Work Experience

Limbitless Solutions
(Unity - C#)

Game Programmer

October 2020 – May 2021

Limbitless Solutions is an Orlando-based non-profit that devotes itself to making a difference by creating a platform and amplifying the voices of those with limb difference and disabilities. They embody this through their dedication to empowering individuals through personalized, creative, and self-expressive bionics.

At Limbitless, I worked as a Games Programmer, tasked with designing (along with two artists) and programming a game for the purposes of teaching people to use the Project Xavier hardware. This hardware involves a sensor placed on the temporalis in order to allow the user to manipulate an electric wheelchair using nothing but the muscles in their head.

I was responsible for:

  • Designing, prototyping, and lighting levels

  • Designing and implementing mechanics

  • Implementing and interfacing the existing project with Tobii Eye Tracker 5

  • Implementing art assets

  • Implementing the Unity High Definition Render Pipeline

    • Optimizing the project to account for the performance impact.

  • Onboarding new hires to the project

The game consisted of a series of platforming levels and a player character with limited movement. The intent is to gamify learning of the Xavier hardware by emulating motions user would have to execute in their day-to-day life. This was aided by an eye tracker, providing a hands-free way for users who struggle to use their hands to navigate menus, and enhancing their independence.

The challenge in this project came from interfacing with the Xavier hardware, a piece of proprietary equipment developed at Limbitless. Further challenge arose in the following:

  • Ramping in difficulty appropriately

  • Remaining engaging despite the limited gameplay

  • Keeping levels short to not exhaust the player.

UCF Restores
(Unity - C#)

Simulation Programmer

February 2020 –
October 2020

As Simulation Programmer, I collaborated with a team of artists and programmers to create a VR software for therapists to recreate traumatic events for Military and First Responder personnel that suffer from PTSD.

I designed and implemented systems built in Unity and written in C#. This includes:

  1. A character creation system the UMA plugin for Unity as well as the corresponding UI. This system allowed you to create, and save male and female characters, and apply different hair styles, skin tones, tops, bottoms, among other customization options. This took about 2 months, and working with the art team to create new clothing for UMA posed more trouble than we had anticipated. Learning to deal with UMA, and really understanding it from the inside out was the key to success with this system.

  2. A playback system for interfacing, storing, manipulating, and playing back created traumatic events. This involved working on previously implemented code from a team of programmers that left a few months after I started at Restores. This system involved loading in files from the Traumatic Event builder, and playing them back appropriately in real time, parsing through large amounts of data and working as a puppet master to make sure that everything was played back appropriately. Similarly, the scene had to also be fast forwarded and rewinded, which provided its own set of challenges in navigating through the data and making sure everything was sync’ed up properly.

  3. A storage system for creating and managing an actor (including their positions, events, progress in their actions) in a traumatic event scene. In May, the previous programming team left, and I became lead programmer on the project and overhauled this system in order to facilitate multiple actors. This involved using linked lists and a large data structure called a waypoint which contained events to store all relevant information necessary for creating and playing back the scene. Similarly, events and waypoints were added dynamically to other characters in order to facilitate jumping from one waypoint to another, as data in between needed to be calculated before playing the scene back.

I also assisted the IT Department in interfacing the system with an AWS server and creating a secure method for uploading created scenes and recorded information.