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About Me

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Like all great tales, we should start at the beginning. Ever since I was a kid, I remember wanting to become a person who makes video games. I also dabbled with paleontologist or archaeologist, but once I discovered that Indiana Jones is not realistic, I pretty much stuck with game development. I recall always being in awe of these immersive digital worlds that captivated my entire imagination and let me live inside of them. I was naturally drawn to computers. I knew that somehow people made games with them, but I had no idea how. I figured if I kept pressing buttons and doing things, one day I would figure it out.

Truth be told, that's basically what happened.

It did not start with games immediately, though. I discovered online gaming forums and I learned that people made their own fan pages. This was the seed that truly started my programming journey. I found a website that explained how to make a website and host it on AOL for free and the rest is history. Over the years I probably created at least a dozen different gaming websites and a couple for bands I liked. The internet used to be a cool place like that.

As I got a little older, I discovered a program called RPG Maker and put all of my friends from fifth grade into a game that is unfortunately lost to time. Fast forward to high school and I have discovered Game Maker. I played around with this with a friend from school. Eventually I take the natural step of going to Wright State University for Computer Science because that's the degree you get when you want to make games but can't enroll in a game-specific degree.

In college I made some friends who were also interested in making games and we worked on a small prototype of a tower defense/RPG/walking sim hybrid in Unity. It was a fun first experience working with a team on a game and I made a cool boss fight with an evil spider that you fought while still managing a tower defense map.

During school and after graduating, I took some jobs working on government contracts where I learned many new skills and how to work on both very large and very small projects to meet specific needs on various types of hardware. This included fully implementing an AR iOS application that was location-aware for building and maintenance in Navy shipyards, and working on an SDK and associated tools that are used across AFRL.

Determined to make game development my full time job, I kept working on projects like the Unity game and eventually found myself working with some amazing people at Babaroga where I got to work on my first shipped title Five Night's at Freddy's: Security Breach. From there, I got to contribute to other titles such as Hello Neighbor: Search and Rescue and Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria among many others. My several years spent here have given me a broad yet deep skillset including:

• Unreal Engine--I had not used it much before starting on FNAF but it is now second nature to me
• Console development processes and pipelines
• AI Implementation and design
• VR best practices and design considerations
• How to create solutions that are forward-thinking with supporting multiple platforms

I am currently working with Babaroga on an unannounced story-driven puzzle game in Unreal Engine 5 where I am leading the engineering team and writing a significant portion of the core gameplay systems and tools. I am mentoring other engineers on properly expanding and using these systems as well as best practices for C++ development in Unreal Engine.

Outside of the workplace, I keep up with trends in the industry by playing new games, listening to game development talks, reading game dev books and articles, and working on my own projects. I'm currently developing an immersive sim in Godot. I am also on my language learning journey and have started studying Japanese.

I'm excited to see where this game development journey will take me and where games themselves will go as the technology becomes more and more accessible and the medium matures. I plan to branch more into game design and creation of art especially with my personal projets.