Dan is a programmer and technical artist who likes wearing as many different hats as possible. He's very tall, and really loves cats. Most recently, Dan was Lead Technical Artist at SMG studio. Dan worked at Mountains and Spunge Games on several commercial releases, has built a number of Serious Games for Queensland universities, and occasionally tutors in a Games Design course. Previously, he worked on a co-op party game about very poor parenting called Think of the Children.
- Ability to work closely with an art team to translate design intention into engine
- Experience approximating high-cost effects on low-spec devices
- Ability to design tech art infrastructure and workflows for use at scale
- Ability to rapidly parse and evaluate technical papers at a 'layperson's level
- Practical approach to high-level 3d maths (splines, ballistics, graph traversal, etc)
- Experience with optimisation for mobile and low-spec devices, including Nintendo Switch
- Broad range of cross-disciplinary secondary skillsets, and the ability to combine them in interesting ways
- Discovery-motivated, and always up to tackle complex and interesting problems
- Genuine interest in all disciplines within game dev, and willingness to learn
Management & Production:
- Design, production plan, and execute development of scalable Tech Art pipeline infrastructure
- Carry out day-to-day tasking and prioritisation for members of a multidisciplinary team
- Support and encourage the professional development of team members
Rendering:
- Build performant PBR and non-PBR lighting solutions (voxels, custom shadowcasters, etc)
- Write HLSL and GLSL shaders, both by hand and using node-based editors
- Write VFX engines and tooling for en-masse mesh drawing (artist tooling, marching cubes, direct mesh drawing, etc)
Tech Art:
- Design and implement multi-stage asset ingestion pipelines for use at scale
- Build production tools to reduce bottlenecks in asset pipelines
- Work extensively with Unity3D's PhysX implementation on mobile hardware
- Implement IK and procedural animation systems
Gameplay & Systems:
- Implement algorithms for proc-gen content (graph traversal, terrain gen, fluid sims, WFC)
- Build robust cross-project systems designed for ease of use (localisation, UI flow, FTUX)
- Do 'juice' and polish implementation (character controllers, character work, UI, VFX)
- Design and implement responsive UI designs and layouts
Lead Technical Artist
Technical Artist
2018-2019 Designer / Developer
2017 Gameplay Programmer
Gameplay Programmer, Technical Artist
Interactive Experience Designer, Programmer
Game Design Consultant
Tutor: Bachelor of Games Design (Serious Games, Experimental Games)
Contract Programmer
Get in touch!