DreadReign: The Shadow Fortress
Updated: 20 hours ago
AI Designer · Mechanical Moonworks
DreadReign: The Shadow Fortress is an arcade-style dungeon crawler that combines first-person action with party-based dungeon crawling.
Players control a party of heroes fighting through ruins and catacombs against groups of enemies, eventually confronting an ancient resurrected evil. Players can choose and customize their team, use primary and secondary abilities, and select from heroes with different combat roles, including the Grave Knight, Cleric, Ranger, and Elementalist.
I worked on DreadReign as an AI Designer, focusing on enemy behavior, combat tuning, and the design and implementation of higher-level enemy abilities.
PROJECT INFORMATION
Role: AI Designer
Studio: Mechanical Moonworks
Engine: Unity 6
Project Type: Commercial Game
Core Focus: Enemy AI · Combat Balancing · AI Ability Design · Playtesting
ENEMY AI & COMBAT TUNING
Part of my work involved adjusting existing enemies to improve how they behaved during combat. For enemies such as the Cave Troll, I adjusted values including:
Movement Speed · Attack Speed
These changes were made through playtesting and iteration, with the goal of improving how individual enemies behaved and felt during encounters.
I also learned and worked with the team's customized enemy and level editing tools in Unity 6, allowing me to make changes within the project's existing development pipeline rather than building isolated prototypes outside the production environment.
NECROMANCER SUMMON SYSTEM
My largest AI design contribution was expanding the Necromancer's Summon ability. The Necromancer is a higher-level enemy capable of summoning lower-level enemies. I designed and implemented the system so that its Summon ability could support multiple stages of enemy waves rather than a single repeated summon.
Each stage can be configured to summon different creatures. The basic encounter flow became:
Necromancer Uses Summon
↓
Spawn Configured Creatures
↓
Track the Current Summoned Wave
↓
Wait Until Every Creature in the Wave Is Defeated
↓
Allow the Necromancer to Summon Again
↓
Advance to the Next Summon Stage
A key rule was that the Necromancer cannot perform another Summon until every creature created by the previous wave has died. This allowed the ability to create a more controlled multi-stage combat sequence while giving designers control over which creatures appear during different stages.
PLAYTESTING & DESIGN COLLABORATION
My work also included regular playtesting of both the game and new prototypes. I used these sessions to evaluate enemy behavior, combat pacing, and new gameplay ideas, then contributed feedback during the team's weekly meetings and additional design discussions. Alongside implementing AI changes, I participated in these discussions by providing creative feedback and ideas for the project. This made the role a combination of hands-on implementation, gameplay tuning, playtesting, and collaborative design iteration.
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