They Are

Custom C++ tower defense — protect your base against escalating monster waves.

A tower defense game built on a custom C++/OpenGL engine from scratch. Players place towers to stop waves of enemies navigating toward the base. I led technical direction with a focus on pathfinding scalability and data-driven balancing.

Led a 5-person engineering team for a custom-built C++ engine project; prioritized engineering milestones and conducted rigorous code reviews to ensure system integrity.
Contributed to replacing per-frame per-agent path recomputation with a singleton-style path manager strategy, significantly reducing pathfinding overhead under stress conditions.
Contributed benchmark scenarios (up to 300 monsters) and profiling reports used to validate major runtime reductions versus naive recomputation.

Technical Deep Dive

Pathfinding Architecture Rework

My work included refactoring high-frequency A* update paths and adopting a singleton-style path manager pattern that reduced redundant recomputation under load.

Benchmark-Driven Optimization

I added and analyzed scripted benchmark scenarios (e.g., 100 monsters × 240 frames) to compare pathfinding strategies. Team benchmark logs report large gains (around ~5,900×, with stress outliers up to ~25,000×) versus naive recomputation.

Data-Driven Gameplay Iteration

I worked on text-file driven wave/map/tower parameter flows so balance iteration could happen with minimal core-code churn and repeatable runtime behavior.