gaming me

CSI: Deadly Intent – The Hidden Cases

Deadly Intent – The Hidden Cases is a Nintendo DS game developed by Other Ocean and published by Ubisoft in 2009. It is an investigation game that mixes elements from adventure games and text games like Ace Attorney. Amongst other things, during the development I worked a lot on the crime scenes and was responsible for a very cool system of my own design that we used to describe the logic flow of all cases. I also worked on tools for content generation and on a nice saving system.

Check out the IGN Review: 7.5 is not bad at all!

Ecchi na Oneesan Jikenbo

I was the lead programmer for this game. It is a mobile game targeted at the Japanese market, developed and published by Gameloft. The cool thing about this adventure game is, oddly enough, its business model. It has a lot of content and each new chapter is downloaded to the phone as you play. The game system allowed game logic, environments, items and characters to be added in each download, even after launch. During the development I worked not only on graphics and gameplay but also implemented the resource management system that made the game completely extensible.

DJ Mix Tour

DJ Mix Tour is a music game developed and published by Gameloft. In it you take the place of a DJ and work on several gigs, with a guitar hero like gameplay. During the development I worked mostly on the graphical engine, created algorithms to add visual effects to the game and to save space taken by images and sprites (a necessity in the mobile game industry).

Real Football 2008 Free Edition

This game was a simplified version of Real Football 2008 that Gameloft shipped along with some mobile phones. Because the game shipped with the phones, it had to be very small and our team worked very hard to make the game as small as possible while keeping the same gameplay. In the free edition, you choose a player and participate in a challenge composed of 10 free kicks in different conditions. It is fun!

Quake Brew

Boy, was this a big challenge. I was the main engineer in this Tectoy Digital project, where we created a Brew version of Quake for high end mobile phones. Although I worked on a mobile phone, you can actually see the result of my work on the Zeebo console. The work involved a complete overhaul of the rendering system, as the target device had very different specifications and performance with the original rendering algorithms was very poor. There was a lot of reverse engineering involved, as well as a lot of research both on OpenGL|ES and the architectures of the ARM processors and graphics chips. The final result made me very proud.

Porting challenges

My first published titles were portings for a variety of J2ME and Brew devices. These were developed by Tectoy Digital and published by Tectoy. It was very interesting because it gave me an opportunity to see many ways to code games, some good, some bad. And it improved a lot my reverse engineering skills, as almost none of the code we got was created with portability in mind. The best part was porting from a high end device to a simpler one: I had to go crazy with speed optimizations, not to mention memory optimization, since some devices have very limited hardware. I worked on many famous titles like Wonderboy, Afterburner, Tamagotchi, Monkey Ball, Monkey Ball Bowling and Monkey Ball Mini Golf, just to name a few.

Multi-platform game engine

My first job in the game industry was in the development of a multi-platform game engine. The project was developed by Overplay and funded by Intel. My responsibilities comprised the optimization of the system as a whole and the development of the dynamics simulation subsystem. While on the optimization tasks, I worked with VTune and implemented several optimizations that increased the performance of the engine by over 30%. On the dynamic simulation module, I implemented a simple physics system and a complex multi-phase collision detection strategy.