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Engineering Values

Internal-Facing Documentation

This section presents samples of my work building an engineering department and nurturing the studio's culture over the course of 10 years.
Permission to use these on my portfolio was granted by my gracious former business partners.

Tech Interview Guide

This was the doc our engineers would have on screen when conducting virtual interviews.

Onboarding Guide

This was the first page a new hire would see when they joined the studio.

Engineer Responsibilities

I like to avoid mismatched expectations during performance evaluations. I also like to see engineers get promoted.

Coding Conventions

Includes justification for why each convention exists.

Replication Tactics for Designers

My way of introducing Blueprint scripters with no multiplayer experience into a studio culture that recognized the "multiplayer tax" on every feature that needed to accommodate join-in-progress scenarios.

Blueprint Anti-Patterns

In a culture where engineers were encouraged to think like designers, we also wanted designers to be able to think like engineers.

Public Articles and Presentations

Designer-Centric Engineering Values

Based on an internal doc, this was a public-facing document I used to attract compatible candidates when we were hiring engineers.

Optimizing AI for the Magic Circle

I shared my bag of tricks.

Predictive Aim Mathematics

Math is my friend.

Game Studio Culture Dictionary

This was my love letter to the games industry with all of its quirks and foibles.

How to Run Your Company into the Ground

This was a group presentation in collaboration with various other professionals in Austin presented to a group of professional game developers.

Austin Games Industry Microtalk

This was my love letter to the city I spent my formative game development years in.

Motivation and Games Through the Looking Glass

This was a presentation I did at a bar in front of a crowd at Nerd Nite in Austin.

Intentional Creativity for Maximum Damage

This was a presentation I did for young kids at a summer camp program in order to inspire the next generation to view game design as a goal-driven, problem solving endeavor.

Game Programming Class Slides

I taught a night class on game programming at Austin Community College.

Useful Code Samples

Predictive Aim
C# Unity
C++ Unreal

I've used this on various projects to make ranged attacks more fun.

Deferred Finite State Machine
C++ Standalone
C# Unity
C++ Unreal 5

I've used this on various projects to manage complexity and avoid switch statements inside update functions.

Class Method Functor Delegate
C++

In the old days, you had to write your own object-oriented callback functions.

Amortized A* Framework
C++

I used this in The Magic Circle to enable flying creatures that could pathfind on a dynamically generated 3D grid.

Elliptical View Cone Method
C# Unity

In stealth games, you want AI vision cones to be wider than they are tall. This lets you do that without having to compromise squashed vision cones as a rectangular view frustrum.

Line Intersection with Sphere Approximation
C# Unity

This is a low cost method that can be used to ensure that line of sight does not result in false positives with entities that are generally represented as bounding boxes.

Duplicate File Detector/Pruner
C# Windows Forms

Thanks to overlapping cloud services, I had a situation in which I had duplicate photo and video files in the same folder. This used binary comparisons to prune the extras.

Duplicate File Mover
Perl
Perl (ignores mp3s)

I wrote this when my music app somehow generated tons of duplicate files during multiple import attempts. It was mainly an excuse to learn Perl over a weekend.