About
Hi, I’m Paul An.
I’m a senior game designer working on an unannounced AAA mobile game in Unity. I own character kit design and implementation, from paper spec through prototype and tuning, working alongside engineering, animation, and VFX to land combat that feels responsive and reads clearly. I also work on FTUE, building tutorial flows that teach gameplay mechanics to first time players.
Before this I was a designer at NetherRealm Studios on Mortal Kombat: Onslaught, and a software engineer at Meta, Boeing, and a few startups. I came up through software engineering, then gameplay engineering, then design, so I can reason about the code under my systems instead of just the spec on top!
In my free time I build my own games, run marathons, and study languages.
Career
Senior Game Designer - Drop Fake
Senior gameplay designer on an unannounced AAA mobile project in Unity. I own character kit design and implementation from paper designs through playable prototypes and tuning, partnering with engineering, animation, and VFX to deliver responsive, readable combat. I've also contributed heavily to the FTUE, building tutorial flows that teach mechanics clearly and support retention.
Game Designer - NetherRealm Studios
Designed and implemented characters and character abilities using UE5 Blueprints. Maintained and updated design docs, wiki pages for items and characters. Worked with engineers, animators, artists, & producers to create a AAA Mortal Kombat mobile experience.
Game Designer & Programmer - Rev Dev Studios
Managed a team of 3 engineers to create 2 prototype games and a fully released game in Unity. Learned and implemented skills such as sound design, lighting, art direction, animation rigging, etc. Built a turn based action-RPG game and a multiplayer PvP game from the ground up. Designed and prototyped a turn-based mobile RPG game.
Software Engineer - Meta/Facebook
Worked as a (PHP) backend engineer interfacing with Oculus Quest 2 payments processing portal. Participated in oncall rotations to maintain, debug and address failures in any part of the shop fulfillment process.
Gameplay Programmer (UE4) - Turn Me Up Games
3 month contract working with Unreal Engine 4 for TMU's unannounced original IP game. TMU has released ports of popular games such as Borderlands, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2, Journey to the Savage Planet, and more. Worked on navigation & pathfinding systems for Player/NPC interactions as well as AI controllers in blueprints. Project Management via ClickUp and SVN for version control.
Software Engineer - TrueAccord
Core engineer on TrueAccord’s scalability & product operations teams. Refactored legacy Jenkins CI/CD indexing jobs to use elasticsearch to decrease build times by over 1000%. Developed and maintained software in Scala & Python to automate helpdesk services in Twilio and Zendesk.
Software Engineer - Boeing
Engineered the core functionality for TCP/IP & UDP connections in Python/C++, enabling the US Navy to send, process, and compress .wav audio data using Python/XML for detecting enemies in anti-submarine warfare. Built and refactored unit tests in Python and proprietary automated testing scripts, in one case increasing the efficiency of a production build by reducing its overall file size by 54%.
