Jean Simonet
Verified Expert in Engineering
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Developer
Rockville, MD, United States
Toptal member since April 8, 2019
Jean has been working professionally in games and interactive media for 15 years, initially in large studios and now as an independent developer. Jean is an expert Unity developer with many projects under his belt ranging from mobile games to VR/AR to physical devices. He is just as comfortable writing fancy shaders as he is writing AI algorithms or designing fun and engaging puzzle games.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Adobe Photoshop, C++, C#, Unity, Windows
The most amazing...
...thing I've created is fully deformable planet engine. This required a really powerful architecture that combined CPU, compute, and geometry shaders.
Work Experience
Founder
Systemic Games, LLC
- Developed a small puzzle game teaching kids electronics.
- Built a Bluetooth-enabled playing die from scratch. This involved many disciplines, from electronics and board layout to firmware code in C++ to a mobile 3D app in Unity and C#.
- Created several assets for the Unity Asset Store.
Senior Architect and Research Engineer
Adobe
- Led the design and development of specific engine components on an undisclosed research project.
Contractor, Senior Game Developer
PluralSight
- Developed a demo game called "Swords and Shovels" intended to introduce subscribers (PluralSight is a learning platform) to professional video game development in Unity.
Contractor, UX Developer
Oculus VR
- Explored new types of UX for VR, including new types of touch interactions and voice recognition.
Contractor, Programming
Elliptic Games
- Developed a Prolog-like language and runtime for the game engine. The language is used to perform complex procedural generation and so also needed to support some quantitative predicates. This made the underlying search/generator system fairly complicated.
Contractor, Programming
Skyborne Games
- Developed technologies and gameplay components for a Puzzles-and-Dragons like mobile game.
Founder
Year Seventeen, LLC
- Helped develop a game called Fireborne.
- Wrote several assets for the Unity Asset Store, most notably the very popular P4Connect Perforce integration for Unity.
AI and System Programmer
Bethesda Game Studios
- Contributed to the development of Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout 4 as part of the AI and Systems group.
- Designed and implemented a navmesh-based navigation system for the studio's large, constantly-streaming worlds. Between writing tools to generate the navmesh, dealing with characters moving through unloaded portions of the world, and animating movements, I handled all locomotion concerns.
- Implemented the Critter system for the engine (the butterflies and fish in Skyrim, for instance). This was an effort to make a low-impact creature system that was entirely controlled by scripts, and that the artists could customize and place in the world at their leisure.
Programmer
Terminal Reality
- Shipped my first game: BloodRayne 2. I also worked on an Aeon Flux game, based on the 2005 movie.
- Contributed to several game systems, fairly quickly specializing in FX programming. In fact, I rewrote the company's particle engine for Aeon Flux and named it after a character I had lots of fun working on in the previous game: Ephemera.
Experience
P4Connect
GPU-Accelerated Terrain Deformation
https://youtu.be/LhkyYBFkMasProcedural Mountains
Planetary Fog System
https://youtu.be/9piL9Eeoz_gFaceted Flight
Fire Effect Shader
https://youtu.be/xq7U5TN72PULow Poly Terrain
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/low-poly-terrain-46528FEATURES
• Import height and color maps from your favorite generation/painting tool.
• Full collision support.
• Achieve a properly faceted look that the default terrain system can't.
• Generate and manage LOD levels dynamically, keeping a low poly count.
• Low CPU and GPU usage, taking advantage of dynamic batching.
• Place trees or other objects procedurally on your terrains.
• Ideal for high-performance environments such as VR.
• Works with PBR or legacy/custom lighting models.
• Full source and shader code included.
Back Button
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/back-button-50892Fireborne
I was able to create many cool systems for the game, a fully deformable planet, an automata-based water simulation, behavior graph AI for the characters, optimized pathfinding, and lots and lots of shaders for all the FX and unique visuals of the game.
Sci-fi Adventure Game
https://youtu.be/wY9ATbe_jO8Pyroclastic Donut
https://youtu.be/zgT507jkzT8Most of what I did was modify the raycasting equations to work with a different shape than a sphere.
Unity BLE Plugin for Windows
https://github.com/jeansimonet/UnityBLEPluginForWindowsProcedural Terrain Generation on Spherical Hex World
Education
Master's Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology - Atlanta, GA
Master of Science in Engineering Degree in Electronics and Computer Science
ENSEEIHT - Toulouse, France
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Standard Template Library (STL)
Tools
Visual Studio 2019, Photoshop CC, Perforce, Adobe Photoshop, Blender, Illustrator CC, Git
Languages
C#, Embedded C++, C++, JavaScript, Python
Frameworks
Unity, .NET
Platforms
Windows, Oculus Rift, iOS, MacOS
Paradigms
Data-driven Design
Storage
JSON
Other
Video Games, Unity, Navigation, Unity Shaders, Optimization, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Shaders, Multithreading, Graphics, PCB Design, VR Platform, Embedded Systems, Virtual Reality (VR), Animation
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