Unreal Tournament 3 Titan Pack

Playstation 3, PC

Since 2008, I have been a Gameplay Programmer at Epic Games in Cary, NC. I spent most of my first 7 months working on the UT3 Titan Pack. I worked across many areas in the game, including gametypes, mutators, weapons, deployables, vehicles, and UI.

Gears of War 2

Xbox 360

While at Epic, I also did a little bit of programming work on Gears of War 2. Though I was primarily working on the UT3 Titan Pack, I fixed some memory leaks, Achievement bugs, and UI bugs toward the end of development and for title updates.

Tomb Raider Underworld

Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC, Playstation 2, Wii

In 2007 and 2008, I worked at Crystal Dynamics in Redwood City, CA. I was a programmer on the Tomb Raider Underworld team, where I worked on the combat system and camera.

Call of Duty 3

Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, Xbox, Playstation 2

In the summer of 2006 I worked as a Programming Intern at Treyarch, a video game developer in Santa Monica, CA. I worked on the AI for Call of Duty 3, and did some scripting for the Fuelplant level.

DOOM 3

Xbox

During the fall of 2004, I was a Production Intern at Vicarious Visions, a video game developer based in Troy, NY. Throughout my 4 months there, I worked on testing the Xbox version of Doom 3.

Cartoon Carnage

I worked on Cartoon Carnage with Stefan Mohler. We built the engine and game from the ground up, as our entry into the 8th annual CS248 Video Game competition in the Fall of 2006. Cartoon Carnage won the grand prize, which includes a trip to SIGGRAPH 2007 in San Diego, and several games for PC and Xbox 360. Thanks to Microsoft and Electronic Arts for sponsoring the competition and providing awesome prizes!

Office Wing

Office Wing is a 2-D space shooter with 3-D graphics. You play as a paper airplane, flying through an office while battling various office supplies.
There are no levels in Office Wing. The types, formations, movement patterns, and numbers of enemies encountered is not random, and has not been scripted.
Instead, the game uses a reinforcement learning algorithm to adapt the enemies sent at the player, and attempts to keep the game challenging while not completely overwhelming the player.
As far as I am aware, this is the first video game to use reinforcement learning in this way.

The game started out as a side project that I was working on in my free time, but I expanded it greatly for my final project in CS 229 - Machine Learning during my first quarter as a grad student at Stanford.

Notebook Ninja

Huge thanks to G4TV's Attack of the Show, for featuring Notebook Ninja on Free Play Friday!

Notebook Ninja is a street brawler involving stick figures in a notebook. You play the role of a student in an ungodly boring Programming Languages class, and fall asleep while drawing stick figures in your notebook. In your dream, it seems that you have taken the form of one of the stick figures you were drawing, and you have to fight your way out of your notebook! Since you have no weapons, you'll just have to make use of the limbs of your stick figure opponents. You'll fight through 3 levels alone or with a friend, eventually battling with a boss at the end.

I worked on Notebook Ninja as part of Team Haribo, a three-programmer group, for CSCI 4440 - Software Design and Documentation during my sixth and final semester at RPI
The group was made up of myself, Brandon Fulljames, and Cory McWilliams. All three of us designed the game and worked on its amazing programmer art. Most notable portions of the game that I worked on include the spline interpolated animation system, all stick figure animations, enemy AI, and design and "art" for the menus and levels 1 and 3.

Interesting features include the smoothly animated 3-D stick figures, the ability to use opponents' body parts as weapons, the huge amount of "ink," the goofy storyline and cutscenes, 2-player cooperative gameplay and controller support, and the fact that the programmer art actually fits in with the game's theme.

Buzz Off

Buzz Off is a physics-based game with a top-down perspective. You indirectly control a buzzsaw using your mouse, and try to defeat all of the planks without falling into a pit. Normally, the mouse cursor is a fan, which can be turned on by pressing the left mouse button. This applies a linear force on the saw, which depends on the distance that the fan is from the saw. When the mouse cursor is positioned over the saw, it becomes a tornado, and can apply an angular force on the saw. Hazards such as bouncers, bombs, and enemy fans are positioned around the map to push your saw into pits. Also, there are floor, ice, and sand surfaces with different amounts of friction.

I designed and implemented Buzz Off as a project for PSYC 4962 - Game Mechanics during my sixth semester at RPI. I developed the game alone over the course of one week.

The most interesting feature of Buzz Off is the physics, which cause much of the game's challenge.

Operation Squirrel Barrage

Another huge thanks to G4TV's Attack of the Show for featuring OSB on Free Play Friday!

Operation Squirrel Barrage (aka OSB) is a top-down action/adventure game where you control Ildar, a Math TA at Rotting Plaque Institute. Ildar's students have been turned into zombies by a virus, and the only way to cure one of these zombies is by throwing live squirrels at them. As Ildar, you and Alby the albino squirrel venture through the three main parts of Rotting Plaque Institute, fighting a unique boss at the end of each level. In addition to squirrel throwing, Ildar can later use a Squirrel Boomerang and Squirrel Launcher to fight zombies. You can also take control of Alby to solve puzzles and defeat zombies.

I worked on OSB as part of a five-student team for the RPI course CSCI/PSYC 4520 - Game Development during my fourth semester at RPI.
The group consisted of myself as Designer and Programmer, Brandon Fulljames and Eric Smith as Programmers, and Hani Lim and Kevin Lockwood as Artists. I designed the original concept and ridiculous story of the game, along with the weapons, enemies, bosses, levels, and puzzles - with plenty of help and input from the rest of the team. Game code I worked on includes enemies, non-player characters, all bosses, and countless other game objects.

Some of OSB's most interesting features are its ridiculous storyline, the ability to use Alby, the puzzles, the specialized boss battles, pixel-perfect collision detection, the game-saving feature, and 2+ hours of gameplay from beginning to end.

Bunny Bomber

Bunny Bomber is a simple Real-Time Strategy game (RTS) where you indirectly control an army of kamikaze Blue Bunnies and try to destroy the base of the evil Pink Bunnies. As the Blue Bunnies' commander, you place carrots to lead your bunnies around in the map, and click on a bunny to make it explode. Your goal is to use your bunnies to make the Pink Bunny base explode, before your base is destroyed.

I worked on Bunny Bomber as part of a five-programmer team, over the course of my third semester at RPI.
The group consisted of myself, Brandon Fulljames, Robert Galen, David Millman, and Ben Zeigler. All five of us worked on both the design and implementation of the game. Portions of the game code I worked on include graphics, HUD, pathplanning, and AI behavior (base defense, multitasking, recovering from a failed attack)

Interesting features include 3 difficulty levels, a bug algorithm for individual bunny movement, cool explosion and screen-shaking effects, a customizable background music playlist, and of course, the ability to BLOW UP CUTE BUNNIES!!

General Game Player

From the General Game Playing page:
"A General Game Playing System is one that can accept a formal description of an arbitrary game and, without further human interaction, can play the game effectively. General Game Playing systems are characterized by their use of general cognitive information processing technologies (such as knowledge representation, reasoning, learning, and rational behavior). Unlike specialized game playing systems (such as Deep Blue), they do not rely exclusively on algorithms designed in advance for specific games."

During the Spring quarter of my first year as a graduate student at Stanford, I enrolled in CS227B - General Game Playing. The main component of the course consisted of developing a general game player as part of a team, to then compete in a tournament at the end of the quarter. My team, The Pumamen, consisted of myself, Brent Ellwein, and Adam Hahn. After a long and difficult quarter of working on our player, we won the final competition, and were awarded an aerial tour of the San Francisco Bay Area.