Christian D'Albano

Gameplay EngineerOrlando, FL

I make small games and finish them.

Four shipped titles in three engines. Deterministic combat, tuning that lives in data, and a bot that plays 300 runs a night so the balance is measured instead of guessed. Most of the art is mine.

About

The short version

I came to games from production software, and it shows in how I build them. The rules get written before the code. Combat math is deterministic so it can be tested. Tuning lives in data, so a designer can change a number without touching a system. When feel is not enough I build a bot and measure: Undead Signal’s balance came out of a headless lab playing 300 seeded runs per change, and the first report said the front door was the deadliest room in the game.

Four shipped games so far. Undead Signal (Unity, live on Wavedash with achievements, leaderboards, and cloud saves) is an anti-poker roguelike where the horde builds the hand and you take it apart. ThunderBashers (Unity) is a 2.5D arena brawler with one verb and bots driven by personality profiles. Spare Knight (Phaser 3) is a tactical roguelike with speed-based initiative and no attack RNG, in a world I painted in Krita. I Won’t Be Abducted (Godot) is a tabletop-defense game with a twist in its last beat. I draw most of the art myself.

I’m looking for a gameplay or tools engineering seat where the systems are the job, on a team that ships. Where games and applied AI overlap is where I want to spend the next few years.

LIBRARY

Shipped

  • Undead Signal

    An anti-poker zombie roguelike shipped in Unity. The horde deals poker hands at you; every verb you have takes their hand apart. Balanced with an automated bot lab, live on Wavedash with achievements and leaderboards.

    Play
  • ThunderBashers

    Play
  • Next one

    ▸ In progress

Tools & AI

  • A SaaS that turns coaching frameworks into structured learning programs. I designed and built the agentic-AI orchestration system behind its quizzes and modular content, solo.

    saas · ai · agentic-ai

  • A League of Legends gold-efficiency tool built around the question item designers balance against, what is a stat point actually worth. Scores every item, compares full builds, auto-syncs from Riot's API weekly.

    league-of-legends · full-stack · vue

  • An AI resume and cover-letter builder with a structured document model, rich-text editing, and an MCP server that lets AI clients read and edit documents directly.

    saas · ai · mcp

Writing

Design Notes

5 min read

Undead Signal: five days of rules before a line of code

Designing an anti-poker roguelike by inverting Balatro, killing three drafts to find it, and balancing the result with a bot that played 300 runs per tweak.

  • postmortem
  • unity
  • jam
  • game-design
  • balancing
  • card-game
  • 3 min read

    Spare Knight: teaching the UI to explain itself

    A post-jam overhaul driven by one comment thread: new typography, a token system inside Phaser, tooltips that read the mechanics, and two soft-lock bugs run to ground.

    • devlog
    • ui
    • phaser
    • readability
    • combat-design
  • 3 min read

    This site is the case study

    Three token layers, eleven motion presets, two identities from one codebase, and a two-agent Claude workflow that keeps design authority and implementation honest.

    • design-systems
    • nuxt
    • tokens
    • motion
    • ai-tooling
    • process
  • 3 min read

    Tuning fear by numbers

    How I Won't Be Abducted ramps difficulty with zero new mechanics: every knob lives in a Godot resource, and the player's kit never changes.

    • systems-design
    • godot
    • difficulty
    • data-driven
  • 4 min read

    I Won't Be Abducted: a 63-hour postmortem

    Shipping a tabletop-defense game solo in one weekend: scope guardrails, a mid-jam economy cut, and hiding the real game underneath the game.

    • postmortem
    • godot
    • jam
    • narrative-design
  • 3 min read

    Spare Knight: 13 days, no dice

    Designing a tactical roguelike where every attack lands: initiative from speed, commitment instead of RNG, and a hand-painted world made in Krita.

    • postmortem
    • phaser
    • jam
    • combat-design
    • art
LOADOUT

Equipped

▸ EQUIPPED
  • Languages

    • TypeScript
    • JavaScript
    • Python
    • SQL
    • GDScript
  • Frontend

    • Vue 3
    • React
    • Blazor
    • Tailwind
    • Chart.js
    • Tiptap
  • AI & Agentic

    • Claude Code
    • Claude API
    • Cursor
    • MCP
    • Multi-agent orchestration
    • Prompt engineering
    • Structured output
  • Game Dev

    • Phaser 3
    • Godot 4
    • GDScript
    • Krita
    • Hand-painted art
    • Data-driven design

Open to gameplay and tools engineering roles, Orlando or remote

Let's talk.

chrisdalbano12@gmail.com

© 2026 Christian D'Albano · Designed and built by hand in Orlando.