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ABOUT GANGSTAR NY:

Gangstar New York is an open-world multiplayer action game set in a futuristic reimagining of New York City. Players compete and cooperate across a dynamic sandbox filled with high-speed chases, chaotic shootouts, and emergent gameplay. Built on the legacy of the Gangstar series, the project aimed to deliver a living online world blending urban exploration, crime-themed action, and competitive multiplayer experiences.

As a Lead Game Designer, I managed a team of 7 designers to ensure alignment with the overall game vision. I took ownership of core gameplay systems, including the design of the 3Cs (Camera, Controls, Character), and fully implemented the Camera system. 

FEATURES:

  • Futuristic Open World
  • Multiplayer Sandbox
  • Dynamic Vehicle Gameplay
  • Third-Person Combat
  • AI-Driven Encounters
  • Gangstar Legacy

TRAILER

MY CONTRIBUTIONS

  • Led a multi-disciplinary strike team of 7 designers, ensuring feature cohesion across camera, movement, combat, economy and mission frameworks, aligned with the creative director’s vision and live iteration priorities.
  • Fully owned and contributed to implementation of the 3Cs system:
        • fully implemented third-person camera logic for the character, vehicles and gadgets, directly implemented in Unreal Engine Blueprints
        • input tuning 
        • traversal responsiveness
  • Designed and led the development for multiple core systems:
        • combat shooting mechanics
        • civilians and enemy structure and AI behavior
        • various gadgets: jetpack, grappling gun, wingsuit
  • Helped on building the foundation of the multiplayer mission system & events
  • Created various in-editor design-oriented tools to accelerate team workflow
  • Actively participated in recruitment and team calibration process - reviewing candidates, mentoring juniors
  • Ensured a smooth collaboration between design and engineering, animation, UI/UX for rapid iterations


(this page is still work in progress and more documents and samples will be coming soon)

Designed


Samples of GDDs and in-action videos:

 
 

The camera system in Nyan Heroes was designed to support high-mobility, third-person combat with maximum clarity and control. It dynamically adjusts to movement, abilities, and weapon use, ensuring strong situational awareness in both tight spaces and open arenas.

In order to achieve that I had to collaborate with level design to elaborate strict metrics for interiors and with engineering to develop a scalable system to support framings for various characters, movement state that supports both movement, abilities and gunplay. 


Main challenges:

  • creating a high responsive and adjustable system scaled with mouse control input
  • proper framing for each character to reflect it's proportions and personality keeping in mind certain limitations
  • finding the sweet spots and balancing between characters proportions and minimizing the parallax effect
  • ensure smooth and expectable transitions between states to prevent motion sickness


Samples of GDDs and in-action videos:

 
 

Each Guardian in Nyan Heroes features a unique set of abilities tailored to their class role, encouraging team synergy and tactical play. Abilities are designed to complement movement and weapon systems, offering a mix of offense, defense, utility, and mobility options.

Each hero was equipped with 4 abilities:

  • Weapon Augment - provides the players a vast amount of optionality and a variety of choices allowing the player to find unique and imaginative ways of using their Guardian and assortment of weapons (duration & cooldown based)
  • Movement Ability - grants the Guardian a boost of movement allowing them to quickly reposition, traverse terrain and engage or disengage from combat (duration and cooldown based)
  • Ultimate Ability - special abilities that charge over time or depending on Guardian performance. They complete the Guardian theme, in the same time providing a powerful and memorable outcome
  • Passive Ability - they activate automatically or have effects that are always active without player interaction and they do not affect the game world directly

The game hosted a total of 7 Guardians and from the total number of abilities, I was responsible for 15 abilities out of the 24 abilities implemented in the game (including 3 Guardians full design): 

        • 6 Weapon Augment Abilities 
        • 3 Movement Abilities 
        • 4 Ultimate Abilities 
        • 2 Passive Abilities


Main challenges:

Ideating, designing, (occasionally) prototyping and supervising engineering implementation of the abilities 

I designed a flexible placeable system used across multiple hero abilities, allowing players to deploy interactive objects with distinct tactical functions. While unified under a shared core framework, each implementation introduced unique behaviors—ranging from area control and protective barriers to traps and utility zones. The modularity of the system allowed easy tuning for placement rules that fit each ability while maintaining expected outcomes.


The system consisted of a hologram attached to the pawn, indicating the placement position by adjusting camera pitch and yaw and the confirmation of the outcome.


Key factors defining the versatility of the system:

  • minimum and maximum range
  • detection trace configuration from the camera
  • blacklisted classes to prevent placing on various actors or beyond different actors
  • possibility to project only on freely mid-air, project on floor, project on floors of various heights with adjustable visibility conditions
  • adjustable line of sight conditions related to the volume of the placed actors
  • using floor normal or using the same up vector as his pawn owner


Main challenges:

Developing a system that could evolve in time on future abilities but have a high reusability and modularity.

I defined and adjusted the entire hitbox system for all the characters to ensure precision, fairness, playability and competitivity for a fast-paced third person combat environment.

Key considerations included per-body part damage multipliers, projectile and hitscan traces handling, consistent feedback for both attacker and target.


Main challenges:

Keeping the capsules up to date with the frequent model changes, maintaining a well balanced experience between the capsules sizes character proportions and overall high speed combat pacing. In the same time, the anti-cheat measures imposed some limitations on certain aspects of the system.

Project's Obituary (?)

The project started as a very ambitious open world and multiplayer game (with various components: shooting, driving, parkour) to be released with Unreal Engine as well as cross-platform (mobiles, PC, consoles). Over the years, it went through multiple changes and improvements continued development after I left the company late in 2022.


For me it was the first project I had the chance of working on with Unreal Engine. It became an invaluable accelerator in my growth — allowing me to rapidly deep-dive into UE’s systems (blueprints, actors, replication), from full partial 3Cs implementation to custom tooling. The project served as a major technical and creative inflection point in my career, solidifying my fluency with design and Unreal Engine.


It's unclear for me what happened with the project after my departure from the company, as I had no more visibility. However, it seems like it still has an active Steam page that can be checked below: