Rewind 99

Rewind 99 is an open-world ’90s sim from Gunmetal Games where you run the last remaining video rental store. It’s built in Unreal Engine 5 and shipped 1.0 on Steam on August 27, 2026, after an Early Access run. I joined in April 2026 as a Senior Gameplay Programmer on contract.

• Ported core gameplay systems (checkout, rental and rewind stations, kiosks, store interactions) from the original Blueprint code to a new UE 5.7 / AngelScript / ECS stack, preserved their existing behaviour, and shipped them in the 1.0 release
• Built the project’s automated testing: a Gauntlet-to-AngelScript bridge, an in-game AutoTest suite, save/load parity checks, and unattended soak runs, all running in Buildkite CI and on packaged builds. The suite is now over 4,000 tests
• Cut ~10.5 s from every editor boot and reduced the per-frame cost of 150 dormant NPCs from 7.4 ms to 4.0 ms, measuring every change with before/after profiling runs
• Fixed compiler and cook-invalidation bugs in the engine fork so AngelScript StaticJIT is now on by default, saving ~0.65 ms/frame of script time
• Developed NPC combat and crowd behaviour and fixed NPCs getting stuck in the checkout queue, after a load, and when leaving
• Wrote GitLink, an open-source Git source-control plugin for Unreal Engine that runs in-process on libgit2, with LFS file locking
• Worked with AI coding agents (Claude Code): wrote the specs and plans, had the agents implement changes and write tests, and required every change to pass the test suite, measurement, and code review