HI TEAM REC ROOM!
I am the guy on the left and unfortunately not a programming dog.
My name is Brennan King. I live in Seattle, WA and I’d really like to join your team. Can I help you make Rec Room an even better place to build and play in VR?
I am not the best at Rec Room paintball, but I have shipped two games in Unity/C# (one of which is a VR title!) and have 4+ years of professional software development experience.
I’ve included some sample work related to Gameplay Programming/3D Art/Music/etc. below.
My extended education/work history is available on LinkedIn here.
UNITY/C# GAMEPLAY PROGRAMMING
This year I solo developed and launched Hand Cannon Virtuoso.
It’s a VR roguelite shooter where you build your arsenal by collecting cards and fight to the top of a shape-shifting tower.
I work in Unity/C#. Hand Cannon is a solo project so I do all the gameplay programming:
Player combat and locomotion.
Behavior tree driven enemy AIs.
Roguelite Systems: stats, loot, level generation, progression.
Other Systems: game data, saving, event bus, etc.
Cross-platform support and comfort settings for the veritable hellscape of VR hardware and runtimes.
NPC dialogues and interactable items/mechanisms.
Game menu and other UIs.
MULTIPLAYER GAMEPLAY PROGRAMMING
I actually have a tiny bit of multiplayer gameplay programming from a game I made in college with a friend.
It’s no longer live, but it was a browser-based drop-in/drop-out pirate ship battler called Mateys Ahoy.
We used Unity/C# + a service called Photon for networking, so it wasn’t like we were writing any custom net code or stuff like that, but it still taught me some good things about what to think about when coding multiplayer.
Also for what it’s worth I made the “extremely polished” art and music for this project lol :)
NON-GAME PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE
During the day, I work as a Software Development Engineer II at Amazon Web Services in Seattle, WA.
I started at AWS out of college 4 years ago. It has been a great learning experience but it’s just not what I want to do long term. I’d really like to spend the rest of my life building games and virtual reality more generally.
Some things I’ve learned from AWS that have helped my gameplay programming are:
How to write code that is easy to understand, test, and extend (especially in Java, which has helped with my C#).
How to design, build, and operate secure, highly available web services.
How to write software in a small (recently remote) team environment. AWS is huge but my day-to-day dev team is usually about 5 devs.
How to recognize automatable work and the right time to automate it.
How to do code reviews, use Git, and other elements of dev team collaboration.
Some interesting things I’ve helped launch at AWS are…
🔗 Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth:
A web service that lets you annotate images, videos, text, and other types of data for machine learning purposes via large batches or streams of data objects.
A library of frontend Web Components that can be used to build custom UIs for annotating data. JSFiddle demo of the semantic segmentation component for labeling pixels in images
NON-PROGRAMMING SKILLS (3D ART, MUSIC, GAME DESIGN)
Hand Cannon Virtuoso is a solo project so in addition to gameplay programming I design the game, make much of the art, market the game, and manage the community.
GAME DESIGN
I plan features and update Hand Cannon Virtuoso every two weeks based on a combination of playtesting, player feedback, and inspiration from games I’m playing or TV shows I’m watching at the moment. Here are some patch notes from a recent update I shipped.
3D ART (BLENDER, ADOBE SUBSTANCE, PROBUILDER)
I created all except one of Hand Cannon Virtuoso’s characters (modeled/rigged with Blender, UV-mapped with Substance Painter).
I also made all of the environments using ProBuilder, but licensed the materials for environments from Substance Source.
I made some of the props in Blender as well, but a lot were licensed from the Unity Asset Store to save time. All of the character animations are humanoid animations licensed from the Asset Store as well. I also licensed one of the characters.
SOUND (FL STUDIO)
Right now I’ve made about two-thirds of the game’s music using FL Studio (including trailer music) and licensed the rest. By the end of Early Access I hope to have produced all the music. I licensed most of the sound effects from the Unity Asset Store.
MARKETING MATERIALS (PHOTOSHOP, PREMIERE RUSH)
I make all of the games store page assets, gameplay trailers, marketing materials, etc. using the Adobe suite (Photoshop for images/GIFs and Premiere Rush for videos).
