Alyve

A systems laboratory

Alyve is an independent action RPG I am building in Unity 6. It is also a long-term systems laboratory: a place to explore how combat, movement, characters, simulation and tooling can share a coherent architecture without turning the game into one monolithic controller.

Architectural foundation

The Entity/Body/Brain model separates three concerns that games often bind together. The entity owns identity and domain state. The body represents the character in the world. The brain provides control, whether that control comes from a player, AI or another source.

This separation makes changing representation or control a deliberate composition decision rather than a rewrite of the underlying character.

Combat as a reusable system

Combat is data-driven across reusable skills, weapons, targeting and combos, with a central damage pipeline defining how effects are applied. The goal is not a catalogue of mechanics; it is a small set of boundaries that lets mechanics interact without each one knowing every character implementation.

That approach supports iteration because content and behaviour can change independently while still passing through shared rules.

Navigation and a living world

Alyve uses custom multilevel navigation that combines per-agent paths with shared flow fields. Tiered crowd behaviour scales how much simulation detail is applied, while the living population connects agents to routines, activities and reactive states.

These systems are designed together: navigation is infrastructure for behaviour, and behaviour gives movement a purpose beyond reaching a destination.

Characters, animation and tooling

Runtime character composition and a PlayableGraph animation stack keep visual representation modular. Editor tooling, PlayMode tests and visual evaluation workflows make system behaviour repeatable and easier to inspect.

Automated checks provide regression evidence; they do not decide whether an animation feels right or whether a scene has reached its visual target. Those remain explicit human review steps.

Current state

Alyve remains in active development. The project demonstrates deep Unity architecture, implementation and evaluation discipline, while technical validation is kept distinct from the final feel and finish of the game.