The Situation

I joined Hometopia as a UI/UX developer. The game had been in development for four years with multiple technical hands coming and going. What I found was a codebase riddled with tech debt, performance issues, and bugs accumulated over years of turnover.

My UI work went well—fast improvements, good collaboration with the game director and artists. But the underlying technical problems ran deep, and Early Access launch was rough.

Then things got harder. Tech leadership left. Most of the team was let go. We went from 15 people to 5.

What I Did

I stayed. The remaining team decided not to let the game die.

As de facto Lead Programmer, I took ownership of the technical recovery:

Performance & Stability

Tackled years of accumulated tech debt and performance issues
Implemented object pooling, LOD streaming, texture atlasing, and material consolidation
Significantly reduced memory usage and eliminated memory-related crashes
Fixed lighting and post-processing problems that plagued the game

Multiplayer Rescue

When the person assigned to multiplayer didn’t deliver, I built the entire system from scratch in under a month:

Unity Netcode for GameObjects + Steamworks integration
Reliable state synchronization for a game with thousands of placeable objects
This became a defining moment for my multiplayer expertise

Systems & Tools

Rewrote the save system with compact, network-safe serialization (Steam Workshop-ready)
Built custom Unity editor tools that streamlined item setup for designers and artists
Implemented Undo/Redo with a deterministic command framework
Migrated input handling to Unity’s modern Input System
Set up DevOps automation with Plastic SCM and Unity Cloud Build

Team & Process

Mentored junior developers through the recovery period
Established a sustainable update cadence: major updates every 1-2 months, patches between
Worked across time zones with a distributed team (US leadership, EU/Asia developers)

The Reality

This wasn’t a greenfield architecture project. It was a rescue mission—inheriting a troubled codebase, surviving a team collapse, and systematically making things better while shipping updates to players.

The game remains in Early Access—funding was eventually pulled and development stopped. But the team that stayed turned a failing project into something playable and stable. Sometimes the most valuable skill is persistence.