Antithesis – Hybrid Board Game and Deck Editor
Overview
Antithesis is a 2-player hybrid tabletop strategy game combining tactical board control and card-driven mechanics across 5 factions and 500 unique cards.
I served as technical director and systems architect, responsible for transforming a loose concept into a production-ready game ecosystem including ruleset formalization, content pipeline automation, and a cloud-hosted deck-building application.
Role
Technical Director / Systems Engineer
Unity (WebGL) · AWS S3 · REST · CI/CD · Data Pipelines · Tooling
Systems Design & Rule Architecture
Co-designed core hybrid board + card ruleset, reducing match duration from ~3 hours to ~1 hour (~66% reduction).
Authored v2 rulebook formalizing recursive response windows, action timing hierarchy, faction alignment constraints, and deck construction gating. Antithesis-Rule-Book-v2 (1)
Engineered deterministic rules layer separated from presentation.
Designed faction rating system governing deck legality across multi-faction builds.
Defined champion alignment gating (Light/Dark/Neutral enforcement logic).
Content Production Pipeline (95–98% Iteration Speed Increase)
Original production time:
30–60 minutes per card
~1 week per 100 cards
After pipeline automation:
15 minutes to regenerate full 500-card library
Built:
CSV-driven card authoring system
Adobe Publisher data-merge automation
FontLab custom glyph pipeline
Stable Diffusion art workflow training
Automated JSON schema export
Image resizing + AWS S3 ingestion
Result:
Reduced full library iteration time from ~250–500 hours to minutes.
Enabled rapid balance passes across all factions simultaneously.
Cloud-Hosted Deck Editor (Unity WebGL)
Architected and implemented a cross-platform deck construction application:
500-card dynamic library
REST GET integration with AWS S3
Schema-based deck validation (0 illegal decks reached runtime)
25 stackable toggle filters + typed search
Multi-category combinatorial filtering
Save/load system
JSON export for Tabletop Simulator
Auto-generated ZIP packages for users
GitLab CI/CD auto WebGL builds
Hosted on AWS S3
Compatible with PC, Mac, and Mobile
Adoption:
10+ active tool users
Used for GenCon 2024 live demo builds
Performance Engineering (WebGL Constraint)
Challenge:
WebGL single-threaded environment
No task-based concurrency
500 images
AWS throttling at ~300 concurrent requests
Solution:
Designed queued batching system
25-card batch loads
20 concurrent request throttling
Async staged loading
Prevented AWS lockouts
Maintained UI responsiveness
Result:
Stable asset streaming in single-threaded environment
Reliable cloud-based delivery pipeline
Live Demo & External Validation
Demoed at GenCon 2024
16–24 live players over 2 days
Iterated UI clarity and visual readability from player feedback
Achieved multiple completed matches within 60-minute sessions
Media & Links
