Experience
New Zealand Games Festival
Director & Treasurer
September 2021 - Present
NZ Games Festival is a grassroots, not-for-profit festival run by gamers and game developers. We aim to celebrate NZ and Australian games and promote the industry as a tool for social good and old fashioned fun.
Founded a company focused on augmented reality with some of the most talented people in the industry
Working with top tier studios around the world and locally on new and exciting XR projects
Worked with skatrix.io, Destination Mars, Qualcomm, and Niantic
Signed many nondisclosure agreements
Contributed to the creation of the StoryXR frame work to accelerate our projects
Deeply involved in NZXR's successful acquisition by Niantic
[REDACTED]
Senior Technical Artist / AR Programmer
August 2020 - April 2021
Contracted to a billion dollar company well known for leading the field in location based, AR games on mobile
Successfully worked with the London based team remotely from Wellington NZ
Part I
Supported the team as they took an internal project to green light
Helped the team prototype and prove out game-play. Freeing the main development team to focus on building for scale
Provided technical art support for the team
Part II
Took on responsibility for delivering a unique Augmented Reality experience to go along side the main build
Worked closely with the Creative Director and Lead Game Designer
Liaised with the in house Augmented Reality SDK development team, testing out experimental features and provided feedback
Analysed and optimization aspects of the Augmented Reality SDK systems and feed results back upstream
Optimized aspects of build and SDK to take the build from <15fps to +50fps
"[This] AR prototype is one of the most exciting AR
gameplay demos I seen recently." - CEO
gameplay demos I seen recently." - CEO
Technical Artist for Dr. Grordbort's Invaders, Magic Leap’s flagship game
Made our games run smoothly and look great on Magic Leap One by guiding the art team with asset budgets and profiler driven optimization
Built, maintained and evolved asset production pipelines in flight as our hardware, SDKs, and Operating System moved from prototypes to shipped consumer devices
Boosted artist productivity with tools to publish models and textures with visual diff against previous versions. This was written in Python, Qt, OpenGL, and GLSL
Designed and championed accessibility guidelines for our games, culminating in an update wholly focused on accessibility features
Developed ‘room scan’ shaders in partnership with the Studio Director. Achieved the design goal of looking amazing and directing player gaze to the right locations
Elected, then trained as Health and Safety Representative for Weta Workshop
Member of studio diversity committee. Achieved increased applications from underrepresented people in game development
I consistently sought alternative solutions to routine overtime as a way of developing a healthy team culture
Pushed for prioritizing employee well-being and retention
New Zealand Game Developers Conference
Committee Member
2017
Committee member for the 2017 New Zealand Game Developers Conference. Contributed to the successful running of the conference
I was responsible for social media channels during the event
Grew the analytics team from a seed idea to a team of four, highly integrated to the product development and analysis cycles
Managed the team day-to-day and interviewed all new hires to the team
Designed and built gameplay analytics processing pipeline turning billions of events per month into actionable insights
Created real-time dashboards to provide teams with up to the minute information about PikPok’s 30+ products
Designed and built custom collection and reporting solutions for key business performance indicators for Decision Makers
Bought reports and analysis to product meetings, reviews and scrums. Actively contributed in product decision making
Sidhe / Pikpok
Lead Technical Artist
2008 - October 2013
Built PikPok’s Technical Art team from the ground up with a focus on inter department communication, troubleshooting and performance optimization
Responsible for the art department's production tools
Responsible for all the content pipelines. Developed content pipelines in Unity and 4+ other engines
Shipped 10+ Console titles
Shipped 30+ Mobile titles including Into the Dead, Giant Boulder of Death, Flick Kick series, Rival Stars Basketball, and Robot Unicorn Attack 2