San Francisco Bay Area
As the technical lead for Lightspeed Studios (NVIDIAs game remastering studio) I am responsible for designing and building, tools and technology to assist in remastering classic games. In addition to my technical responsibilites and managing a team of engineers, I also assisted in starting the studio - finding and hiring the right team for the job.
As principal devtech engineer, it was my responsibility to lead all RTX engagements (from the technical perspective) with game developers actively working on ray-tracing technology globally. As part of this role, it was my duty to work with the individual game teams, and simultaneously with our architecture and driver teams - to maximise communication and re-use between all the projects. It was also my job to report/present weekly with the executive team at NVIDIA. During this role, I was also hands on lead the engineering team for Minecraft RTX, including the design and building of our game ready path traced renderer, one of the first of it's kind. Press interviews related to this project are attached to this post.
During my time in the Developer Technology team, I worked with many game developers around the world - to help ensure that titles shipping on PC both looked great, and ran fast on NVIDIA GPUs. Generally this involved working onsite along side the developer in the final few months leading up to ship, but also sometimes stretched to year long engagements. Towards the end of this role, I was given the oppertunity to represent our team in a leadership capacity, driving our internal and external game development needs with our Devtools team - driving our performance analysis and optimization team (where we looked at all titles on PC months before shipping) for USA - as well as creating, developing and evangelizing NVIDIA Aftermath, the original GPU crash debugger for game developers, which is still used by 100's of game developers around the world. As well as title engagements, I also had the oppertunity to innovate new graphics/simulation techniques for use in games, including working on several GameWorks libraries - and writing technical papers, blogs and talks for graphics/games conferences. A summarized list of my publications and talks can be found linked to my profile and below: - GPU Pro 6: "Realistic Volumetric Explosions in Games" - GPU Pro 7: "Interactive Sparse Eulerian Fluid" - GPU Zen: "Real-Time Participating Media Effects Using Extruded Light Volumes" Summarized list of all the games personally spend a significant amount of time working hands on, in their codebase alongside: - Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 - Battlefield V - Battlefield 1 - Mirrors Edge: Catalyst - Need for Speed (2015) - Batman: Arkham Knight
Worked on the Low Level Technology team at Evolution Studios, building a next gen renderer for the driving game: Driveclub. Which was a PS4 launch title, and an original IP.
During my time there I worked on several game prototypes and one major release all made using the Unity3D engine. Being a small studio required me to quickly learn numerous new skills crucial to game development. A year into our major project, I was seen as fit for promotion due to my extensive knowledge about the engine and C# skills, putting me into an increased seniority position, and leaving me to make crucial decisions for all technical systems. I also personally set up, and managed, the entire source control system. As a programmer my key roles were: - Working with Unity3D engine. - Source control using Perforce, GIT and Asset Server. - Designing and maintaining the player character system. (with 800+ animations) - Develop our online multiplayer systems, and steam integration. - Writing new image effects, and using GPU programming skills to find new and innovative solutions to problems the CPU would struggle with. - Use the marshalling and interop api in C# to integrate any C++ plugins required, including specific mesh utilities included in the DirectX API, ANL noise library and steam.