Noah Parker

Gameplay Engineer

Cascadia Digital

The digital version of the popular tile-laying and token-drafting game

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Position: Lead Gameplay Engineer

Company: Dire Wolf Digital LLC

Duration: May 2024 – May 2025

Technologies: Unity Engine, C#, AWS Gamelift, AWS Lambda

Contributions & Notable Gameplay Mechanics

Record-Keeping System

I created the server-side of the record-keeping system to allow game history, player statistics, and end-of-game information to be kept for player review. Using AWS Lambda, all relevant data was collected at the end of the game, and sent up to a database. Working with client engineers this data was available to be viewed by player to look back on previous games. Adding end-of-game recording was a challenge as I need to create new data structures to record type, position, and rotation of tiles which could be converted to JSON and read by a Unity game client.

Multi-Daily Challenges

I increased versatility of daily challenges, by allowing AWS Lambda logic to generate multiple different difficulties of daily challenges each day. To do this, I had to separate out the messaging for each difficulty to point to unique Lambda functions, as it was needed to correctly saved and load them.

Tile-Token Pairing Validation

For several challenges, special tile-token validation rules were needed. To reduce client-server round-trip messages, I developed pairing logic to prevalidate tile-token combinations based of these game rules. This allowed tiles and tokens to know if they could be placed somewhere based off the possibility of the other being places first.