Virballs
Action-adventure platformer where players fuse elemental creatures into hybrid weapons, on Steam.
- Layers
- UE5, Gameplay, Engine, Platform
- For
- Bolder Games, Chimera Studios
- Year
- 2025
Virballs is an action-adventure platformer set across six outlandish planets overrun by Virballs, viral elemental creatures that consume each other to form exotic hybrids. Players clean up the ecological disaster by using those hybrids as weapons. It released on Steam in March 2025, and later on the Epic Games Store and Nintendo Switch.
Contract work through Bolder Games, on a game developed and published by Chimera Studios and Bolder Games. I was on it during early development, about a year before it shipped, and moved off the project well before release.
What I worked on
- Built the elemental damage system in C++, extending Unreal’s damage framework so every weapon and enemy carries damage types and resistances, with the core loop of combining creatures to counter enemies built on it
- Moved the project from prototype toward production, porting Blueprint prototype code to C++
- Managed several Unreal Engine version upgrades over development
- Set up the first Steam build and release pipeline, early in development
- Did general gameplay programming