Jñani Crawford - Portfolio

ChatGPT-powered card battler -- assemble your team and engage in a battle of concepts!

• Novel battle system powered by ChatGPT storytelling.
• I apply the model to generate the outcome of battles, post-combat statuses for units, and even commands that the player can choose from each round.
• Designed 50+ cards based on nouns and adjectives to create synergistic teams, and 20+ unique battle modifiers.
• Utilized Blueprints for rapid prototyping of deckbuilding and online multiplayer.
• Online multiplayer utilizing Epic Online Services.

A monster raising and racing game!

• 1-month game jam project for the BiG Byte Game Jam 2024.
• Pet sim gameplay with stats, energy levels, and moods that respond to player dialogue and world events.
• Procedural art and animations generating distinct Bot species, short cutscenes, and walking animations.
• Physics based vehicle system and automated steering using physics forces and constraints.
• NPC wander behaviors implemented in behavior trees.

My capstone project for the Games & Playable Media MS! A multiplayer turn-based dungeon crawler with a unique die rolling mechanic and a social deduction twist -- one of the players is a traitor!

• Set and documented coding standards, asset/source control, and core C++ abstractions.
• Guided junior teammates by leading Unreal Engine tutorials, Perforce tutorials, and debugging.
• Implemented 3-5 player networked asymmetrical multiplayer RPG gameplay utilizing Epic Online Services.
• Provided technical input and work estimation for the producer and creative director through the stages of pre-production and production.

This was a great experience not only because of the fun and challenging journey of programming the game, but also the bond I made with my team and the surprisingly rewarding opportunity for leadership that came with being the project's Technical Director.

I'm most proud of the fact that I was able to help guide the junior teammates by learning their interests and finding them tasks that made real contributions that lined up with their career and skill development goals!

Mini simulation game where you negotiate with NPCs to barter for fruits and veggies!

• Novel dialogue system specialized for negotiation.
• Utility-based AI for an immersive economic simulation.
• Procedural generation of levels and objectives.

Playful sandbox game where you sit in the back of class, play with paper, and toss things at your fellow naughty classmates!

• Designed and implemented origami-like 3d mesh folding system.
• Implemented physics-based projectile system and dodging.
• Programmed UI and implemented sounds.

Monster battling game where you assemble your monsters from plant parts and duel on a grand stage!

• Full turn-based combat and movement system in 3D.
• Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm for opponent AI, implemented in C++.
• Procedural mesh generation using Geometry Script.
• Modular ability system that also supports procedural ability generation, written in C++.
• Vertex-based animations using shaders made using Unreal Material Editor.

This is part of a larger project that I am hoping to have playable soon. You can see my pitch for this project here! (Pitching this was really fun.)

Global game jam - Battle robots and use their parts & abilities for yourself!

• Created turn-based combat system with buffs/debuffs, costs, and cooldowns.
• Designed modular gameplay ability system that applied to players and enemies symmetrically.
• Implemented animations and UI for battle and inventory management.

Infinite runner style mobile game!

• Designed gameplay, powerups, and difficulty scaling.
• Leaderboard system and interstitial ads implemented using android-native Java.
• Gameplay code, graphics, sound, and inputs implemented using Java + the libGDX library.

An NPC AI framework that uses a linguistic modeling and context-free grammars to parse sentences, store knowledge, deduce information, and plan, all using human readable sentences.

• Linguistics-inspired system that tracks relationships between words.
• Goal-oriented action planning (GOAP) algorithm implementation, in C#.
• AI scripting language that uses logic and planning systems to generate behaviors and intentions in readable English.