Game engineer and designer with with over 10 years experience creating unique and lasting experiences in games. Experienced systems architect with a focus on scalability of implementations.
Quadroped locomotion is a unique problem we needed to tackle. Unreal Engine has no native support for the complexity of this type of navigation. I Took inspiration from Guerilla Games efforts to create a clothoid based locomotion system for navigation smoothing. During prototyping phases of development I designed and implemented clothoid solvers for turns as well as custom string pulling requiring changes to be made to Unreal's navigation systems. This work served as a foundation for creature locomotion on Argos going forward.
As part of the world simulation we wanted the players to interact with their environment in different ways. We drew inspiration from Zelda and other titles such as Noita. This system presented significant challenges, gameplay elements in a networked game needs to be reliable and scalability was an early issue for large scale interactions (forest fires, entity-to-entity electricity conduction). The challenge of this system was in the requirement that it be able to interact freely with different game systems. Discussions within the engineering team settled on using tags which could freely be applied to different game objects. This was a lightweight way to represent the state of an object and allow it's internal functionality to react accordingly to stimulus.
Beginning it's life as a game jam entry, Rove takes inspiration from games like Sunless Sea, FTL and Oregon Trail. The player takes the role of a traveller or smuggler who is struggling to survive the dangerous environment. Travelling from settlement to settlement the player learns the story of Martian colonization and gathers the resources needed to keep themselves alive.
Early on we struggled with how to keep the game engaging. There are vast areas of landscape between occupied settlements so we focused on the feel of driving, trying to find a sweet spot between the arcades and reality. Using Unreal Chaos Vehicles we were inspired by the soft feel of the Warthog in Halo, and added the ability to correct aerial orientation for smoother landings.
From the outset we wanted the Mars we drive on to BE Mars. I tailored the third party LibTiff library into a custom plugin to read the massive and detailed maps. We settled on a 1/20 scale and used USGS tools to render a custom cubemap of Mars' surface. This and the use of Voxel Plugin to generate a world on a massive scale and gave us the opportunity to change the surface.
The people and history of Mars are just as important, to build the culture of Mars I set out to make a Morrowind inspired hyperlinked dialogue system. This way we could make navigation of the world's information natural and easy. The settlements were then procedurally placed in the world using a combination of static placements, layered Poisson sampling and a weighting mask.
I joined the Outlaws team during early development. My time spent at Code HQ taught me a lot. I was able to work on nearly every system in the game. I debugged issues with crafting and inventory, built AI systems and did performance optimization on structure replication. Code HQ is also where I experience supporting a released game for the first time. Because we were a small studio, I assisted with communication with the community, tracking and resolving bugs and performance testing server architecture.
During my time at CodeHQ I was tasked with redesigning the AI systems. In order to make the world feel more alive I knew we needed it to be full of life. The primary challenge then was going to be scaling our AI performance. Through the combination of simplified behaviors, pre-baked spawn volumes and entity caching we were able to bring hundreds of animals and bandits into the world.
When I joined the team Snowberry Peak was in the very early stages of development. I lead efforts to architect primary gameplay systems like player controls and basic interactions with world objects. While working on the game I oversaw the implementation of a branching dialogue system, level event system, multiple mini-games and a gameplay cutscene system.
Snowberry Peak was a coming of age tale inspired by games like Fallout and Deus Ex. Having impactful dialogue decisions with an immersive-simm gameplay core. Part of my work here was to develop and maintain an event subsystem which was able to interface with both dialogue and gameplay actions.
Because dialogue was going to be an important factor our writers wanted to be able to iterate on their work as quickly as possible. I worked with them to develop a branching data structure for dialogue delivery. This allowed writers changes to be integrated back into playtesting quickly using external tools.
While at Swift Star I was responsible for mentoring junior developers and assisting in project leadership. It was here that I was able to build experience uplifting my peers and sharing the knowledge I had gained working on other projects. I spent time doing code reviews, budgeting for features and building content pipelines for development. Early on I struggled with releasing control of game systems I was responsible for, but in time I learned to trust my juniors and entrusted them with features I did not have the bandwidth to complete myself.
These experiences have prepared me for stepping into roles where others will look to me for guidance. I am comfortable giving positive feedback and criticism where necessary.
