Michael Hamilton                MichaelHamilton.com

247 South Crimson Clover Ct, The Woodlands, TX, 77381 • 310.866.1023 • mike@m2tm.net

 Profile

I am a technical leader with over ten years of experience in the gaming industry, specializing in software engineering. I have worked in AAA, mobile, and indie studios. I have a mixture of IC and management experience and regardless of my role, I love to help my team succeed and multiply their efforts with a proactive and positive approach to collaboration.

Some highlights of my personal experience include:

• Working with deterministic rollback netcode in platform fighters (Rushdown Revolt and Icons: Combat Arena)
• Designing and implementing a novel defragmentation routine used in Need for Speed: Most Wanted
• Creating a custom 2D game engine using C++ (scene graph, netcode + rpc layer, asset management, ui)
• Implementing a 3D character creation system
• Creating a modern match 3 from start to completion
• Working on various core systems for managing game resources, networking, and rendering
• Always leading by example, but being proactive about delegating tasks appropriately and helping my team level up.

My leadership approach focuses on clear expectations and open communication, ensuring that engineering efforts are aligned with overall goals and needs. I am dedicated to helping teams grow and creating a supportive environment that encourages individual development and career advancement.

In my personal time, I enjoy programming, reading, drawing, and gaming. I prioritize staying up-to-date with the latest technical trends and language updates in C++, allowing me to stay at the forefront of my craft and effectively mentor my team.

 Skills

Languages/Frameworks
C++ (Expert), Unity (Expert), C# (Expert), Solidity (Experienced), Cocos2dx (Experienced), Objective C (Experienced), PHP (Proficient), JavaScript (Proficient), HTML/CSS (Proficient), SQL (Capable).

Activities
Programming, Sculpting, 2d Illustration, Gaming (Was Diamond League of Legends)

Released Titles (Old -> New)
Vampirism Beast, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Dragon Age 2, Tiny Pets, Tiny Monsters, Tiny Village, Family Guy: Quest For Stuff, Big Win Sports (Amazon Ports), Boom Boom Soccer, Boom Boom Football, Tap My Katamari, Taste Buds, Charm King (Unity Port), Icons: Combat Arena, Covet Fashion, Rushdown Revolt

 Work Experience

Vortex Games, (Remote while in Texas)

Software Architect Consultant

July 2022 -> February 2023 (8 Months, Studio Ran out of Funding)

• Vortex Games purchased the assets for Icons: Combat Arena from Wavedash Games, a company I had previously worked for before it collapsed. I agreed to join as a contractor who was familiar with the code base and to potentially help scale the team as CTO full time if they secured funding.
• Directly participated in some funding discussions in a supporting role as a potential CTO for the company (contingent successful funding raise.)
• Worked with Unity/C# on Rushdown Revolt implementing various gameplay features including a king of the hill mode called flashpoint.
• Refactored their net code and lobby system to improve stability during match making.
• Improved network code for the rollback system by a factor of 2-4x from 4 frames delay to 1-2 depending on location/connection quality.
• Set up the Jenkins build server for automated builds and steam beta branch deployment.
• Took on web store development and lead duties when our web lead left, ramped up on Node/React and successfully launched several skin sales and the closed beta code sale.
• Unfortunately funding did not come through.

Snap Jaw, (Hayward CA -> The Woodlands TX)

CTO/Co-Founder

June 2021 -> Present

• Founded an LLC with my wife (Jaclyn), and have been working on developing both the art business which is currently profitable and an indie game branch which has two unreleased titles.
• Worked with Unity/C#/Solidity/Javascript/HTML/CSS to develop Crypto Dungeon for Polygon (MATIC) and eventually will re-launch on Ethereum (ETH) once gas fees are resolved.
• Worked with C++ and created my own game engine for Bindstone. This engine pre-dates Snap Jaw and has been in development on and off for 7 years. It uses several open source libraries: SDL, OpenGL, Boost: Asio, Cereal, Chaiscript. I use an AWS hosted back-end with Postgresql DB. I’ve written most of the other systems from scratch including a component based scene graph with its own custom network replication/rpc layer + corresponding server applications to enable multiplayer, and a custom built UI system. Particle effects, pathfinding, combat logic witten within chaiscript, and much more.
• Worked with ZBrush and built an entire physical fabrication pipeline for Jaclyn’s art studio to 3D print molds for her latex masks released under the banner of Snap Jaw and sold directly to clients.

Glu, (San Francisco CA: 800 Howard Street, 94103)

Lead Client Engineer -> Client Engineering Manager (Promoted)

November 2018 - June 2021 (2 years 8 months)

• Was hired as a Lead Client Engineer and was promoted to Client Engineering Manager after 3 months.
• I had 4 direct reports on-site, and helped guide 4 external client engineers with our outsourced studio. I helped guide personal quarterly goals and held regular 1 on 1’s with the team.
• Focused on extensively refactoring our legacy code base and working a mixture of new features and tech debt related work into each sprint.
• Resolved issues with poor threading implementations and messy network callbacks which dramatically improved stability and maintainability of Covet Fashion.
• Collaborated with leadership to define and prioritize new features and our high level rolling roadmap. I created technical specifications, tasked out work, and guided features to launch readiness.
• Organized sprint retrospectives, feature scoping and design meetings, and other structural discussions to ensure work was well defined and scoped to each sprint.
• Held regular 1 on 1’s with my team and ensured everyone was happy, productive, and supported in their goals while delivering on our regular sprint tasks.
• Occasionally acted as a feature owner for exploratory tasks or SDK integrations. I would often spend time with a v1 implementation and then depending on remaining scope I would write a spec and hand off the work, or simply complete and deliver the feature myself.

Wavedash, (Oakland CA: 344 20th Street, 94612)

Senior Software Engineer

December 2017 - Oct 2018 (11 Months, Studio Shut Down)

• Launched Icons: Combat Arena on steam in North America.
• Assisted our technical director in a hands-on lead capacity with several features on the client team. I created technical specifications, tasked out work, and assisted in guiding features to launch readiness.
• Developed a system for animating material properties in game, allowing glowing swords, flashing characters, and an interface for our VFX artist and designers to integrate and time these effects with character’s moves.
• Lead development with another engineer for the in-game store and equipment system, provided direction and support and coordinated with product owners to get the feature to launch. Worked full-stack on both client and network elements of this feature.
• Dramatically improved performance of Icons. I defined and set up our minimum specification computer, and worked with artists and assets and optimized code to hit 60 fps on that machine (started at 12 fps).
• Developed Perfupple. A tool to copy changes between streams in perforce in a more art and design friendly way and streamline workflow.

PlayQ, (Santa Monica CA: 1540 2nd Street, 90401)

Senior Software Engineer

March 2015 - December 2017 (1 year 11 months)

• Acted the first in house senior engineer on Taste Buds and helped build and lead the team to work on it to completion.
• Implemented a variety of features across all systems in the game client and established the core architecture and several fundamental systems upon which the game was built as our team expanded.
• Supported continual feature development after taking the game from its first days of development all the way to worldwide launch.
• Worked on porting Charm King from Cocos2d-x to Unity. Integrated many of the in game events and Facebook SDK.

Bandai Namco Vancouver, (Vancouver BC)

Senior Software Engineer

March 2015 - February 2016 (1 year 1 month)

• Acted as the only gameplay engineer on an unreleased prototype of a MOBA which included hero vs ai controlled hero combat with skillshots, auto attacks, and minions similar to games like League of Legends.
• Developed an in-house google sheets driven metadata system used in-house to drive data driven development and support A/B testing.
• Integrated Supersonic’s Ad System for Tap My Katamari and implemented the King of All Cosmos treasure vomiting feature.
• Worked as the team lead engineer on an unannounced title which consists of procedurally generated levels single player tile based real time combat and movement.

Hothead Games, (Vancouver BC)

Software Engineer

November 2013 - March 2015 (1 year 5 months)

• Ported a collection of 8 mobile Big Win Sports games to Amazon’s Store.
• Worked in C++ on legacy sports titles.
• Learned C#, Unity, NGUI, and later Unity UI to work on Boom Boom Soccer.
• Created the team texture generator and 3d character generator, which allows swappable parts to be combined into one model. This system constructed all the characters in our game at run time on mobile devices.
• Responded to significant design changes to support Boom Boom Football and extended the tool to run as an in-house designer tool to craft both the character appearance and stats to support future entries of the series.

TinyCo, (San Francisco CA, Vancouver BC)

Senior Software Engineer -> Lead Software Engineer (Promoted)

July 2011 - October 2013 (2 years 4 months)

• Acted as lead engineer on Tiny Pets where I organized a team of 5 engineers for several months.
• Shipped Tiny Pets and Tiny Monsters, did feature development on Tiny Village and maintenance on Tiny Chef.
• I developed our C++ written interview screening test and assisted with the hiring process.
• I worked on 2 other unannounced projects, one of which I was one of the first 3 people to work on.
• Tech: Objective C for 8 months and C++ with our custom engine (Griffin) and Cocos2dx for the remainder.  I spent a small amount of time with Python, Java, and SQL.

BioWare (EA), (Edmonton AB)

Software Engineer

May 2010 - May 2011 (1 year 1 month)

• Worked on Dragon Age 2.
• Acted as a GUI programmer.
• Implemented the Character Generation, Journal, and Options GUI and worked on several other shared utilities and bug fixes to assist the team.
• Tech: C++, Scaleform, Flash/ActionScript 2.0, and the in-house toolset including DAScript.

Squareflo New Media, (Regina SK)

Lead Programmer

May 2008 - Oct 2009 (1 year 6 months)

• Developed the Squareflo CMS which is actively powering over 40 websites.
• Acted as a lead programmer performing client specific tasks while creating a set of shared libraries and tools and offering hands on assistance for other developers on their own tasks.
• Implemented custom websites designed by an in-studio artist in photoshop and illustrator from start to finish by hand.
• Developed custom database import solutions, e-commerce implementations, and custom front-end scripted features.
• Tech: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL.

BlackBox (EA), (Vancouver BC)

Co-op Software Engineer

October 2005 - May 2006 (8 months)

• Worked on Need for Speed: Most Wanted.
• Developed a 25% more efficient memory defragmentation routine to improve performance of the track streamer (dynamically loaded race tracks).
• Worked on front end GUI features and developed a new in-game memory tracking menu within the in-house PS2 Dev Kit (Codeine).
• Tech: I worked with C++ and JavaScript.  I also acted as the team’s Sharepoint technical administrator.

 Personal Projects

SnapJaw LLC Games (Unity, C#, Solidity, Javascript/PHP/HTML/CSS)
I developed a match 3 blockchain game called Crypto Dungeon in preparation for launch on the Polygon Blockchain. This is an NFT driven play-to-earn title with its own custom token. This game has a Unity 3D WebGL client and a Solidity contract based back-end, all interactions with game state occur on the blockchain including anti-cheat verification on-chain for the match 3 implementation itself. A simple unrelated working web game called double up is currently live and working, the main game is not yet up. https://cryptodungeon.online

SnapJaw LLC Art Studio (ZBrush, 3D Printing, Javascript/PHP/HTML/CSS)
A collaboration with my wife, Jaclyn to create custom tailored latex masks. I designed and implemented our entire fabrication process with 3D Printed molds for the masks, worked with ZBrush to fine tune the mask designs, and created our website. Jaclyn focuses on the entire artistic process from design to painting. Our business has over 9000 followers on Twitter and a growing community of enthusiastic collectors. https://snapjaw.net

Bindstone  (C++, SDL, OpenGL)
I have been developing this tug of war mobile game in my spare time over the past few years with my wife, most recently we’ve adopted the banner of Snap Jaw which is the studio name we will release it under, it features a custom game engine built on low level libraries in C++ and target platforms will be iOS, Android, and Windows: http://bindstone.online

Vampirism Beast (Jass/WC3 World Editor) (2007-2009)
Warcraft 3 map (mod) which reached the top 5 most hosted maps when it first came out on Blizzard's western server out of over 10,000 (according to mapgnome.org).  I originally developed this project on my own under the pseudonym M2tM. I created most of the original items and game modes using the scripting language JASS.  After achieving popularity I transitioned support to two other developers so that I could focus on my career and other projects.

Dark Sky Fire (C++, SDL, OpenGL) (2007)
This project started life as a very simple missile command style game and gathered some popularity on free game sites after I posted it online.  Most of the scores for the older version were very positive hovering around or over 80%.  The highest review scored the game at 91%.  The game is available on my portfolio: http://MichaelHamilton.com

 Education

University of Regina
• Acted as Computer Science Student Society (CSSS) president