Ricardo Costa, Developer in Rio de Janeiro - State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Ricardo is available for hire
Hire Ricardo

Ricardo Costa

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Game Developer

Rio de Janeiro - State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Toptal member since September 12, 2018

Bio

A professional developer for over 13 years, Ricardo focuses on game development, computer graphics, including rendering, computer vision, and VR/AR, artificial intelligence, and client-server systems. He is also an Unreal Engine expert with eight years of experience. Ricardo is passionate about cutting-edge technology, optimizing complex systems, and creating real-time, high-performance software.

Portfolio

Ampaire Inc.
Game Design, C++, OpenGL
KEYS Metaverse
3D Games, 3D Rendering, Unreal Engine 5, Non-fungible Tokens (NFT), C++...
Genius Ventures
3D Rendering, 3D Visualization, Augmented Reality (AR), Unreal Engine 5, C++...

Experience

  • Game Development - 17 years
  • Computer Graphics - 17 years
  • C++ - 16 years
  • Networking - 10 years
  • Unreal Engine - 8 years
  • Augmented Reality (AR) - 3 years
  • Unreal Engine 5 - 2 years
  • Virtual Reality (VR) - 2 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Git, Visual Studio, Unreal Engine, C++, Perforce, Windows

The most amazing...

...system I've developed is an unmanned ground vehicle software controller featuring stereo vision, autonomous spatial navigation, and 3D-scenario reconstruction.

Work Experience

Game Developer

2023 - 2024
Ampaire Inc.
  • Developed a custom X-Plane flight simulator plugin that showed relevant flight data for a new hybrid aircraft manufactured by Ampaire.
  • Wrote code in C++ and OpenGL, also interacting with the X-Plane SDK.
  • Created a custom HUD with animated icons and implemented formulas to display simulation data.
Technologies: Game Design, C++, OpenGL

Lead Developer

2023 - 2023
KEYS Metaverse
  • Developed an Unreal Engine 5 metaverse project with virtual mansions sold as NFTs to thousands of investors.
  • Used C++, blueprints, and other advanced techniques to achieve triple-A visual quality and performance.
  • Hosted the game on AWS so that it could be accessed from any browser and pixel-streamed it to the clients.
Technologies: 3D Games, 3D Rendering, Unreal Engine 5, Non-fungible Tokens (NFT), C++, Game Development, Microsoft Visual Studio, Computer Graphics, Windows, MMORPGs

Senior Graphics Engineer

2022 - 2023
Genius Ventures
  • Developed a 3D interactive poster with a human-like character, i.e., MetaHuman, that could talk and interact with the public on a kiosk at the famous Irving Plaza venue in NY, taking advantage of 5G and edge computing.
  • Created a real estate property viewer using Unreal Engine 4 with fully baked lighting and realistic rendering. It allows multiple users to join and collaborate on the same session online.
  • Created a new technology to stream ultra-high quality 3D objects from Unreal Engine to an AR experience that surpassed Google's XR Streaming technology in rendering quality.
  • Developed a 3D avatar in Unreal Engine that could react in real time to the emotions detected from the user's facial expressions.
  • Worked on a 3D car showroom project using ultra-realistic rendering in Unreal Engine 5.
Technologies: 3D Rendering, 3D Visualization, Augmented Reality (AR), Unreal Engine 5, C++, Blueprints Visual Scripting, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Unreal Engine 4, Edge Computing, Multiplayer, Networking, Microsoft Visual Studio, Computer Graphics, Extended Reality (XR), MacOS, Windows

Elite Unreal Engine Developer

2021 - 2022
MDA
  • Collaborated with a large team to create a VR application in Unreal Engine for military training.
  • Optimized the project to run in Oculus Quest 2 with good performance and visual quality.
  • Wrote code in C++ for critical parts and blueprints for the user experience (UX).
Technologies: Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine, Virtual Reality (VR), Oculus, Game Development, 3D Games, Microsoft Visual Studio, Computer Graphics, Windows

Unreal Engine Developer

2019 - 2020
RYOT
  • Created an AR experience for the Angry Birds 2 movie launch using Unreal Engine and a novel pixel-streaming solution to achieve real-time, movie-like 3D quality using a mobile phone.
  • Created native applications for Android and iOS that could run the pixel-streamed experience from Unreal Engine on the phone.
  • Worked on several R&D projects for 3D AR and realistic rendering with Unreal Engine through pixel-streaming from an AWS GPU instance.
Technologies: Unreal Engine, C++, 3D Rendering, Augmented Reality (AR), Microsoft Visual Studio, Computer Graphics, MacOS, Windows

C++ and Unreal Engine Developer

2019 - 2019
Lucid
  • Developed an Unreal Engine plugin to integrate real-time 3D scenes from Unreal into the Ventuz virtual production ecosystem.
  • Used the C++ language and low-level APIs from Unreal Engine source code.
  • Optimized a plugin to achieve production-ready performance.
Technologies: C++, Unreal Engine, Rendering, Microsoft Visual Studio, Computer Graphics, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Windows

Unreal Engine Developer

2019 - 2019
Reach Sentient Artificial Intelligence
  • Developed a 3D prototype for a new agent-based AI algorithm.
  • Used Unreal Engine to create a real-time simulation of sentient agents controlled by AI.
  • Integrated a C++ AI library created by other developers on the team.
Technologies: Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 4, C++, Microsoft Visual Studio, Computer Graphics, Windows

C#/C++ Developer

2018 - 2019
Heartland Engineering
  • Created a back-end system in Python for a warehouse management system.
  • Implemented a crane hardware controller in C#. Communicated via TCP networking.
  • Integrated all systems with an existing web-based front end created by another developer.
Technologies: C#, C, C++, Python, Microsoft Visual Studio, C#.NET WinForms, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Linux

CTO

2011 - 2019
Magistral Games
  • Developed an online 3D mobile game with Unreal Engine, C++, and Lua. Handled the client and back-end server and completed part of the game design.
  • Created a development framework in modern C++ featuring optimized data structures, algorithms, and client-server networking with an efficient multi-threaded architecture.
  • Planned the cloud architecture of the game's back end, including DDoS resiliency and fault tolerance.
Technologies: Lua, C++, Unreal Engine, 3D Games, 2D Games, Game Development, Microsoft Visual Studio, Computer Graphics, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Windows, MMORPGs

Teacher

2010 - 2019
ORT Institute of Technology
  • Taught technical training courses in Computer Science with programming content in C, C++, Python, x86 Assembly, data structures, computer graphics, computer networks, and operating systems.
Technologies: ASM, OpenGL, C++, C, Computer Graphics

Specialist Developer

2014 - 2018
AevoTech
  • Developed an unmanned ground vehicle software controller featuring stereoscopic vision, autonomous spatial navigation, and 3D-scenario reconstruction using C++, OpenGL, OpenCV, and ROS.
  • Contributed to a robotic arm Kuka controller and GUI written in C# and WinForms. It has many real-time features, such as 3D visualization of the arm position and its sensors.
  • Created an ROV laser scanner that used computer vision to detect changes in the surface of objects, such as underwater oil pipes. It was written in C++ and OpenCV.
  • Developed an OCR solution that allowed the client to upload any digitized document, including photos of printed papers, and classified it according to its contents. Used C++, OCR libraries, and a machine learning classifier algorithm.
  • Built a Python/Django back end used to process large amounts of data, such as importing millions of entries from a file format into a relational database, in a parallel, efficient manner. Used AWS services such as EC2, RDS, and ElastiCache.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), OpenCV, OpenGL, Python, C#, C++, Microsoft Visual Studio, C#.NET WinForms, Qt, Computer Graphics, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Linux

Professor

2015 - 2015
Infnet Institute
  • Lectured Introduction to Artificial intelligence to the Computer Engineering undergraduate class.
Technologies: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Intern Developer

2008 - 2009
Tecgraf
  • Served as the lead developer of Particles, a volumetric discrete element visualization application funded by an oil company, Petrobras.
  • Developed many real-time visualization techniques with intense GPU shader usage.
  • Collaborated with a team of artists and engineers, communicating and integrating their work based on the project requirements.
Technologies: Shaders, GLSL, OpenGL, Lua, C++, Microsoft Visual Studio, Qt, Computer Graphics, 3D Rendering, Object-oriented Programming (OOP)

Alta B Interactive Poster

https://youtu.be/mBgpjFvumGs
Alta B is a 3D interactive poster with a human-like character that can talk and interact with the public on a kiosk at the famous Irving Plaza venue in NY. It took advantage of cutting-edge rendering and natural language processing technologies. I managed the entire Unreal Engine implementation, system and kiosk architecture, and AWS hosting on Verizon's 5G Edge computing network.

Nobu Real Estate Virtual Tour

https://youtu.be/AmY1POsNRVM
Nobu is a real estate virtual tour in real time using Unreal Engine. It featured fully baked lighting and realistic rendering, and it could run from any browser since it was pixel streamed from AWS. Multiple users could join a session and share the tour experience. I oversaw the Unreal Engine implementation and all functionalities, including the multiplayer logic.

KEYS Metaverse

https://keys.xyz/
I was the lead developer at KEYS, creating the metaverse experience in Unreal Engine 5. We used cutting-edge technologies to provide a triple-A experience to any user with a web browser on mobile or desktop.

Cockfight

https://youtu.be/5VvSWJqVj5o
Cockfight is a 3D mobile RPG/card battle multiplayer game prototype created in 2018.

I was the lead programmer and architect of both the game client and server. The client was based on Unreal Engine 4. It was optimized for mobile platforms and leverages GPU shaders and a variety of rendering techniques.

The server was written in modern C++ and Lua, a powerful scripting language whose development team I was part of during college. It featured high-performance, multi-threaded networking, and REST APIs to communicate with cloud services.

I was also one of the game designers, defining gameplay rules and monetization strategies.

Brabexia

I was the game designer and lead programmer of Brabexia, a massively-multiplayer online 2D RPG game (MMORPG) for Windows and Linux PCs that I created as a hobby, inspired by some of my favorite online games back then. It was online from 2005 to 2008.

I mainly worked on the game server written from the ground up in C++ and Lua. As a real-time game, it required low-latency networking and thousands of simultaneous players. Such a performance level was achieved with parallelism, profiling tools, and highly-optimized code. During peak hours, the game hosted about 7,000 players online.

The computer-controlled characters were based on numerous AI techniques such as A* path-finding, state machines, and behavior trees, providing a challenging gameplay experience to the players.

The 2D game client was based on an open-source project that used OpenGL. It was adapted to my game server by rewriting the networking protocol entirely.
2009 - 2011

Progress towards a Master's Degree in Computer Science with a specialization in Computer Graphics

PUC-Rio - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2003 - 2009

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering

PUC-Rio - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Libraries/APIs

Standard Template Library (STL), OpenGL, OpenCV

Tools

Microsoft Visual Studio, Git, C#.NET WinForms, Perforce

Languages

Lua, C, C++17, C++14, C++11, C++, GLSL, Python 3, Python, Python 2, C#, Assembly

Frameworks

Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 4, ASM, Qt

Paradigms

Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Mobile Game Design, Concurrent Programming, Parallel Programming

Platforms

Windows, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Android, Azure, iOS, Mobile, Oculus, MacOS

Other

Game Development, 3D Visualization, Video Games, Games, 3D Games, Computer Graphics, 3D Rendering, Unreal Engine 5, Blueprints Visual Scripting, Low-level Programming, Low-latency Software, Augmented Reality (AR), Game AI, Android Games, 2D Games, Mobile Games, Mobile Game Development, Computer Vision, MMORPGs, Data Structures, Rendering, Rendering Pipelines, Real-time Rendering Engines, Rendering Performance, Game Design, Debugging, Cloud Computing, Cloud Services, TCP/IP, Shaders, Version Control, Code Versioning, Networks, Multiplayer, Profiling, Benchmarking, Concurrent Computing, Extended Reality (XR), Networking, Virtual Reality (VR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Edge Computing, Non-fungible Tokens (NFT)

Collaboration That Works

How to Work with Toptal

Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.

1

Share your needs

Discuss your requirements and refine your scope in a call with a Toptal domain expert.
2

Choose your talent

Get a short list of expertly matched talent within 24 hours to review, interview, and choose from.
3

Start your risk-free talent trial

Work with your chosen talent on a trial basis for up to two weeks. Pay only if you decide to hire them.

Top talent is in high demand.

Start hiring