Antoon Groenewoud

After joining the Games Academy, I decided to leave behind my "April" engine and start fresh. It evolved from 2D to 3D and offline to online. It ended up having a 3D renderer, animation system, particles, deferred lighting, a UI system, Lua scripting, a terrain engine, math and geometric functions, spatial partitioning, and more. It focused on online collaborative working à la Google Docs, in real-time while playing the game. At the time I did not know about Gdocs or Shark3D, which also implemented something similiar. If you were a dev you could change scripts in real time and they would update on everyone's computer. Example: Someone could play while a dev was editing how the inventory UI worked.

When I joined Happy Tuesday, we started creating Haunted Island in Unity3D. I was the only programmer at the time and wrote all the core systems, and later 2 more programmers joined. I joined to learn more about game development itself because I was so focused on engines. What I found especially interesting is how many states the code has to deal with and how different the quality assurance is.

The client wanted to reach the mobile market with their Facebook/Flash game. I was the only developer as we ported it to Unity/iPhone/iPad in just over 3 months. It was a slot machine game that included minigames like black jack. It also sported many small unique cutscenes which presented an interesting challenge to port. It had significant Facebook integration, a strong connection with a php backend, and tried to achieve maximum graphical fidelity which is a significant challenge on iPhones. I wrote an exporter that rasterized the pre-existing animated vector graphics in Flash to bones and sprites which saved a lot of time and money.

I wrote a tool that tracked transactions in Second Life for Perfect Prefabs. This way we could see what products were popular, who were our biggest costumers in terms of sales, revenue, and time periods. It had two main parts: The web user interface that was generated by PHP, and the Second Life scripts that would access a PHP web interface to store new data into an SQL Database.