Ritwik Sharma
PhD Applicant · Autonomous Agents · Emergent Narrative · Game Design Research
Research Orientation
One question, pursued since 2018: how does story emerge from what people actually do, rather than from what was authored for them? The current form of that question is the autonomous administration of live game worlds: what happens when the administrator of a persistent community is an agent with bounded, audited authority, and whether the understanding it builds while running the world can become that world’s unauthored history. MA dissertation (2021), years of production system-building, and a published novel all lead to the same problem.
Professional Experience
Dec 2022 — Present
Inter Tech Interact Pvt. Ltd.
Bikaner, India
Director & Lead Developer
Designed, built, deployed and operate Zombita solo: a self-learning agent that administers a live Project Zomboid community across a Discord agent, a web backend and community site, and a suite of custom in-game mods, on a PostgreSQL database of roughly one hundred tables. The model proposes and a deterministic engine disposes; consequential actions pass through a single authorisation gate with a permanent audit record. It includes deterministic perception and identity resolution, a nightly per-person read, four affective gauges, a versioned living memory, a claim-judgment engine, and a closed-loop economy on an in-game-month heartbeat.
This is the research instrument for the doctoral proposal. The research question came from watching what the running system already did; the architecture predates the formal framing.
Additional production systems: ClaimBridge (healthcare claims, PM-JAY / Rajasthan MAA), Relay (multi-channel operations platform), lighting control software for the NEOM Sindalah development (Saudi Arabia), and AI-powered event installations for major brand activations. Over 200 games and interactive experiences delivered across Unity, Construct3, PlayCanvas, and JavaScript, including VR, AR, Kinect, and physical hardware installations.
Jul 2019 — Dec 2021
Skunkworks Experiential
Gurugram, India
Game Designer / Developer
Designed and developed interactive gaming and immersive experiential systems for live events and brand activations. Built VR Cricket (HTC Vive, Unity), physical installations (Batak, Peddle-to-Cycle, Beat Saber replica), AR experiences for Audi Motors, and over 50 browser-based games for event-based advertising using Construct3 and JavaScript.
Aug — Nov 2018
Neurocompusy
Jaipur, India
Software Development Intern
.NET and C# application development, debugging, and technical documentation.
Technical Capabilities
Languages
Python, C#, C++, JavaScript, TypeScript, Lua, SQL, Java, PHP
Game / XR
Unity 2D/3D/URP (7+ years), Unreal Engine 4, Vuforia AR, HTC Vive, Meta Quest, Kinect, Lua modding, 200+ shipped games
Backend
FastAPI, Node.js, PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, REST, WebSocket
Frontend
React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, Construct3, PlayCanvas
AI
Anthropic Claude (Haiku, Sonnet) and OpenAI APIs, agentic tool use behind an authorisation gate, multi-model pipelines, Ollama / Qwen (local LLM), Stable Diffusion
Infra
Linux VPS, Nginx, systemd, SSH, server orchestration
Creative
TouchDesigner, Arduino, Blender, Photoshop, Figma
Education
MA, Game Design
London College of Communication
University of the Arts London, UK
University of the Arts London, UK
2019 — 2021
Bachelor of Computer Applications
Engineering College Bikaner, India
2016 — 2019
Additional
MA Dissertation
How does branching and illusion in story affect gameplay in role-playing games? Examined conditions under which player choice produces genuinely emergent narrative rather than authored variation — the same research question approached from the design side, before the agent architecture side.
Published Novel
Under The Cherry Blossoms (2024) — fiction demonstrating sustained engagement with character interiority, social dynamics, and narrative consequence. Published at imitatia.com.
Paper
A paper on Zombita’s architecture and its emergent-narrative argument was submitted to AIIDE 2026.
Research System
Zombita — a self-learning agent administering a live game community under bounded, audited authority, with a versioned living memory and a closed-loop economy. Full technical and architecture documentation available on the Zombita page.
Game Development
200+ games shipped across Unity (2018–present), Construct3, PlayCanvas, and JavaScript. VR, AR, Kinect, physical installations, HTML5 event activations, and browser games for international brands.