Game Development

Plenty of Planets
Unity + Roblox Developer

• Systems programmer – Land or Die!

  • Developed custom NavMesh solution to allow dynamic pathfinding, ragdolling, and collision-detection/interaction from NPCs without relying on costly physics computations, raycasting, or Roblox's native navmesh system which does not allow for runtime modification of bounds or rotating/translating navmesh areas.

  • Created responsive NPC system, allowing players to interact with passengers by talking to them, feeding them, subduing or fighting unruly passengers, and otherwise meeting their needs during flights.

  • Implemented gameplay event system, producing random encounters such as alien invasion/abductions, gooses landing, weather events, among others.

  • Optimized physics interactions, allowing individual game clients to steer the ship fluidly in real time, while keeping NPCs and other players on board and able to operate normally.

• Lead developer – Noob Launcher

  • Optimized NetCode to prefer a server-authoritative model with event-driven communication with game clients.

  • Implemented mock players for testing multiplayer behavior in a closed environment, dramatically speeding up iteration time and enabled unit testing for multiplayer behaviors and systems.

  • Developed AWS stack for Roblox development, allowing extensive logging and analytics, deployment pipeline, and other DevOps tasks that Roblox does not support out of the box.

  • Rewrote critical gameplay systems to improve reliability and robustness, reducing client error rates by 80%.

• Lead developer – Heartbound recreation

  • Developed prototype in Unity recreating the demo of Heartbound by Pirate Software for an unreleased YouTube video by a popular YouTuber.

Contract Game Developer
Unity Engine

StarForged Studios, LLC.
Technical Director, Co-Founder

• Microsoft Seed Investment recipient

• Conquer Accelerator Member (2020), an incubator program for growing companies to develop and overcome challenges, providing funding and ten weeks of hands-on mentorship and training with business professionals

• MSU Burgess Institute New Venture Challenge Award Recipient (2020), a competition for startup businesses to pitch their business model (including product, sales pitch, and marketing plan)

• Designed and oversaw development of major gameplay systems such as Player Interactions, Building, Crafting, Inventory, and Player Attributes / Modifiers

• Screened, interviewed, and hired 20 Developers. Managed teams of 6 programmers, developers, and artists

• Worked as business liaison reaching out to and interviewing game publishers and other independent game developers

• Maintained the technical documentation, development guidelines, and the project structure

• Pitched to both project-based and company-based funds advocating for our ideas and the profitability of the business model

Eternal Studios
Unity Developer (Contract)

• Built 12 fully functional prototypes for hyper-casual mobile games, from Game Design Documents (GDDs) provided by a mobile publishing company

• Development for each prototype took place over the course of 1-2 weeks and was focused on rapid prototyping, quick iteration, and player feedback

• Gained experience working with publishers and coordinating with a small core team to swiftly produce results

Baudville Brands
Software Developer

Auto-Owners Insurance
Software Developer

• Supported and maintained the Java-based web API that serves our policy brokers through a REST API. My job includes work in Groovy, WebSphere Liberty, Spring Framework / Spring Boot, Apache Kafka, Jenkins, and IBM MQ.

• Oversaw rollout and implemented technology upgrade of the core REST controller component and ensured that all corresponding endpoints were functional and performing as expected (through unit/integration testing).

• Boosted client-time responsiveness by 15% through implementing caching to internal systems calls.

• Used Splunk to collect and analyze edge-case failures over distributed systems and rework code to accommodate.

BS&A Software
Software Developer

• Contributed to and deployed code for a tax and assessing software suite used by over 2,100 municipalities nationwide, 1,600 in Michigan alone which covers nearly all township/municipalities in the state.

• Built 30 applet/submodules for township-related services including Tax, Assessing, Delinquent Tax, Delinquent Person Property, Special Assessments, using the MVVM and MVC patterns in a single page application (SPA) using Knockout, Angular, and ASP.NET.

• Implemented an automated export framework within our application to process customer Automated Clearing House (ACH) data in bulk for county and township tax rolls to be received by partnered financial institutions using NACHA ACH file format.

• Created a tool for Azure blob file exporting for specialized files to allow interoperability between our legacy desktop (WinForms) and modern, hosted (ASP.NET) applications through a common API; a tool for building shared models between ASP.NET MVC and Windows Forms via DLLs and publishing a NuGet package; and a CLI tool to automate the creation of Microsoft SQL Management Studio backup/restore scripts to build-up the users/credentials required for our development cycle.

• Created 120 reactive views in KnockoutJS with AJAX querying and hosted services for computations, and server models to offload work on the backend and interop with the server-side applications running for multiple clients (server-client model).

• Implemented Repository and Unit of Work programming patterns over 3 modules to integrate data concurrency for the client and data layers over large datasets (10,000+) of client information efficiently. Combined with Entity Framework and DataContext pattern to allow easy data transactions through fluent code interfaces.

• Reimplemented and integrated 10 Windows Forms applications into a single, modern ASP.NET Single-Page Application; migrated all accompanying data into the hosted framework.

• Wrote 20 SQL stored procedures to efficiently query and manipulate large datasets with user-interactable forms to pass client-customizable queries, data filtering, and computations.

• Implemented 45 unit and 20 integration tests for added Georgia-specific tax calculations due to their unique tax laws.

• Used Microsoft Unity Framework to implement Dependency Injection for Inversion of Control, to enable module-specific (isolated) computations and data loading via injected services and repository interface implementations.

• Created new features, updated existing, and fixed bugs to support the onboarding of 12 new clients across Michigan, Georgia, and Florida.

Aevex Aerospace
Computer Graphics Engineer

• Gained experience in Computer Vision under Chief Scientist Darren Butler, processing live drone feeds, and superimposing data onto a globe using GPS coordinates and predictive movement

• Developed a HoloJS augmented reality app, where air traffic data is displayed in real-time to traffic controllers using Luciad’s RIA geospatial library

• Worked in WebGL to create a traversable and interactive globe model with moving components based on real-world data (OGC). Deployed in the California Forest Fires of 2019 for tracking their progression and predicting future movement. Utilized NodeJS, both client and server

• Contributed to Google Maps-like app (GIS) using ASP.NET / WinForms and Java deployed for use by firefighters worldwide, including The National Forest Service, National Guard, and various Fire Services in regions of California, Africa, The Middle East, and Australia

MSU Dept. of Pharmacology & Toxicology
Dept. Lead Web Developer

• Acted as chief web developer and maintainer of the department's website and those of its affiliates and researchers, working under the assistant to the department chair

• Gained experience in DevOps, assisting the College of Natural Sciences IT department for issues more specific to PharmTox, including maintenance on the department's web architecture and supporting updates for the whole College's system onto the PharmTox developer ecosystem

• Worked with faculty clients to add and update information, add relevant posts (articles, papers, events, grants), and redesigned older portions of the site

• Redesigned the sites layout and implemented changes to the structure to modernize it

• Designed and created the connected website for the Pharmacology Drug Research Center