Game Development Details
Here are a few of the many projects I have worked on
Need for Speed
The Run
I worked with the amazing team that built 1000's of kilometers of driving experiences between San Francisco and New York based on satellite data and photogrammetry.
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In preproduction I completed risk assessments of new technology platforms and identified key solutions required for going into content production.
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Early on I implemented several solutions, and co-developed even more. These include the editor scripting functionality, the profiler tools, streaming and visible sectioning tools, the road tools, art pipelines and productivity tools.
In the later stages of development I directed optimization efforts across several hardware platforms. Working with art and engineering leads, I defined, communicated and tracked work completed across a large content team.
Plants vs. Zombies
Garden Warfare
As the Technical Art Director, I directed many aspects of the character work.
To start with, I worked with domain experts and defined the scope of character development based on budget, team size, expertise and schedule.
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While we were getting started in hiring a team, I took on the responsibility of rigging several of the first characters while creating a content creation guide for our amazing rigging and animation teams in Shanghai.
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I was a people manager locally, while also directing technical efforts across multiple domains. This included improving external team communications, defining and managing deliverables, while ensuring people had appropriate guidance and training.
Performance Profiling
Identifying Where and How to Optimize
How do you ensure interactive runtime performance across 100's of races and 1000's of kilometers?
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Working with a wonderful rendering engineer, and one other incredible programmer, I designed and implemented several performance tools, that allowed us to have both AI and QA testing each build of the game across many platforms.
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I built the backend database in MongoDB, the frontend menus with C# and WPF, and the heatmap view in OpenGL. I also synchronized the camera views recorded in the profiler with the game running on multiple consoles.
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This all works with the performance hooks that were added in the engine, and the output from the game to the database, along with the automation of tests across hundreds of thousands of updates on several hardware platforms.
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Art and technical leads received auto generated reports, and I worked with each department to identify optimization strategies based on criteria with the least degradation to fidelity and the highest impact to performance.