• Technical Designer

  • Designing and implementing gameplay in a variety of engines across multiple platforms

I contracted with Dramatic Labs from February 2024 through August 2025. Dramatic Labs, and by extension its parent company and publisher Bruner House, is a collection of developers originally from Telltale Games and the creators of Star Trek: Resurgence. Bruner House is also known for its proprietary narrative engine, Beanie.

During my time with Dramatic Labs, I worked on some updates to the Steam release of Resurgence, and most importantly, helped port the project to Nintendo Switch. Due to technical and resource constraints, a full traditional port of Resurgence was out of the question. So, we had to reinvent the gameplay to fit within the technical constraints of the platform. We also needed to move away from Unreal engine to do so, which meant exporting the game to Godot. Almost the entirety of the game was rebuilt inside Godot UI nodes, with a custom backend that translated Unreal gameplay data and Beanie narrative controls into a playable experience.

Here’s some highlights of my contributions to the project:

  • Architected the entire gameplay framework, including integration of a sandboxed Lua environment, various subsystems including UI management and input, and establishing coding standards

  • Pitched and owned a variety of custom gameplay systems, including tricorder and transporter minigames

  • Owned all major pause menu features - settings submenus, character information submenus

  • Championed use of the Switch’s touch screen features, ensuring that users can smoothly switch between gamepad and touch controls at any moment

  • Wrote a variety of in-editor tools such as a QTE creator, tricorder scripting interface, and bug-reporting tools that directly integrated into Jira

  • Worked inside Unreal to help write and refine tools to export data into a format readable by the Godot and Beanie engines

  • Wrote Python tools to assist with image conversions via ImageMagick, including automatic creation of sprite flipbooks

  • Documentation galore

I encourage you to take a look at the below links for Bruner House, Beanie, and of course the company’s flagship title!