Core Games Projects and Tools

Table of Contents

• Deadmau5 Concert
• Create Editor
  • Marketing Tools (Internal)
  • Measurement Tool (User Facing)
• Avatar Pipeline and Debug Menu
• MekaVerse NFT Bundles
• Game Jam
• Other Related Core/UE and DCC Tools

Deadmau5 Concert

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World-famous electronic artist deadmau5 collaborated with the Core Games platform to develop a live virtual concert called Oberhasli — an interactive music experience and fan hangout built entirely in Core. Designed as an evolving online space, Oberhasli features music, games, and interactive content curated and created by deadmau5.

In addition to the concert, we also shipped several cosmetic bundles and the Purrari Car mount. image

Create Editor

Marketing Tools (Internal)

The marketing tool is an internal tool built for the marketing team to showcase characters, cosmetics, and mounts for promotional purposes. It runs natively in the Core Client, fully isolated from the game systems.

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Users can configure characters, mounts, and animation poses without any limitations — filtering all eligible assets and matching characters with mounts as needed. The tool also integrates with the screenshot system, using stencil masking for clean backdrops. It is available across all Core projects. The marketing team has been using it since 2022, and in 2023 we extended the tool for showing Mobs in Out of Time too.

Measurement Tool (User Facing)

The measurement tool was the first user-facing tool I built for the Core Create Editor. Its function is straightforward: measure the distance between two points in a Core map, with measurement pins that can either snap to surfaces or move freely.

Building this tool deepened my understanding of how the Core Create Editor works — the layered Core/UE architecture, and what it means to design with public users in mind. Due to time constraints, several features didn't make it into the release, such as multiple measurement pins, shape-based pin layouts for object snapping, and curve measurements — all worth revisiting.

Avatar Pipeline and Debug Menu

Setting up an avatar for use in Core involves several steps. This section covers the UE and Core side of that process.

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Each avatar requires its own character blueprint, animation blueprint, and data assets to define how it appears and behaves in Core. For internal validation, we built a debug menu that lets the team thoroughly test new characters before they go live. It supports:

• Viewing different LODs
• Previewing the avatar from front/back/left/right and 3/4 camera angles
• Applying different gears, animations, and poses
• Simulating rigidbody physics and foot IK across varied surface angles
• Taking screenshots with different backgrounds and lighting setups
• Running color correction checks against a standard color cube
• Generating thumbnails
• ...

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This debug menu has been actively used and well-maintained by the team for years. It's satisfying to contribute tools with that kind of lasting impact.

MekaVerse NFT Bundles

This project launched during the peak of the NFT boom in 2021. Collaborating with the MekaVerse team, we built a world called MekaVerse Citadel and created gear sets for all 8888 unique Meka NFTs. Players who linked their crypto wallet to their Core account could unlock Meka gear corresponding to the NFTs they owned.

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We established art standards for the Meka gear sets and the environment visual language to ensure consistency across the entire Meka world. These standards covered material setups, mesh pivots, poly counts, LODs, transforms, UVs, collisions, textures, and iconography used throughout the project.

We also extended our avatar pipeline to support the Meka gear sets and built an automation process specifically for Meka assets. The scalability of the Core platform made the integration smooth.

Game Jam

Core has hosted several game jams over the years, both internal and external. In the most recent one I participated in, I leaned into AI-assisted development to build a Treasure Hunting game — inspired by the wave of Bay Area startup office closures happening at the time.

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The premise: a company is shutting down its office and inviting staff to take items home on the final day. Players take the role of an employee, racing against a 3-minute timer to collect items of varying rarity and point value and haul them back to their car. Some items — like desktop computers and laptops — require inspection before their value is revealed. Others are tucked away in unexpected places, like a bottle of wine hidden in the kitchen cabinet.

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The game went from concept to playable in under 2 days. With AI assistance (Claude, naturally), I was able to execute far more of my original design ideas than the timeline would normally allow. The game shipped to the Core Games production platform and is available here.