Zynga came to us to help round out their development staff on two different projects. We worked to improve the workflow, increase productivity of the programming staff, refactored several systems to be cleaner and easier to extend and maintain, tracked down metrics anamolies, implemented gameplay features, and learned how to make games The Zynga Way.

We helped build a 3D avatar system using an internally-created Stage3D engine, built tools to allow for easier exporting via FBX to suit the needs of the art staff, and were embedded in the programming team making gameplay as excellent as possible. Game is to be released.

We built tools for asset tracking, optimized their graphics engine to push significantly more polygons, tracked down memory waste, fixed issues with their Scaleform UI implementation, and generally helped them keep on schedule as much as possible. We were all over the place, but that’s what we do best.

2K came to us searching for a cross-discipline programmer who could write client libraries and installers for modern consoles and PC, and additionally handle the server configuration to talk to these clients. The Portcullis system allows 2K to not only deny pirates from playing games that leak before launch, but also track who played the games and for how long, and optionally disable a specific player if need be.

Replay Games and A&E Television Networks came to us about making a trivia game using the History Channel brand, a large selection of images from the Getty Image Archive, and several pieces of energetic music to form a compelling, polished trivia game in Flash. The project is planned for release soon on the Intel AppUp store.

Thor required some special camera work, since the gameplay is linear at times but roaming at other times. Red Fly Studio had me put some time into building them a multi-Catmull-Rom spline interpolation system that allows designers to set up influences, groups, and assignment of position-to-spline-T. With this, a designer can finely control where the camera is and what it’s looking at based on the location of Thor in the world. It also cleanly interacted with all previous cameras I’d written for them, so they could switch into something else if circumstances demanded.

We were brought in by Bluepoint Games to help getting bugs out of the conversion codebase, fix legacy issues, rebuild the UI for high definition resolutions, and implement the stereoscopic 3D effect in a pleasing way. It was a challenging project, since the code is written in Japanese and Team ICO took extreme advantage of the more advanced platform-specific features of the PS2, some of which do not map exactly to modern platforms. We’re particularly proud of the stereoscopic 3D, which looks spectacular with their artwork and environments.

Six Degrees Games, the company behind the popular children’s Flash MMO ActionAllStars.com, called us to help them reach a Thanksgiving milestone by writing a simple football-and-turkey-themed field goal kicking game. We knocked it out in a week, and still had a week before their deadline to iterate with their art director to get the best integrated experience possible for their users.

Red Fly called us to fill in the gaps on their engineering team again. This time, Jason was in charge of a complete rewrite of the camera system, special effects such as force lightning, the force rage dynamic cutscenes, character control tuning, and special rendering techniques like hemispherical reflection mapping. Jeff was the one-man-show that brought the Wii version’s most talked about feature: the Smash Bros.-like multiplayer combat mode.

Six Degrees Games asked us to build them a solid 3D-in-the-browser experience that carried the NBA license with player likenesses and team logos and everything. This was a short timeline project at only 5 months long, with an unfamiliar engine, but we managed to pull it off by subcontracting in some talented people and working hard to get polish on ever aspect we had time to. In the end, there were 60 normal-mapped NBA players on 30 teams, solo or multiplayer support, 3 different environments (beach, rooftop, and NBA court), 40+ animations, and all done in an art style matching their MMO.

A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. needed someone to quickly get them some nice looking water for their TV-game show spinoff. They found out about “Cook or Be Cooked” and asked for the same treatment… although doing realistic water simulation per vertex on the scale that Wipeout needed it wouldn’t be possible on the Wii. Instead, I wrote some per-pixel warping with animated refraction. It took about 2 weeks to implement, and dramatically improved the look of the title. Wipeout: The Game was the #7 top grossing Wii title in 2010.

Red Fly contracted us to be their engineering team for a project published by Namco in conjunction with Food Network, called Cook or Be Cooked. As silly as the name is, the game was a careful balance between fun and simulation, meeting the stringent demands of both Namco and Food Network. Jason was lead programmer doing everything from physically-based fluid dynamics (on the Wii, no less), Scaleform/gameswf UI integration, and being build master. Jeff handled all the various engine updates, bug fixing the lightmapping tool, WWise integration, etc.

Disney Interactive/Junction Point hired me to work on art pipeline tools and designer extensibility and usability workflow enhancements. The exact details are under NDA, but suffice it to say, I was popular among the tech artists and design team.

Red Fly hired us to rewrite their pathfinding system for Mushroom Men. The system in their engine of choice was terribly inefficient and quite limited, but had a complete designer-driven editor that was necessary to remain intact. So, I wrote a parallel system that allowed creatures to walk on walls, fly, go upside down, and do so without bogging the framerate even when many creatures suddenly need to find a route. This was done through a shared A* pathfinding pool, incremental pathing, and a triangle-mesh created by designers in the aforementioned tool. A KD Tree was used to map a world space position to the mesh, which proved problematic at times. The project was started and finished in about 3 months. The same system has been used in most of their games since then.

Fizzball, a cute PC title and IGF 2007 Finalist, was slated for a full conversion to Wii. The project was initially hacked together and failing to meet milestones. Replay Games handed the project to us to fix and ship on-time, under the new name Dr. Fizzwizzle’s Animal Rescue. This was a tough project because it entailed removing English text from about 1200 textures, writing a complete localization layer, integrating EFIGS, reimplementing the story sections completely with redrawn art larger and cleaner artwork so as to be legible on standard definition TVs. We also added every control scheme possible–pointer, tilt, nunchuk joystick, classic controller, and even balance board! This is probably the ONLY game that supports all these controllers.