The brief
Samurai Saga is a third-person multiplayer combat game on Ethereum, built in Unreal Engine. Players choose one of three NFT-backed character classes (Cyborg Samurai, Kaiju Monsters, Onna-Bugeisha), each with their own movesets, and fight across an open-world setting. The project is co-founded by Jian Tam, with NFT artwork from Dino Tomic.
The cover above (Multiplayer Trailer Part 1) shipped publicly in October 2023 and is the trailer that demonstrates the multiplayer combat work I contributed. The other gallery items are earlier project trailers and reels providing visual context for the larger world the game sits in.
My role
Contract Multiplayer Combat Developer on the Unreal Engine team. The client engaged me directly through Upwork, parallel to my Exarta Senior return engagement.
The work is governed by an active NDA that runs until the game publicly releases. Engineering specifics including system architecture, frameworks, frame-level implementation, and internal numbers cannot be discussed publicly until that point. This case study sits here as proof of work and as a placeholder for fuller documentation post-release.
Results
Public artifacts:
The cover above is the October 2023 Multiplayer Trailer Part 1, the public demonstration of the multiplayer combat work.
The official YouTube and Instagram channels (linked in the bar at the top of this page) host the rest of the project's public-facing content.
The game itself is still pre-release; live players cannot yet experience the build directly.
Tech stack
Unreal Engine 5.3
(Other tools, plugins, and frameworks fall under the NDA and will be added here once the game publicly releases.)
Lessons learned
I took on Samurai Saga as freelance work alongside the Exarta Senior return job, with the two running in parallel for most of the contract window. Doing contract work next to a full-time role costs more focus than just adding hours suggests. The day job had its own deadlines, team coordination, and review cycles; the contract had different deliverables and a different communication cadence. Switching between two codebases and two production rhythms ate into evenings and weekends in ways I didn't plan for. Next time I take parallel contract work, I would scope it with an explicit weekly time budget agreed up front, instead of letting it expand into whatever hours happened to be available.
