I founded my own game development consulting company, initialPrefabs around June of 2016 with my brother.
I primarily focus on building custom tools for game developers and optimizations for mobile, desktops, and VR. Some studios I have worked with include:
- The Feast
- Computer Lunch
- ESC Game Theater(Defunct)
- Metamorphasis Games
- Metis Suns
- Mokuni LLC
- Unity Technologies
- vrWiz
- Whalefood Games
The Feast
The Feast, is a rogue like developed by Tim Conkling (creator of AntiHero). On this project, I was primarily responsible for helping the team migrate from a Forward renderer to a custom deferred renderer with custom cell shading. Click the banner for a link to the in game trailer!
This meant overriding Unity’s default deferred pipeline in URP and encoding the correct data to the GBuffers as well as support common features found in URP such as Light Layers, dynamic occlusion culling, integration of a custom deferred pipeline in artist friendly tools such as ShaderGraph and Amplify.
Additionally, I developed a procedural lantern spot light system, that dynamically scales to the surface it’s pointed to, mimicing volumetric lights.
Computer Lunch
Cell to Singularity
Cell to Singularity is an educational clicker idle game, where I was contracted to help Computer Lunch develop a feasible save system in their existing architecture. This was to help delay and potentially prevent users from editing their save file which may allow them to cheat and gain tons of resources. Simultaneously, this was used as the backbone for the team’s cloud saving architecture, as save data was stamped and signed allowing for easy version control.
For more information on where you can grab Cell To Singularity, please see here.
ESC Game Theater(Defunct)
Well ESC Game Theater is now defunct and I imagine assets have been liquidated by their parent company, ESI Design. Because of that I can’t link any work I have done for them as none of their links work anymore.
In order to help support them in building interactive jumbotron experiences, I worked on helping them optimize rendering in WebGL by creating a custom rendering pass which allows all elements be draw efficiently in 1 draw call.
Metamorphosis Games
Gestalt Steam & Cinder
In 2018, I was contracted to help Metamorphosis Games build Gestalt: Steam & Cinder. Here I was responsible for developing hierarchical state machines (HSM) for many of the grunt enemies in their games, developing and finetuning a generic cross fade animation system for responsive controls for all characters, and built editor tools such that the game designers can tweak paramteres easily without having to touch the codebase.
Mokuni Games
Kitty in the Box 2 (Released, Mobile)
Kitty in the Box 2 is a mobile game where you aid, Sushi our lovable cat, jump into boxes. The game is released for Android and iOS in 2017.
Kitty in the Box VR
Kitty in the Box VR originally started as marketing material for Kitty in the Box 2. Eventually, the folks at Mokuni Games found inspiration to turn it into a game and so I started transitioning from prototyping work in VR into creating the backbone infrastructure to allow users to interact with Sushi.
This included
- developing custom modes for the HTC Vive Controller
- developing the force & penetration system to ensure that players would not stab their hands into Sushi
- developed an efficient navigation sampling system so that Sushi can navigate on procedurally generated levels
Unfortunately, the project is now defunct and the game was never released.
Metis Suns
Emissary the Sunsets the Self (Released)
Emissary the Sunsets the Self is the final episode in Ian Cheng’s Emissary’s trilogy, which follows a civilization’s relationship with a sentient slime like creature. The episode was built in Unity where I primarily worked on developing a graph based node editor which allowed Ian to craft utility theory based AI that fit his design needs.
The project was first released and shown at Museum of Modern Art in 2017.
Bag of Beliefs (Released)
Bag of Beliefs is another art exhibit and game, where attendees can interact with a sentient create called BOB. BOB uses exhibit provided phones to allow attendees to interact with it in order to receive acceleromter and motion data and determine how the attendede is interactign with it. I worked on optimizing the runtime and building the infrastructure to enable teammates to focus on building BOB’s AI.
Tools I built included
- Shader visualization system to easily debug the state of BoB’s nodes
- Force normalization and dampening to ensure that BoB’s nodes did not violently react to extremities in impulse applied by exhibit attendees
- integration with proprietary NLP software such that BoB actually understood different commands
The project was first released and shown at the Gladstone Gallery in 2018.
Unity Technologies
Kart Microgame (Released)
Kart Microgame is Unity’s beginner template for an arcade racing game. I helped developed this for Unity via Thousand Ant in order to bring gameplay updates to the kart vehicle physics, provide the initial ML Agents template for new users, and to optimize the game for mobile WebGL.
The project was officially upgraded at the end of 2019.
Please view the associated video here.
vrWiz
Inwards VR
Inwards is a VR game about exploring your choices. Most of my work with Inwards involve creating custom workflow tools for teammates and optimizing the current rendering stack in order to improve performance.
This allowed the team to push the rendering limitations of their game on the Oculus Quest (v1).
Kung Fu Kickball (Released)
Kung Fu Kickball is a multiplayer fighting sports game where the goal is to score the most points by kicking the ball into your goal. In order to help Whalefood Games potentially compensate for a lack of players online, I helped them train an agent to introduce competitive bots instead of building a classical experts based AI system (State Machine/Decision Trees).
The research to train the AI was primarily based on the following paper.
Kung Fu Kickball is recently released as of 2021.