Alina Onyx
Game Developer
Experience
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coherence
2024 - Now
Game Developer (Developer Relations)
My mission at coherence is to help developers integrate multiplayer and networking into their Unity games. Our clients include industry veterans like Poncle (Vampire Survivors) and Bossa (Lost Skies), among many others.
In addition to collaborating with our clients and engaging with our developer community, I develop custom game demo projects using coherence and Unity, which we use to showcase the ease and depth of our feature integration. This also includes content creation in all kinds of formats: videos (from high-energy feature trailers to voiced tutorials), case studies, documentation, and live demos of coherence.
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Ryalto
2023 - 2024
Full-stack Developer
Developed the Ryalto communication platform for healthcare workers across UK and Europe. I worked on implementing new features, such as work logs, calendars, shifts and shift booking integration with external APIs, as well as maintenance. Outside of new features, I prioritized opportunities to make impactful product experience improvements.
The role involved full-stack web development in Ruby on Rails/JavaScript, as well as UI/UX design for the new features of our product, with an emphasis on mobile support and responsive design.
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Larian Studios
2021 - 2023
Capture Artist
I created the game trailers for Baldur's Gate 3, including those seen by millions of players at major industry events like The Game Awards. I handled the full production pipeline - pitching, storyboarding, editing, post-production, and everything in-between.
Additionally, I produced press kits for all major media outlets and other online marketing content for the game.
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Unity Technologies
2020 - 2021
Technical Writer
I documented the Unity core engine features and the C# scripting API, as well as owning product documentation for Unity ArtEngine. Both required an in-depth technical understanding of Unity and its products.
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Unity Technologies
2018 - 2019
Developer Evangelist
In the span of a year, I delivered multiple technical talks on using Unity at 18 different developer conferences worldwide, such as GDC and Unite; driving new feature adoption and focusing on the experience of our users. I developed game demo projects in Unity and C# to support my talks and serve as a backbone for learning content delivery across other channels.
I also engaged with our developer community at online and in-person events, supporting our users and striving to make sure they had a great experience using our tools.
My Work
coherence
- My Role: Game Developer (Developer Relations)
Coherence is a complete multiplayer development solution for Unity games.
Multiplayer development has always been seen as a big engineering challenge, but coherence takes the pain out of development and makes it simple and accessible. Our tools are also excellent for integrating multiplayer into existing singleplayer games.
Key contributions and responsibilities:
- As part of the internal game development team, I build sample games to demonstrate the power and integration of our tech in Unity games.
- I also work with customer projects, helping integrate and optimize multiplayer features in their games.
- Using the game samples we develop, I create learning content like videos and documentation to further support our developer community and make learning accessible.
Baldur's Gate 3
- My Role: Capture Artist / Video Producer
Baldur's Gate 3 is an awards-winning RPG from Larian Studios that took the industry by storm.
Set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, it's the quintessential D&D experience - gather your party, and return to the Forgotten Realms in a tale of fellowship and betrayal, sacrifice and survival, and the lure of absolute power.
I had the awesome chance to contribute to this amazing game as a Capture Artist on the Publishing team.
Key contributions and responsibilities:
- Building the creative and narrative foundation for Baldur's Gate 3 trailers, communicating closely with developers to highlight their best work.
- Responsible for all stages of production: pitching, storyboarding, capturing, editing, and post.
- Co-ordinating trailer production with artists and developers; ensuring feature requests are feasible to implement and ready in time for capture.
- Major contributions: the PS5 announcement trailer; the 2022 Game Awards trailer; "Of Valour and Lore" - a trailer announcing the Bard class; "Absolute Frenzy" - announcing the Barbarian class.
- Produced media for the press kits that went out to all major news outlets; created videos for the Larian Studios social media channels, and other community content.
Demonbound
- Play it here: itch.io (Windows)
- Project focus: Procedural Generation of 3D environments
In this personal project inspired by the Diablo games, I created a game prototype that uses a procedural algorithm for dungeon generation.
Key features:
- Fully procedural and customizable 3D dungeon generation algorithm.
- Room population algorithm based on 'theme' presets (implemented via Scriptable Objects).
- New theme presets and props can be added to the population algorithm without the need to write any additional code.
- Smart prop placement behaviour (e.g. avoidance of similar prop types, placement along walls or in room center, etc.)
- Depth-based dissolve shader (to allow the player model to be visible behind walls)
- 2D minimap solution for procedural levels.
Emperor Mail
- Play it here: itch.io (WebGL, Windows)
- Event: Mini Jame Gam #39
- Jam Theme: "Don't get surrounded" + Special Object: Aerial Vehicle
This is a small, silly jam game about the miserable experience of being a servitor in the world of Warhammer 40,000.
Highlights:
- It was engaging to work with a team of 3 other people of different skill levels. This jam was a valuable lesson in team management and game prototyping.
- I don't often get to make art for games, and game jams are a perfect opportunity to diversify my gamedev experience and do something for fun. I made all of the 3D assets for this game in a couple of days.
- We placed #14 in best visuals out of 110 submissions.
Torrheim
- Play it here: itch.io (Windows, Mac)
- Project focus: 2D game development pipeline
I created this project together with my colleague, Ciro, at Unity. It was the backbone for our game development tutorial for Global Game Jam 2019. The goal was to prove that you can make a simple game with Unity in just 48 hours.
We wanted to make use of the new (at the time) 2D features of the Unity engine - the 2D Animation package and Hexagonal Tilemaps; as well as Scriptable Objects for game architecture.
Contributions:
- The full 2D art pipeline in Unity - character art, animation, environment art, and GUI.
- Story and dialogue.
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Tunnel Surfer
- Project focus: C++ and Graphics programming
The goal of this project was to implement a custom graphics renderer and graphics pipeline in a C++ game engine, and implement some of the most commonly encountered graphics shaders in OpenGL.
Features:
- Procedural mesh generation based on a Catmull-Rom spline (used to generate tunnel geometry)
- Procedural texturing
- OpenGL shader implementation of the Blinn-Phong model, supporting multiple light sources
- Normal-mapping shader
- Geometry shader for visual debugging of mesh normals
- Implementation of different types of lighting (spot light, point light, directional light)
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Unity Royale
- Find it here: GitHub
- Project focus: Unity for Mobile
I created the in-game UI assets for this mobile game development project I contributed to at Unity.
Contributions:
- UI art for character cards, healthbars, menus, and other elements.
Shaders and VFX
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Resource Orbs
UI Shaders/VFX - Unity
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Ethereal Wings
Shaders/VFX - Unity
About Me
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Hey there! I'm Alina. Thanks for taking the time to check out my portfolio! :)
You may have guessed this from my work already, but I am a multidisciplinary enthusiast who loves programming, art, and games. I love the creative process, and the point where tech and creativity come together is where I feel most at home.
For me, the most rewarding part of creativity is growth. Learning is its own reward - I'm always seeking new challenges and ways to push myself to improve; passion, experimentation, and curiosity drives a lot of my work.
Aside from that, I love playing games - I could never list all my favourites, but recent ones include Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Elden Ring, and Baldur's Gate 3 (I loved it way before I got to work on it!). Oldie favourites are Gothic 1&2, Morrowind, and the original Thief trilogy. An eternal obsession is World of Warcraft.
I love tabletop games, which began with playing D&D with my co-workers at Unity. 7 years later and no longer at the same company, we still play every single week. (And if you've ever played D&D, you know how hard it is to keep a group together!)
Away from the screen, I like to cycle and play music. I also love exploring new places. Gothic architecture fascinates me, and I'm obsessed with swords and plate armour. That's about it!
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