Nicholas Reardon

Lead system designer and gameplay engineer for a Lyra-based Unreal Engine action rogue-lite focused on modular combat, encounters, seamless travel, persistence, and data-driven content authoring.

• Architected a modular Lyra-based gameplay framework using Game Feature plugin isolation to keep combat, game modes, and content decoupled while iterating on an arena-mode vertical slice.
• Designed a world-level event bus on the GameState Ability System Component to coordinate encounter, spawn, and travel systems at runtime without coupling individual components.
• Built a seamless-travel subsystem that snapshots and reconstructs player and world state across level transitions, preserving GAS attributes, equipment, and run upgrades through GameState teardown.
• Implemented a pluggable save backend behind an interface, isolating disk I/O from runtime state and leaving a clean extension point for a future server-backed implementation.
• Designed a designer-facing combo system using an input-tag routing map where each step resolves attacks from owned Gameplay Tags at runtime, letting upgrades modify movesets without branching logic.
• Built data-driven encounter, wave-advance, spawn-modifier, and combo-routing systems so new encounter rules, enemy behaviors, and upgrades can be authored through data.
• Migrated a GAS-based Lyra project across two major Unreal Engine versions (5.6 to 5.8), resolving API deprecations, build and registration breakage, and Lyra base-class changes.

Solo Unity prototype with data-driven weapons, upgrades, enemy spawning, and runtime UI.

• Built an enemy spawning director with spawn pacing, cap management, and optional object pooling for performance under high enemy counts.
• Implemented rarity-weighted enemy selection with per-type parameters and runtime tuning hooks for spawn rate and movement speed.
• Built a fully data-driven weapon and upgrade framework with stat scaling and functional modifiers authored as editor-defined upgrade definitions.
• Created dynamic runtime UI that adapts to available upgrades and player state as new weapons and modifiers are added.

Primary gameplay and tooling programmer for a browser-playable Godot game jam platformer.

• Built a nested state-machine character controller with ground, air, wall-slide, slam, destroy, and death states; coyote time; variable-height jumping; wall jumps; input buffering; spike grace frames; and tile-data-driven slippery surfaces.
• Built a chain-reaction destructible system where a facing raycast breaks a target and an expanding overlap query breaks neighbors outward with per-depth delay.
• Created an editor-time tile-to-scene tool that swaps tiles for scene instances keyed by tile custom data while preserving flip, transpose, and rotation values.
• Built an aimable launch ability with aim, fire, and cancel states, a live guide line, and on-screen control prompts.

Primary programmer for a three-day Godot jam game about physics balancing a bear on a unicycle across telephone wires.

• Built a two-body physics character using a wheel and rider rigidbody joined by a pin joint, with torque-based locomotion and separate ground and air balance tuning.
• Implemented a charge-and-release variable jump with compression, impulse scaling, contact-based ground state, and rolling average-speed feedback.
• Built a telephone-wire authoring tool that creates segmented physics ropes between anchors and renders them as smooth baked Curve2D lines.
• Implemented a shader-driven day-night cycle with four-phase sky blending, scripted sun and moon motion, stars, and tinted clouds.

Python and PySide6 desktop application for downloading market data, charting ETF price history, and running trading-strategy backtests. Educational engineering project, not production trading software.

• Built a PySide6 desktop interface for selecting ETFs, date ranges, and strategies, with embedded Matplotlib charts for price history and strategy performance.
• Designed a data-access abstraction with swappable adapters for Yahoo Finance, local JSON, Alpha Vantage, and Polygon-style sources, so adding a provider does not touch consumer code.
• Added dynamic strategy loading via Python module discovery so a new strategy drops in as a file with no controller changes, and ran data downloads on a background QThread to keep the GUI responsive.
• Implemented SMA Crossover, MACD, and Bollinger Bands strategies on shared infrastructure for tracking cash and shares, logging trades, computing return metrics, and writing CSV outputs.

• Independently diagnosed and repaired unfamiliar devices through structured troubleshooting, fault isolation, and verification testing.
• Executed delicate device teardowns with detailed tracking and documentation for reliable reassembly.
• Built internal repair documentation and improved workflows to increase consistency and efficiency.