The Game
Galactic Thunderdome is a physics-based brawler released on Steam in October 2024. The game emphasizes dynamic simulation, destructible environments, and real-time AI operating on procedurally generated, constantly-shifting terrain. Developed at Pansimula, it shipped commercially on Steam and demonstrates the full lifecycle of production gameplay engineering: from architectural design through optimization, testing, and post-launch support.
Gameplay Systems
I built the core player controller from the ground up: a hybrid animation system combining keyframe and procedural animation for foot and hand placement, ragdoll on knockouts, and blend trees for falling and running on slanted terrain. The gun positioning system raycasts along the gun’s length to find valid placements within an allowed arc, preventing the weapon from clipping through terrain. The gravity system supports any direction, from per-room gravity zones to planetoid-style radial gravity pulling toward a center point.
The input system is generic by design. Players and AI drive the same controller interface, with a PID-style layer to handle the imprecision of AI inputs versus direct player input. This kept the two systems from requiring separate implementations as the game grew.
AI Systems
The AI state machine plays at a high level. Projectile detection uses a trigger collider that registers incoming projectiles and evaluates their velocity dot product against the direction to the player. If something is heading toward them, the AI decides whether to shield or dodge. Weapon selection, healing usage, and utility items all feed into the decision tree.
Per-character abilities pushed the complexity. Ten characters, most with distinct ability logic, distinct trigger conditions, and distinct use cases. Characters that spawn a random item need to path to it and pick it up once it appears, which added a layer of reactive planning on top of everything else. It scales fast. Door interaction was a small but genuinely annoying problem: AI pathing to a button to open a door needs to react correctly if the door opens mid-path, avoiding the mistake of hitting the button again and closing it.
Performance
Profiling drove every optimization decision. The Voronoi geometry pipeline for destructible terrain runs on a compute shader I ported from C# to HLSL, offloading textured geometry generation to the GPU. Under normal gameplay load, performance stayed well above 60 FPS. Object pooling, allocation-free loops, and making physics callbacks lightweight kept GC spikes and frame hitching out of the critical path.