D3-09 was an interactive droid aboard the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, in collaboration with Walt Disney Imagineering. Guests could get helpful information, hear a bedtime story, and converse with D3 in all kinds of ways, from within their rooms.
Built in Unreal Engine 4, D3 was driven by a procedural animation system, which blended motion-captured animations to create lifelike movement at all hours of the day. Under the hood, we utilized Unreal's Pixel Streaming technology to render instances to each of the rooms displays. Audio and data were communicated to these instances via a server.
I was responsible for implementing all of the core UI in the experience: implementing a data-layer in C++ for information to be displayed from a server, and the visual layer in UMG. I also assisted artists on our team with several systems related to environment and animation.
Virballs is a 3D action-platformer, where the player is tasked with capturing and utilizing small elemental creatures known as Virballs, which can be combined by the player into various weapons that the player can use.
I was responsible for implementing the enemy AI. This was a great experience in which I was able to build on my knowledge of Unreal’s Behavioral Tree and AI Perception systems, adding life and intent to these loveable creatures.
In addition to handling the enemy AI, I also designed and implemented a modular puzzle system, which was created with the intention of allowing designers to rapidly prototype and iterate on new puzzle ideas without having to re-write the base logic for each new idea they wanted to try.
Gameplay Video:
2AD is a character animation system. Characters can animate and lip-sync in real-time with just text or audio serving as input. The library works across both Unity and Unreal game engines.
As a senior developer on this project, I contributed heavily to the architecture design and implementation of the system.
I also built a suite of custom UI and tools in both Unreal Slate and Unity Editor GUI that allowed designers to properly set up and refine the character animations within the system, including a full timeline sequencer for constructing long-length scripted animated sequences. One of my favorites was a lipsync-analyzer tool, which allowed animators to test out dialogue lines and get information regarding current blend-shapes for each syllable.
Caleb is a character built upon the custom 2AD animation system, in collaboration with Inworld, which showcased a young child and his toy, who miraculously comes to life. Players communicate with Caleb and the toy and go through an interactive journey together. This served as the cornerstone of a TED Talk in 2024.
As the lead developer on the project, I was responsible for helping bring multiple technologies together in Unreal Engine 5. There was a lot of custom system work to get the application stood up, including: designing and implementing Unreal subsystems to manage the experience, custom tooling to allow artists to rapidly iterate on the scene, and assisting with the rollout of the experience.
TED Talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV1yPkkUFOw
Multiple games which I contributed in updating and porting to new platforms. Starballs, Roboshark Rampage, and The Adventures of Spunk and Splat are original titles released by Bolder Games.
Originally built in Unity 3 and 5, the porting of these projects involved a fair amount of legwork to bring to a modern version of Unity, allowing for us to bring these games to new platforms. My work on these games consisted of anything needed to get them running on the new platforms, whether it be updating obsolete code or rebuilding systems that weren't compatible with modern Unity. In the case of Starballs, this required me to rebuild the UI in its entirety, as the original UI was built in an obsolete UI system.
In addition, I worked on updating the input system to allow for both controller and MK input types, as the original games were made exclusively for touch-based inputs.
I also helped in handling certification and the re-release of these games on the Apple App Store and Steam.
My first professional project was working on several attractions for Lionsgate Entertainment World, located in Zhuhai, China. My responsibilities included implementing localization, debugging, optimizations, and assisting with the installation.
The installation took place over roughly two months, and while challenging, proved to be a valuable opportunity for me (learning to develop on an ongoing construction site has believe-it-or-not proved fairly valuable).