Game Developer - Programmer - Clearly not a designer
I am a developer who loves to solve interesting problems! My areas of interest include making games, specifically the use of AI in games. I am currently working on my Masters Degree from Rochester Insititute of Technology, with an expected graduation May 2023. These are some of the skills I've aquired:
That damn goat is a party game, where four players compete in various game modes, all while trying to avoid the antics of a all-powerful goat. As the AI developer, I developed the central AI agent, the goat. I used the GOAP architecture to produce novel interactions between player and agent while keeping development load light. In addition to these responsibilities I also spearheaded work on a major refactoring of the code-base following a move out of preproduction, was in charge of porting the game to the Nintendo Switch, and ran developer playtests
I was hired as a summer intern at CFD Research Corporation in Huntsville Alabama. I was assigned to the Dynamic Avatar project, which consists of animating 3d Volumetric Tetrahedral meshes of warfighters (I know a mouthful right?) for a Department of Defense customer. To start, I made two GUIs to help outfit the avatars and to create a path for the warfighters to walk along. This was done in Unity, with the main difficulty being saving information in a way that the in-house engine could understand. After this, I was switched to visualizing the animations produced by the in-house engine. What made this difficult was not only transferring data between C++ and C#, but conserving the complex structures needed to animate the meshes in an efficient way certainly kept me busy!
I work as a Teaching Assistant for GDAPS 1 and 2, which serve as the intro to CS courses for our Game Design and Development students at RIT. I teach basic programming principles and good habits in GDAPS 1 for the fall, and then teach algorithms and data structures in GDAPS 2 in the spring. This culminates in a semester-long group project that I help guide and mentor. Teaching really is the best way to learn, and I feel that my experience helping students write clean and efficient code has improved my skills tenfold.
