Hi! I’m Ciarán.

I’m a detail-oriented Toronto-based game developer with over 5 years of experience working on multiple shipped titles.
I work as a Gameplay Programmer.
I’m passionate about systems design and juicy game feel.
You can play and learn more about my work below.

See my other creations that showcase my work as a professional filmmaker, musician and audio engineer.

Neon Override - survival roguelite shooter

At Lightning Rod Games, I worked on a survival roguelite shooter where you play as a synthetic consciousness trying to break free of your digital cyber-prison.

What I Worked On

  • designed and programmed combat — shooting, dashing, secondary weapons, status effect system, auto-firing abilities, enemy AI and customizable spawn patterns/rules etc.

  • designed and programmed an extensive upgrade system — a combination of level up and shop-based progression that supports branching trees, a changing economy, dynamic tooltips, etc. Creating upgrades and trees is made easy for designers with a variety of custom editor tools.

  • designed and programmed a quest system that actively tracks and displays objectives, with support for expression trees to evaluate objective and quest completion. Creating quests and rewards is also made easy for designers with custom editor tools.

  • designed and programmed a branching narrative system that serves the player a wide variety of story moments through video call conversations, text chat conversations and barks during gameplay — the system uses knock out lists sorted by priority (à la Hades).

  • designed and programmed a versatile player action system that allowed designers to customize state flow between actions and attacks using timelines, blending between root motion and scripted motion when desired

  • designed and programmed a dynamic metronome system that allowed several game elements to listen and react to any musical subdivisions

  • continuously worked to improve performance using Unity’s profiling tools

  • built and programmed UI for the shop, HUD, loadout selection and several other menus.

  • wrote several technical design documents to help designers use the tools I built

  • responsible for all sound design and implementation

Password: N30n!24

Nothing bad ever happens in Cozy Harbour - Mystery/Horror
Soulslike RPG

At Lightning Rod Games, I worked on a protoype that combined a dense choice-matters adventure RPG (à la Disco Elysium) with isometric soulslike combat.

What I Worked On

  • designed and programmed an interactive dialogue system that supported branching conversations, dynamic pop-ups and custom commands (for animations, camera movement, cutscenes, gameplay moments etc.).

  • built and programmed all dialogue UI elements

  • designed and programmed a versatile player action system that allowed designers to customize state flow between actions and attack combos using timelines, blending between root motion and scripted motion when desired

  • designed and programmed combat — a seamless blend of melee and ranged combat, lock-on system, enemy AI, QTEs, stealth and perception systems etc.

  • designed and programmed fog of war mechanic using a combination of shader and rendering techniques to support various level design approaches

  • designed and surfaced enemy behaviour trees and cutscene system to use visual scripting, so that designers could more easily iterate

  • implemented performant level streaming to support a seamless world

  • wrote several technical design documents to help designers use the tools I built

Rock Gods - Multiplayer Rhythm Brawler

At Lightning Rod Games, worked on a multiplayer prototype that merged free-flowing hack & slash combat with rhythm elements.

What I Worked On

  • designed and programmed rhythm combat that scaled, coordinated and queued enemy attacks to musical time while displaying and validating timed player parries — all easily tweaked and tuned from the editor using timelines

  • fully implemented online co-op gameplay across a network using Photon, syncing all rhythm gameplay to maintain immersion

  • designed and programmed a dynamic metronome system that allowed several game elements to listen and react to any musical subdivisions

  • designed and programmed player controller and attack combo system

  • designed and surfaced enemy behaviour trees to use visual scripting, so that designers could more easily iterate

  • responsible for all sound design and implementation

Scot Free - Arcade Party Minigames

I teamed up with three other developers to enter a game jam which provided us with the theme Shortcuts.

Using Unity, we created a WarioWare-inspired game centered around a young student named Scot who is cheating on a test — taking shortcuts at school.
Scot Free earned 1st place of over 60 submissions. Not long after, we ported the game to mobile and shipped it to the Google Play Store.

What I Worked On

  • designed and programmed the core game loop and state flow

  • designed and programmed all minigames

  • ported Scot Free to mobile, being mindful of performance and ensuring controls for movement and minigames felt juicy and intuitive

  • responsible for all sound design and implementation