Daniyal Mirza

01Selected work

1. Avowed

   shipped 2025

   Obsidian Entertainment / Xbox Series X|S, PC

   • engine
   • console
   • tooling
   • build systems
   • Owned the engine upgrade path from Unreal 4.20 to 5.3, including the UE4 to UE5 transition taken mid-production, integrating each release into a heavily modified branch and absorbing the fallout for every other discipline.
   • Worked Xbox console development through to ship, clearing the compliance failures and cert-blocking defects that gate platform submission.
   • Built and maintained the in-editor tooling design, art and animation used daily, cutting the cost of a content iteration.

2. Unannounced Title

   2025 to present

   Obsidian Entertainment / Tech Lead, tech and rendering

   • engine
   • rendering
   • leadership
   • Tech lead for tech and rendering on the project, with two engine programmers and a rendering engineer as direct reports, while carrying a full senior engineering load directly.
   • Continued the engine upgrade path onto the current project, taking it from Unreal 5.3 to 5.5 and then to 5.7.

3. Crowe

   shipped 2017

   The Rogue Initiative / Oculus Rift, HTC Vive / Tech Lead

   • vr
   • platform
   • build systems
   • gameplay
   • Tech lead on a shipped VR title, owning platform services, UI, game-management and analytics modules, runtime optimization, and CI-backed build management.
   • Implemented the bow and arrow the protagonist's kit is built around, a two-handed draw and release, with guns and other projectiles as secondary weapons. A designer tuned its art effects and haptics.
   • Carried a hands-on engineering load alongside the lead role: hand presence and grab, world-space UI, and level layout.
   • TrailerThe Drowned Armory
   • TrailerSurvival Arena mode

4. RedpillVR

   2019

   The Rogue Initiative

   • networking
   • vr
   • Authored interpolative prediction for networked location and animation data, hiding link latency in replicated character movement rather than letting it surface as visible correction.

5. Possession

   shipped 2016

   RTS/FPS hybrid / Unreal / Lead AI Engineer

   • ai
   • architecture
   • systems
   • Architected the base codebase and designed the RTS AI, running decision work across threads behind Behavior Trees layered over state machines.
   • Built the system joining the strategic RTS layer to the first-person layer, which is the connection a hybrid of the two depends on.

6. Wildstyle Basketball

   2015 to 2016

   Easley-Dunn Productions / 3x3 street basketball, mobile / Unity / Systems and Gameplay Engineer

   • systems
   • data-driven
   • mobile
   • Built a StatSheet-driven data system that let designers drive gameplay behavior from spreadsheets without engineering in the loop.
   • Worked directly on the stat delivery architecture and built gameplay modules alongside the AI team.

02Personal projects

1. Nightspire Engine

   2026 to present

   browser as the shipping platform

   • engine
   • wasm
   • webgpu
   • threading
   • tooling

   A game engine written from scratch that treats the browser as a first class shipping target rather than a demo target: a C++20 core compiled to WebAssembly through Emscripten, rendering on WebGPU with no WebGL2 fallback, with Lua 5.4 statically linked as the gameplay scripting language.

   • Built around a browser-shaped thread topology: a host thread that owns the DOM and must never block, a game thread running as a worker pthread that owns Lua, a render thread holding the WebGPU device, and a task pool sized from the concurrency the browser reports. Threads need cross origin isolation, so the serving headers are part of the engine rather than of the deployment.
   • Instrumentation is part of the definition of done, not a later pass. No system ships without log coverage and tracing on its hot paths through NightInsights, an in-engine tracer that exports Chrome Trace format, with memory tagged per subsystem and held at zero steady-state growth.
   • Eleven phases in: an archetype and SoA entity model with component reflection and render extraction, a forward lit pass over WebGPU, a Lua runtime with hot reload, and Dear ImGui tooling with an outliner and inspector. Modules are layered in a strict dependency order from Core up through PAL, RHI, Renderer and World.
   • CMake and Ninja against a pinned Emscripten SDK, driven by PowerShell so one set of scripts works on Windows, macOS and Ubuntu. CI builds the wasm target on Ubuntu and Windows, runs a Playwright smoke test in Chromium, and deploys the demo only on green.
   • Live demodemo.nightspireengine.com

2. Constrained Dynamics

   2015

   mass-spring simulation

   • physics
   • simulation
   • opengl

   A deformable cube in C and OpenGL: a lattice of springs holding the cube at its rest shape, deforming on contact with a boundary, and resolving those collisions through the spring system rather than alongside it.

3. Engine Programming v1.5

   2015

   USC coursework / third-person arcade shooter

   • engine
   • networking
   • physics
   • animation
   • Implemented low-level networking on the TRIBES model, including a Ghost Manager to replicate object state out to connected clients.
   • Wrote a custom physics engine, and an animation system that blended partial and additive animations together programmatically.
   • Demo video1:05

4. Engine Programming v1.0

   2014

   USC coursework / third-person action game

   • engine
   • physics
   • animation
   • Built the core engine systems behind a single level of gameplay: programmed animation, physics, a particle system, and the game structure holding them together.

03Stack

Languages

C++PythonC#

Engines

Unreal Engine (UE4 to UE5)Unity

Engine and platform

Engine upgradesXbox console developmentPlatform certificationMiddleware integrationEditor and pipeline toolingMemory and framerate optimization

Build and CI

HordeJenkinsTeamCityPerforceGitSVN