Usual June
Lead Programmer2021 - 2026
Studio: Finji
Platform: PC, Mac, Steam
Genre: 3rd Person Action Adventure
Release Date: October 2026
Game Summary
Fight monsters, talk to ghosts, and get to the bottom of a mystery threatening to obliterate an entire city in Usual June, a third-person action-adventure game about combat, cupcakes, and community.
My Part
Worked in a custom Unity ECS system to build up Usual June from an early prototype to a released game. Usual June is a 3rd person action adventure game with an even split of combat and narrative systems built in Unity.
- Built a responsive and modular animation driven action combat system inspired by games like Bayonetta and Nier: Automata. Designers can markup specific frames with collision and combo flags within unity’s editor.
- Built a dialog system that uses character and camera positions to show dynamic dialog bubbles in a 3d space.
- Created a Motion Warp system that allows for root motion animations to play out while smoothly blending a character to a target position. The speed of the warp in game can be controlled from embedded maya data.
- Worked with our game director to architect, implement, and iterate on core gameplay systems and mechanics.
- Implemented a 3d root motion driven character controller for players, NPCs, Enemies and Pathfinding.
- Implemented packages such as FinalIK, AStar Pathfinding, Bakery Lightmapping.
- Made a Unity plugin that downloads cutscene scripts from a 3rd party script writing tool called Scripto so they can be compiled into gameplay code.
- Build automatic tooling for Unity shader stripping to reduce build times and shader memory consumption.
- Profiled and optimized gameplay performance for lower end hardware.
- Worked with artists and designers to build Unity editor tools to streamline lightmap baking, VFX & SFX triggers, shader driven animations, Asset import pipelines.
- Created a tool where writers and designers can run cutscenes directly in Unity's edit mode to speed up cutscene iteration times.
