Gears of War — The Coalition

The problem

A five-month embed on an active AAA production (Gears of War, at The Coalition under Microsoft) is a short window to be useful on someone else’s codebase and someone else’s conventions. The job wasn’t to redesign anything — it was to ship game systems that held up under production pressure, and to make the designers around you faster without becoming a bottleneck yourself.

What I built

• Developed and implemented game systems in Unreal Engine 5 for an active AAA title.
• Built Blueprint nodes that exposed core C++ functionality to designers and producers directly — letting them iterate on gameplay without waiting on an engineer for every small change.
• Took ownership of workload estimation and task allocation for the systems I was responsible for, keeping delivery aligned with project milestones.
• Went back into existing systems to improve error handling and code quality, reducing bugs by 20% and leaving a clearer codebase behind for the next person who touched it.

Key decisions

• Building the Blueprint/C++ bridge rather than just writing C++ and moving on was a deliberate call: on a production this size, unblocking designers has a multiplier effect that a single engineer’s own output doesn’t. That’s the same instinct that shows up later in the Telltale work and in the Ueno Bank systems — build the tool, not just the feature.
• Fixing error handling in code I didn’t originally write is thankless, unglamorous work on someone else’s deadline. I prioritized it anyway because a clearer codebase compounds for every future changeset, not just mine.

Outcome

Delivered game systems and design tooling that shipped inside an active AAA production window, cutting bugs by 20% in the systems touched and leaving a clearer codebase behind.