Noah Parker

Gameplay Engineer

Eternal Card Game

A online collectable card game, craft decks & challenge friends!

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Position: Lead Gameplay Engineer

Company: Dire Wolf Digital LLC

Duration: October 2021 – May 2025

Technologies: Unity Engine, Scala, C#, PostgreSQL

Contributions

Implementing over 700+ cards across 8 major and minor digital card sets (Cold Hunt, Unleashed, Behemoths of Thera, Battle Lines, Valley Beyond, Enter the Arcanum, The Devouring, Separate Ways)
Maintained regular live content for +40 monthly patches
Implemented unique core gameplay mechanics including Inscribe, Unleash, Taunt, Versatile, Hunt, Devour, Recruit, Bolster, and Nomad
Regularly discussed with designer to determine viability of new tech and alternative options if necessary
Improved AI decision evaluation to understand and use gameplay mechanics of cards without custom logic needed

Notable Gameplay Mechanics

Tournament System

Reworked pre-existing tournament system to improve several elements including the leaderboard, internal setup, and match pairing. SQL messages received several new pieces of data and improved sorting was done to make the the leaderboard reflect new design needs.
Done in Javascript and HTML, internal setup was streamlined by removing redundant inputs, creating improved tournament templates, and adding extra warnings. This reduced time needed by production to create and manage tournaments by approx. 1 day of work per month.
Match pairing logic was improved to prioritize players who have not played together, giving each player a more diverse spread of decks to play against.

Dialogue System

I created a dialog system to allow designers to write dialog in a Google Sheets, which would then be imported into game without the need for gameplay engineers to implement them. Dialog could easily be changed to trigger off of several various trigger during the game. This gave design the ability to quickly iterate on Eternal chapter battles, saving server engineers at least 1 day of work per month.

Taunt Mechanic

I implemented a taunt mechanic to force the opponent to block against an unit with taunt if able, the main challenge was making sure the AI obeyed this. The AI block logic had to be updated to prioritize taunt units in conjunction with pre-existing block prioritization. Using combat evaluation logic, units with Taunt were quickly prioritized so that the maximum number were able to be blocked. In addition, I was able to optimized the logic so that no increase to blocking calculation time was noticeable to players.

Devour Mechanic

For the Devour mechanic, I created a way to permanently remove cards from the game. Several challenges came from this as it we hadn't done it before. The main problem that I overcame was dealing with creating new server-side logic had that allowed client messages to circumvented the devour logic midway so that players could end the ability early. The second challenge was making sure it played nice with the rest of the systems, as all other systems assumed that once a card was created, it exists somewhere. So across the project, additional logic needed to be added to check and/or ignore cards when they were being deleted.