Experience

Niantic Labs

Staff Technical Artist

April 2022 - Present

Becoming an integral part of the design and development of multiplayer real-world AR experiences unique to Niantic.

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.

Senior Technical Artist & Co-Founder

July 2020 - April 2022

  • 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

References available on request

Magic Leap / Weta Workshop

Technical Artist

May 2016 - May 2020

  • 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

NOTE: Weta Gameshop is the name of Weta Workshop's game studio. I was employed by Magic Leap, but worked exclusively with the Gameshop team.

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

Pikpok

Analytics Manager

October 2013 - 2016

  • 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