Béla Struffolino

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A large-scale multiplayer game server, supporting an active player community and complex in-game systems, which I developed from the ground up and now maintain. The project serves as a technical showcase of scalable Lua-based backend systems, performant networking, and AAA-style UI design within the Source engine constraints.

Highlights:

• Custom Persistence Layer: Designed a player profile system with data schemas for characters, ranks, regiments, and progression, ensuring seamless synchronization across sessions and maps.
• Event Framework: Built a dynamic event system allowing game masters to configure roles, loadouts, spawns, and objectives through an in-game editor, with automatic state persistence and player registration.
• Progression & Gameplay Systems: Implemented a performant XP/leveling system with real-time updates for kills, assists, healing, and revives — optimized for multiplayer environments without degrading server performance.
• UI/UX Development: Designed complex, responsive in-game interfaces mimicking AAA game polish, pushing Garry’s Mod’s UI capabilities to new limits.
• Development Infrastructure: Introduced Git-based version control, structured modular architecture, and a lightweight CI/CD workflow for multi-developer collaboration and testing.
• Integration & Automation: Connected the server ecosystem with Discord bots and a VPS for webhooks, analytics, and external player management.

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An interdisciplinary university project in which I worked as a backend developer on a system that automatically generates app content for small and medium-sized enterprises by crawling public business data and transforming it into ready-to-use app previews. The platform allows users to select a business via map or URL and receive a populated app concept within minutes, combining web data extraction, AI-driven analysis, and real-time delivery.

My Responsibilities:

• Backend Data Acquisition: Built and maintained crawling and parsing pipelines that extract structured business information from websites and map services to supply the frontend with reliable, normalized content.
• AI Prompt Engineering & Optimization: Designed and iteratively refined OpenAI-based prompts to analyze and transform extracted data, with a strong focus on accuracy, token-cost efficiency, and fast response times suitable for production use.
• Performance-Oriented Backend Design: Implemented backend services optimized for low-latency processing so users receive app previews quickly enough for real-time interaction.
• Scrum & Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Worked in agile sprints with students from computer science, design, and business informatics, contributing to reviews and planning under academic supervision and in cooperation with an industry partner.
• Applied AI & Full-Stack Integration: Bridged data extraction, AI processing, and frontend consumption into a cohesive pipeline that demonstrates how automation can replace manual content creation for business applications.

Garry's Mod (Source) Server Monitor with Metrics Dashboard and REST API

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A monitoring and analytics platform for Garry's Mod servers. It collects server status and player data via the SourceQuery protocol, stores it in a database and exposes a REST API for dashboards or integrations. Through environment variables, the servers to be polled can be configured, the poll interval adjusted, and the poller mode set to test to generate randomized data without actually polling the servers. On the dashboard, the player count graph can be viewed over 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or 90 days, with multiple polls aggregated into each x-axis step showing minimum, maximum, and average player counts.

Garry's Mod In-game debugger and logger with Discord bot

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A debugger tool with mainly in-game menus and lots of configuration. There are seperated modules that all aim to collect valuable information to then be accessible immediately in-game with options to also extract the information on the server and to discord webhooks and bots. This project is still being worked on, likely with a cleaner rebuild coming up.