CRASH PAD - 2025

Network Multiplayer Game, Unreal Engine

Producer and Lead Programmer

For this project, I led a small development team in creating a multiplayer platform with the intention of testing the medium’s ability to facilitate social interaction and actual play. With those goals in mind, I utilized Unreal’s existing voice attenuation system to allow players to direct the direction of their interactions. With a player’s speech growing louder or quieter based on their distance and direction, I worked to emulate the way speech is used in real-world environments and, in doing so, better simulate the conditions a user might be used to experiencing while playing a game like Dungeons & Dragons or poker. This was then integrated into Steam’s multiplayer framework, allowing for a seamless player experience across platforms regardless of location.

This project was inspired by my experiences playing TTRPGs and party games over platforms like Discord. Due to their use of mono-audio, natural conversation flow and side talk are almost impossible, which stifles the social nature of these platforms and leads to a lot of players actively avoiding utilizing these tools. Additionally, the majority of the existing systems for synchronous actual play attempted to reinvent the wheel, including advanced world-building modules and gimmicky tools for running games that served to distract from the actual problem. Thus, Crash Pad was developed with emulation in mind, as most users of virtual TTRPG systems are people who would play these games in person if not for time constraints or geographic distance. Our final build serves as a proof of concept for a larger game model designed to be as unobtrusive in players’ game experiences as possible, prioritizing the user’s ability to direct social play over that of the platform’s. You can see a demonstration of the attenuation system here.