I am a experienced video game programmer, with over 25 years in the games industry. I have predominately worked in the area of 3D graphics but can turn my skills to most areas. I am passionate about Virtual Reality and believe it is the future of our industry. I am hardworking, easy going and have a proven track record of working both autonomously and as part of a team.
Solo Engineer: Air Hockey Arcade, Oculus Quest (AppLab) (Oculus Rift, SteamVR & PS VR planned).
Air Hockey Arcade is a VR adaption of my earlier mobile game Flick Hockey. While at SIE R&D West, I prototyped a version of the game in PhyreEngine that we would use to showcase PhyreEngine's VR support in addition to our official PS VR sample. I've since moved it to my own cross platform VR engine "Reality Engine" written in C99 using OpenGL ES 3.2 on Quest & OpenGL 4.6 on PC. I released the single player version as a free demo on AppLab at the end of May 2021 and I'm currently working on the Multiplayer support to be released as paid IAP when it's ready. Aside from the various Oculus SDKs, FMOD and a couple of small open source libraries, everything has been coded from scratch by myself with most of the 3D assets created for previous versions of the game.
Contract Programmer: Engram (7 Months - Maze Theory)
Initially I applied for their Technical Director role but due to a lack of leadership experience I didn't get that particular role. We pivoted to what was supposed to be a Principal Engineer role, but on my first day I was told it was actually a Senior Engineer position. As a result of this, I negotiated a change to a 6 month contract role on a 3 day per week basis so I could continue to work on my own game in parallel. After a time it became clear to me that what they really needed was a Unity Generalist which I am not, so after the initial 6 months we decided to bring the contract to an end but keep open the possibility of ad-hoc contract work that fit more with my areas of speciality which never materialised. This project did give me my first experience working with Unity + VR.
Consultant / Contract Programmer: Project under NDA (7 Months - Wushu Studios)
• Porting an existing PSVR / PCVR UE4 based project to Oculus Quest. (Cancelled).
• Porting a PC game to PS4 & XBox One (Unannounced).
• Continued Support of PhyreEngine.
• Developed a method for allowing regression testing of PSVR projects without requiring PSVR hardware.
• Help develop PlayStation SDK components with the rest of the Game Engine Technologies.
Initially interviewed as a Graphics Programmer, I expressed an interest in Virtual Reality during my interview and upon being hired I was to be given the responsibility of adding PlayStation VR support to PhyreEngine. and became the resident VR expert on the team. This combined my loves of Engine / Graphics Programming for the core engine support and Gameplay Programming creating the sample demonstrating the new engine features.
Key Highlights:
• Added PlayStation VR support to PhyreEngine and kept it up to date with SDK functionality.
• Created (along with our Artist) the PhyreEngine VR Sample called CaveRoVR.
• Enhanced our Tiled Deferred Lighting Code to work with non asymmetric projection matrices.
• Wrote a simple IK system to enhance the PS Move tracking features in the sample.
• Integrated Mutislice stereo rendering into an existing engine codebase.
Contract Programmer: Switch Galaxy Ultra, Playstation Vita and PS4 (3.5 Months - Atomicom)
I was initially hired for 3 weeks to help get their track spline code to work. Then I was asked to stay on to help them finish the project. Tasks were mostly graphics related, Motion Blur and Bloom on PS4, shader work on Vita, PS4 and PC.
Contract Programmer: Joe Danger / Joe Danger 2, Playstation Vita (6 Months - Four Door Lemon)
I took the Lead role in a 2 programmer team involved in porting Joe Danger / Joe Danger 2 to Playstation Vita. Involved in all aspects of the port but the contract was terminated in February 2014 so I didn't see the project out until the end.
Engineer: Cosmic Clean Up, Playstation Mobile
At the end of 2012 I helped out on Green Hill and Ripstone's game Cosmic Clean Up for Playstation Mobile for the final 3 weeks of the project. The game used Sony's GameEngine2D classes that are based on Cocos2D for iOS.
Senior Engineer: Ported several PSP / PS3 titles to the Sony Xperia Play (Catalyst Outsourcing)
In August 2010 I took on the task of porting 2 PSP games (Skyscraper and Swizzleblocks part of the Go Puzzle game), to the new Sony Ericsson Xperia Play phone. Both games were based on the same Engine. Early in 2011 these projects were temporarily shelved but from June 2011, I was additionally tasked with finishing off two additional projects (Lemmings and Super Stardust) as well as adding touch support to all four games and ensuring they work on the two newly announced Sony Tablets.
Contract Programmer: Risen 2, PS3 (Wizarbox)
I spent 7 months or so, between December 2010 and July 2011 helping Wizarbox optimising the rendering engine for the PS3 port of Risen2. This primarily involved integrating Edge Geom into the existing runtime and tools codebases.
Solo Engineer: Flick Hockey, iOS & PlayStation Mobile.
In Tandem with my contract work, I developed my first game for iPhone / iPod Touch, an Air Hockey game called Flick Hockey, that had a 3D players eye view, in contrast to the many 2D top down Air Hockey games already available on iPhone.
• Wrote the entire game engine (Rendering, Physics / Collision, Networking, Front end, Audio Subsystem) in C with a little Objective C thrown in where needed (EAGLView / GameKit etc.)
• Wrote a Cocoa Based Mac Application for loading .obj files and converting them into a custom model format, optimised for iPhone.
• Much of the artwork, was created by myself, with only the Air Hockey Table and the main textures being created for me by friends / ex-colleagues.
• Ported it to PlayStation(tm) Mobile (C#) several years later.
Contract Programmer: Venetica, PS3 (Wizarbox)
• Assisted with the final parts of fixing up the Ogre3D port to run on the PS3s GCM library.
• Wrote a Vertex Cache Optimiser based on a Paper by Tom Forsythe
• Fixed up shaders to work correctly on PS3.
• Lots of Renderer optimisations.
• Wrote a LogLuv rendering path to handle High Dynamic Range Rendering.
• Additionally wrote an FP16 HDR path to help verify the LogLuv path.
Graphics / System Engineer: Common Rendering Initiative
I was the only dedicated engineer on a 3 year cross studio initiative comprising 4 - 5 runtime engineers and 5 tools engineers to move EA Canada's game teams from project specific rendering engines / asset management systems to something built to scale from current hardware to whatever future hardware is around the corner.
Graphics Programmer: Unannounced Project, Sony Playstation 3
• Improved initial shader code for real-time lighting.
• Implemented per-pixel motion blur using MRT.
• Basic first pass shadows (for milestones) to be replaced with a proper shadow solution in time.
• Began work on a basic particle system using the SPUs. Put on hold while investigating a cross company system.
• Integrated a cross studio material system into out tool pipeline and engine code.
Graphics Programmer: F1 Championship Edition, Sony Playstation 3
• Bespoke rendering systems not covered by main Graphics Engine. (Track Reflections, Depth of Field, Initial Shadow System among others). Track Reflections and Depth of field were retro-fit into an almost complete engine and so were subject to certain limitations.
• Fake HDR system (original system used FP16 render targets but performance was too slow and didn't allow for FSAA.) so I came up with a technique to approximate the average luminance using the pixel counters. Tone-mapping was then performed in all shaders using the calculated average luminance.
• Crowds: I integrated the crowd system originally written by SCEE London's Football Team. Made lots of optimisations to both the Shaders and PPU / RSX rendering code. Used conditional rendering as a form of real-time PVS to turn individual crowd areas on and off based on visibility.
Graphics Programmer: Researching Next-Gen rendering technology using OpenGl and Cg
Spent a lot of time investigation modern realtime graphics techniques in the lead up to Playstation 3. Most notably:
• Bump / Normal Mapping
• Image Based Lighting.
• High Dynamic Range Rendering.
• Real-time Irradiance Environment Mapping using Spherical Harmonics.
Various PS1, N64 and PS2 Projects
Manchester Metropolitan University BSC. (Hons) Computing
Farnborough College of Technology Higher National Diploma - Software Engineering
National Diploma - Electronic Engineering
C/C++11, C99 / C11, C#, Assembly Language, Gnm, Vulkan, OpenGL 4.6, GLSL, HLSL, PSSL and OpenCL. Experience with the following consoles, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Playstation 3 (PPU, SPU & RSX) and iOS. Experience developing for PS VR, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest and HTC Vive on PC. Unity and a tiny bit of UE4.
I enjoy most aspects of game development not just graphics programming. Outside of work and programming in general I enjoy walking, kayaking and both making and listening to music. I play Guitar in a band called The Gentle Scars.