Pavan

Background

Systems Test Engineer at Dell Technologies (3 years), BITS Pilani ECE. I work on the PowerScale distributed storage platform — designing test plans, debugging hang dumps, and identifying failure modes that emerge when complex systems interact in ways their designers didn't anticipate.

That work built one skill that transfers directly: reasoning about how a system behaves from the outside. Not by reading the code — by observing what happens when a real agent pushes on it. Game design runs the same reasoning. You build the mechanic, then work backward from player behavior to emotional response. I started building games in January 2026.

The design target I keep coming back to is the same across every project: the feeling a player gets when they make something happen they came up with themselves. Not a moment I scripted. A situation they constructed, using tools I gave them, that I didn't put there. I'm not trying to build content players consume — I'm trying to build systems players learn to author.

Current Projects

Bound — 2D action platformer in Unity with a custom physics system. Movement IS combat: grapple tendril, shotgun recoil, and wall adhesion are all symbiote-derived abilities, each distinct in use, all interconnected in play. The skill ceiling is spatial reading and creative routing — how many interesting ways can a player chain these through a given space. Fully playable and live on itch.io.

Doppelganger — A close reading of DMC5's Vergil Doppelganger mechanic and a design proposal for a game built entirely around it. The mechanic — a clone that replays your inputs through its own spatial context — is one of the most interesting combat systems in action games and goes almost entirely unexplored in DMC5. The analysis asks what a game looks like when that's the only verb you have.

RL Research — Making RL agents that feel fair to fight, not just statistically optimal. Bound's momentum-heavy physics is the testbed. The research question: can constraining what an agent knows — limiting its observation radius to mirror human first-run experience — produce behavior that feels skilled rather than mechanical.

Skills

• Unity (C#) — custom physics systems, state machines, character controllers, ML-Agents
• Systems Design — emergent vs. authored mechanics, MDA framework, reward function reasoning
• Unreal Engine 5 — Blueprint prototyping; targeting C++ depth for TD roles
• Reinforcement Learning — PPO, GAIL, DDA frameworks, Unity ML-Agents pipeline
• Python / Bash — scripting, tooling, CI/CD (Dell background)

Why Technical Design

The problems I'm drawn to sit at the boundary of code and design: movement systems where skill feels physical rather than arbitrary, AI opponents that feel fair because of how they were trained, emergent systems that produce authored feel from simple interacting rules. Technical Design is the role where knowing what a physics behavior costs in implementation changes whether you reach for it in a document. That's the competence I'm building toward.

Dell Technologies  |  BITS Pilani ECE  |  FIEA Technical Design, Fall 2026.