. We chose Blueprints so that team members with limited programming experience could still understand or modify gameplay logic as needed. I also created and implemented lightweight animations as a personal side interest for the purpose of adding placeholder animations in case artists wanted to replace them later, though mine were ultimately approved and used in the final game.

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Notable contributions:

• Turn-based Game Flow System and Enemy AI

I built the full game flow, including turn order logic​, player action phases (draw key/card, then play cards or toggle doors), attack resolution, and AI. The AI's programming was done by me, however it was primarily our game designer the decided on the behavior of the AI. The result is an enemy that passes of a intelligent but is actually very simple.

• Guillotine, Design and Implementation

Contributed to conceptualizing the game’s scoring representation. Dungeons and Doors uses a tug-of-war-style score system, where successful attacks by the player or enemy raise or lower the score respectively. To match the game's theme, we explored several ideas and ultimately went with my suggestion: a guillotine with a movable bar that both displays the score and determines how far the blade can fall. A player win raises the bar to the top, locking the blade; a loss drops it to the bottom, allowing the blade to fall fully. I implemented and animated the guillotine system to deliver clear, thematic, and satisfying visual feedback.​

• ​Code Readability

I formatted my Blueprints in an organized and structured way, using redirection nodes as needed to organize wiring. This allowed my teammates to read through my code with more ease.​

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Game origins: Dungeons and Doors is Expired Jam's first game. Originally conceptualized for the 2024 Brackey's Game Jam, our team decided to complete this project to its end.

About Expired Jam: Expired Jam is a student-led game studio I co-founded at Purdue. What began as a small team of students working on a single game jam project has grown into a multidisciplinary group dedicated to building original games whose design focuses on enabling emergent gameplay. In just over a year, we’ve fully developed and released two titles—Dungeons and Doors and Razor Cyclone—with all code, art, and audio made in-house.