Home/Software/Game development

The Manhunt lobby panel with lobby and leaderboard tabs, over GTA V's loading-screen art — Manhunt's lobby, over GTA V's own loading-screen art.

Game development

Personal projects · Lua, JavaScript, SQL · 2023–26

Game servers and gamemodes for GTA V, built on the FiveM platform and run since 2023. It's where most of my software skills come from.

What I built

KOTH: A competitive team shooter, run as a public alpha for two months in 2026
The Aussie Server: A cops-and-robbers server for my mates, three seasons from 2023 to 2026
Manhunt, Jailbreak: Round-based cops-against-criminals gamemodes, 2026
Ironbark: Tools for other server owners, packaged as products

Along the way I built game systems and interfaces in Lua and JavaScript, client and server code and SQL databases, wrote an anti-cheat, and ran a live community through Discord, patch notes, test sessions and feedback. The code was written with AI coding agents; the design, testing and running of it were mine.

Manhunt class select: four specialisation cards, Driver, Hacker, Face and Mule, with a countdown timer — Class select: four specialisations, picked against the clock.

The criminals' contact menu listing tiered robbery, courier and vehicle-theft jobs with payouts — The criminals' job board: robberies, courier runs and vehicle thefts in tiers.

A weapon shop panel with item cards and prices — A weapon shop, one of the in-game interfaces.

The police detective board with case files and an evidence item linked to a crime — The police detective board, linking evidence to crimes.

The police computer's alerts tab listing dispatch alerts with priority tags — The police computer: live dispatch alerts, tagged by priority.

Manhunt lobby with the Game Master tab open: game type, duration, play area and mutator toggles — The Game Master panel, for game type, round length, play area and mutators.

Manhunt end-of-round screen reading COPS WIN, 7 arrests against 52,870 dollars banked, with MVP, cop seizures, detective board score and both teams' stats — Manhunt's end-of-round screen with test data: arrests against money banked, seizures and the detective board's score.

KOTH map-vote card for City Pier, a night aerial view of the pier in GTA V — A KOTH map-vote card, one of six zones.

What I took from it

I learned to keep code in small pieces after KOTH's round logic grew into one huge file, and to decide early whether the player's game or the server owns each piece of state, because that gap is where most of the bugs lived. Jailbreak now tests itself with simulated rounds before anyone joins. The other lesson came from my mates: the more realism they asked for, the less fun it got, so simpler usually wins.

Message: Send me a message
LinkedIn: in/jeremy-alec-osborne
Based in: Sydney, NSW