God Of Riffs is a VR rhythm combat game with a big metal-fantasy presentation: enemies, weapons, effects, music timing, and performance-heavy moments all happening around the player. My work focused less on the concept side and more on making the project behave like a stronger, smoother production build.
Challenge
The project needed to support Steam-facing systems while also improving runtime stability. That meant connecting store hook-ins such as leaderboards and friends features, while also digging into the codebase to find places where performance could be improved.
Because this was VR, performance work had a higher bar. Lag spikes and frame stutter can be much more disruptive than they would be on a normal screen, especially in a music-driven action game where timing and comfort both matter.
Approach
I worked through the codebase to clean up rough areas, reduce avoidable runtime cost, and improve how frequently used objects were managed. A key part of that was setting up object pooling so repeated gameplay objects could be reused instead of constantly created and destroyed during active play.
I also conducted performance testing to find the biggest sources of lag and frame stuttering. Once those areas were identified, I focused on fixing the specific systems causing problems rather than making broad guesses about optimisation.
Outcome
The work helped God Of Riffs move toward a smoother and more complete VR production build. Steam integration gave the game access to platform features such as leaderboards and friends systems, while the optimisation pass improved runtime stability where it mattered most.
The breakdown below highlights the main areas of work: VR performance pressure, object pooling and code cleanup, and Steam-facing integration.
