My Pet Hooligan
Engine: Unreal 5
Role: Technical Game Designer
Focus: Gameplay Engineering & AI
Platforms: PC, Xbox One
About:
An online multiplayer shooter where you play as mischievous rabbit hooligans trying to take down an evil robot overlord.
As a Technical Game Designer, I worked across the early alpha and later development phases for My Pet Hooligan in Unreal Engine, implementing and prototyping gameplay mechanics in close collaboration with the Game Director. I worked with level and mission designers to build features that supported their encounters, contributed to performance optimization, and designed enemy AI, security systems, and weapons using behavior trees, state trees, and custom gameplay logic.
Enemy AI
For My Pet Hooligan I designed and implemented the initial enemy “Zuckbot” AI in Unreal Engine 4 using behavior trees and the perception system. In addition to the combat logic, I built a waypoint-based patrol and population management system so enemies could roam the city, chase and attack players, then return to patrol while keeping Zuckbots distributed across routes.
When the project moved to Unreal Engine 5 and the AI was rebuilt, I returned to extend the new system with patrol logic and a flexible objective framework. Designers could add a component to any world object and tag it as something to attack or defend; these components registered to a central system with helper functions to efficiently find and sort objectives by tag and distance.
I also expanded the waypoint options, including radius-based “linger” behavior so enemies could move around a point of interest before continuing their route, and added editor-side visualization, making it easier for designers to author, tune, and debug enemy behavior.
Security System
A key feature I worked on was the Security System. Originally inspired by the security cameras in Bioshock, the Security System for My Pet Hooligan was highly modular and built around reusable components, giving a lot of flexibility to the level and mission designers.
Security cameras detect and track players in their field of view, firing tag-based events that can drive gameplay responses such as spawning enemies or locking doors. To support scenarios like multiple cameras triggering a single lockdown, cameras feed into a centralized alarm object, which handles door locks, enemy spawns, and camera behavior for the duration of the alert.
Because the system is decoupled, other triggers—like volumes or interactable buttons—can also activate or disable alarms, giving designers a flexible toolkit for building stealth, lockdown, and escape scenarios.
Sticky Hand Weapon
One feature that was especially fun to work on was the Sticky Hand weapon. It’s basically a giant version of those little rubber sticky hands you had as a kid in the 90s.
The game director built the first prototype version and then I was tasked with taking it to a production-ready state. This involved refactoring certain areas, and optimizing others. But most importantly, it involved a lot of work in getting everything to replicate correctly so it could be used in online multiplayer (animations, abilities, VFX, etc).
The end result is probably one of the funnest features in the game. The Sticky Hand can be used as a melee weapon with both a primary light attack and a secondary heavy attack. And it can also be used as a grapple hook so you can fly around the city like spiderman.
