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Work
Twenty-four shipped titles and projects. The mobile work is where I did the most interesting engineering; the handheld work is where I learned the most. The leadership side of these — the numbers, the teams, the replatforms — is on the Impact page.
Disney & Disney Interactive
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LaunchPad Framework
A cross-platform framework used to build several of Disney’s mobile games. I architected it and led its development.
The point was throughput. A studio shipping many small titles spends an enormous amount of its time rebuilding the same scaffolding, and that cost stays invisible because it is spread across every project rather than charged to any one of them. LaunchPad made the distance from prototype to production much shorter by turning that scaffolding into something a team inherited instead of something it wrote again.
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Inside Out: Thought Bubbles
A puzzle game based on the Pixar film. I led architecture and implementation, working with Pixar to keep the game aligned with the film.
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Where’s My Mickey?
A physics-based puzzle game built around Mickey Mouse. I oversaw technical development and the implementation of its mechanics.
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Dodopop
A bubble-popping game built on an original character rather than an existing property. I led technical development.
It had a long half-life: it became the foundation for Nemo’s Aqua Pop, which shipped roughly a decade later.
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Nemo’s Aqua Pop
A bubble-popping game set in the Finding Nemo universe, descended from Dodopop. I led development and implemented core gameplay.
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Checkout Challenge
A fast-paced game built around a supermarket checkout.
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Stack Rabbit
A puzzle game about a rabbit stacking and matching vegetables while staying out of the farmer’s way. I worked on core gameplay systems.
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Lost Light
A puzzle adventure built on light-based mechanics.
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Don’t Break the Bank
A resource-management game. I built the gameplay mechanics and the systems under them.
n-Space
Four titles for Nintendo handhelds in two years. The DS had a fraction of the memory and none of the horsepower of the consoles some of these games shared a release date with, so much of the work was the discipline of deciding what to leave out.
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GoldenEye 007
A reimagining of the N64 original with Daniel Craig as Bond. I managed technical implementation for the DS version.
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James Bond 007: Blood Stone
A third-person shooter with an original Bond storyline.
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Toy Story 3
The adaptation of the Pixar film. I oversaw technical implementation on DS.
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Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2
An action RPG built on the Civil War storyline. I led development for the Wii version and its platform-specific work.
Midway Games
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Wheelman
An open-world action-driving game set in Barcelona, starring Vin Diesel as a driver for hire. I led technical development and implemented core gameplay systems.
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Stranglehold 2
The sequel to John Woo’s Stranglehold. I contributed to early development and technical architecture. It was never released.
Tap Slots
Six titles between 2015 and 2019, built by teams in Las Vegas, Perth and Kiev. The interesting engineering here was the slot machine framework underneath them: a deterministic system where skinning a new variant of an existing math model took no code at all.
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Slot Galaxy & Classic Slot Galaxy
Unity ports off Adobe Flash — the kind of migration that is invisible when it works and existential when it does not.
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Vegas Cherry Slots
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Wild Triple Slots
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Slots of Fame
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7 Kings Casino Slots
Nobis Technologies
Co-founded in 2004. Three projects worth describing, and none of them are games — which is rather the point.
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OsCommerce VeriSign plugin
VeriSign’s cheap Payflow Link product sent customers off your site to type their card details into VeriSign’s own page. It worked, but it lost orders: enough people never realised they still had to come back and finish, and those carts simply died.
The premium product, Payflow Pro, kept the customer on your site. So I built a plugin that produced the Payflow Pro experience out of the free Payflow Link API — better checkout and higher conversion at no extra cost, which is a more satisfying kind of engineering than it sounds.
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Nobis Command Center
An order processing and fulfilment application that turned a repeat order into a single tap: issue the bill of materials, print the postage, hand it to shipping. It hooked into OsCommerce for real-time purchase notifications.
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eToll Clip
A suction-cup clip for mounting a Florida SunPass to a windscreen, replacing the adhesive strips it shipped with. My first experience of rapid manufacturing, and the start of a long interest in 3D printing.
Elsewhere
Things still growing, ideas not yet started, and one project that died and deserved better, are all in the garden.